Final Design - How my journals have influenced my design

I have finished my office design. My office is mainly constructed from wood because I was inspired from an article from the “international journal of environment and sustainable development”. It informed me about the advantages of using wood to our environment and living. Architects generally recognise the advantages of using wood, but utilisation of wood in housing is still low. In the article, it said that Germany was aiming to increase wood productions in houses by 20% by 2014, I think this is a step in the right direction to our future.

Preserving the green life in our land is very important if we want to keep our planet healthy. When a building is built, the land is usually stripped of its natural green life in order to make room for the new man-made structure. In my design, I aimed to achieve an environmentally beneficial building by having green grass and plants on my roof. When you build on land, you are “taking away” the green, and by including green life on your roof, you are “giving back” the green to the land.


Most people are aware of our environmental situation, we are slowly moving into our next ice age as global warming continues to affect us. People want to save the planet, but little action is taken as we continue to pollute our planet. In the “Australian property journal” there was an article that made me become aware that pollution also effects architecture. When toxic waste is not properly disposed of, it can result in the land nearby to became hazardous and unable to redevelop the land to build on. From this article, I continued to think about pollution on our land. If most of our planet’s land becomes polluted and unable to redevelop. Then imagine our world with buildings above the land or water. A new space away from the pollution. This is what I tried to achieve in my design. My office is built above the lake, barely supported with poles and walls (which shows the instability of our environment if we don’t look after it). The pathways connected to my office are above the water, and the surface is covered with grass.
[To the left the pathway into my office, my neighbour has added a ramp because her design idea is about connections and linkage.]

My office has three rooms, these three rooms have different wall heights, and these rooms “overlap” with each other. The office does not have solid walls covering all sides. There are sides with no walls, which interact with the outside.

Social spaces can be physical and virtual. In my office I have lounging spaces with chairs, this is my physical social space. I then have a computer table where you can read my blog, this is my virtual social space.


When my visitors go up the elevator to Floor one, they will see a moving slide that displays photos that I have been inspired from to create my office design.
When my visitors walk though the door into the next room, they will find a wall of moving words. The words are the titles of my journals,and when you click on them, you will be navigated to the blogging of my journals.

Entering and Exiting my Office

Entrance

For the entrance to my office, I have used a script to create an elevator that takes my avatar to "Floor 1" when you click on the object named "Entrance-Lift"

Exit

For my exit, I added a teleport hub. The teleport hub transfers my avatar from Floor 1 to the outdoors downstairs. To activate my teleport, you have to click on the moving horizontal "EXIT" texts, and your avatar will automatically sit on the slab and be teleported out of the office. From then, move your avatar to follow the pathway out of the lake.

Development of my Office design.

I found this wood bitmap texture on http://dit.perm.ru/articles/3DMAX/Tutorial2/Images/Modeling/WoodBoard.jpg.
I prefer this texture to the previous texture that i used because the tone of the wood is more rich and this texture is more detailed compared to my previous texture. This texture also shows a series of individual planks which gives a more realistic quality to my design.

I used the wood bitmap texture that I found online and photoshopped it into my tree branch floor design. I think this is more successful compared to my first experiment, because you can see the individual wood planks and the wood planks are more detailed, which makes my floor look more realistic.

I wanted my floor design to be mostly made of glass so that it will give an "unstable" feeling for people who walk on it, I want this to portray the idea of the instability of our environment if humans don't look after it.

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Most of my walls have large "windows" or transparent areas that allow people to see into my office, or to see outside the office. This creates more interaction between the inside and outside of my office.






I kept developing the design of my walls, so that there is more change in my office design.

With this first wall I overlapped my texture to create a more ambiguous form. The viewer can see recognise the tree branch shape, but it is harder to identify top and bottom of the tree.

With the second wall, I intersected a thinner white wall into the existing wall, this makes my wall stand out more against the interior walls. It also blocks the interaction with the outside from that side of the office because I want people to be directed toward the other side.

First concepts and ideas

In my first experiment with my idea, I used separate prims to create the design of my floor. I used a total of 25 prims to make this floor, but through this process, I found that this was a waste of time and a waste of prims.
I will use photoshop to create a new floor slab, that will create a similar effect but only use one prim. I hope that using photoshop will be more successful and less time consuming.

I think the glass is not realistic enough, the tone of the blue in the glass is too vivid and makes the glass look "cartoonish" and amateur. I think using a texture of fragmented glass would create a more interesting effect.

The texture I used for the wood is too common and the tone is too light. I would prefer using a wood texture that is not in my second life inventory.