Class started with students sharing their work from lost foam casting with Mike Tarky. There were some interesting designs, from pencil holders and name tags to MIT hack representations and aluminum cats.
Gwyn then introduced Fay Butler, who went over a technique to form a bowl from a flat piece of metal with nothing more than a hammer and an anvil. After Fay finished making the bowl, he did something unthinkable, he showed the students how easy it was to flatten it out! It was very impressive to see how mastery of a few simple techniques could produce and reduce a bowl so quickly.
Amy Smith then introduced the students to their Agricultural Processing Project and the design process. She briefly went over the process, emphasizing information gathering and idea generation. A few methods for how to frame information gathering were talked about, and the students started talking about subjects that interested them. At the end, the topics of South East Asia, Chiles, Coffee, Chocolate and Biofuels were selected as topics of interest to dive further into.
