SAVAGE CONCEPTS
Materials & Senses
Prototypes
I decided that a soft/flexible board pen made of silicone would be a great opportunity to put he haptic and tacit to work, and with some careful moulding I thought I could make a pen out of silicone that had the same visual qualities as the standard pens would have.
The first step was to make a mould over the original board pen, this was done in a tin silicone. and then to release thepen once it had set and coat with vaseline to create a barrier before pouring the silicone onside the mould.
This first test had mixed results, as I was please with the colour of the pen, however the texture came out looking like a marshmallow instead. Talking to Shirley in the resin area, she thinks that the reason why the silicone had the bubbly texture was because the tin silicone of the mould caused the platinum silicone that I was moulding in to react. The original pen lid fit the pen well, and was able to disguise that the pen didn’t have a working nib.
By remaking the mould, I was able to over come this issue, creating several white silicone pens.
To further add to the authenticity of the pens, I tried to develop a way of adding the text and barcode onto the pen. I had a few ideas around screen printing or maybe seeing if there would be a printer within the print facilities of the uni to print onto a curved space. After these ideas fell through due to the round nature of the pens or not having a silicone paint, I had an idea of using the laser printer as a transfer, and transferring the image to the silicone pen. I achieved a level of success using minimal super glue, pressure and time to get the transfers to work. However, for the final pens used in the intervention I decided against this, as the intervention could still work without the print, and I wasn’t able to get a consistent enough result through my trials.
