theCASTLE: Week 10

Week 10 is slightly less memorable, partly because the elated atmosphere of the previous week’s achievement flattened out a lot, but also because I was quite sick, which gives me reason to think that I was quite quite sick because I cannot really remember what happened. The plan of action in the morning of week 10 was again peppered with questions of product choice and us making decisions about what the Castle (and/or the rig) was to be made of so we could order this and that, which immediately rubbed everyone up the wrong way because we had thought we had left those questions, which had been the same for a number of weeks, behind and had decided that we had a reasonable goal for the semester, and that didn’t involve us specifying things. It just seemed to be an inability of our group to make decisions like that which we knew would affect the complete outcome of the Castle. It was also perhaps our personal views on material use in today’s society; who cares if there is a budget for spending that we haven’t spent yet, it has not been in the nature of this particular Castle class to want to use up good materials for things that we are unsure of. This and what also seemed like a constant quest for new adjustable, flexible systems for the cladding or the roof or this or that. Although we didn’t want to choose materials, we did want to really understand and make some decisions about the size and arrangement of the interior of the Castle rig, and this, frustratingly we thought, often got lost in looking for a flexible system. Looking for flexibility too much meant that we had an even more wishy washy test rig than the week before where we had actually made some decisions and stuck to our guns. Even so, we did manage to fix up the rig with a proper plywood floor and put a plywood roof on top and staple cardboard to the ends for walls. Connor was also making a small toilet/shower pod that could sit inside the space and show the area needed for those kinds of services. A lot of the day was spent in buying some steel channel for sliding wall panels that in a later week were taken off anyway and used on the roof for a similar purpose. I guess if we had initially known at the start of the semester what was expected for the overall outcome of The Castle project, we wouldn’t have had days were we got so frustrated with stuff we couldn’t explain, it wasn’t god or particularly bad, but the different approaches were not what we thought, and all it was, was different.