The Plan

Each student was randomly assigned a “tile” and was given the vectors for that tile. Each tile was 4.2852” W x 4.4444” H. The final size was planned at 60” x 40” with a 3/4" x 62" x 42" plywood mounting base. The students were randomly assigned a “main” tool of either a laser cutter, 3D carver (we use X-Carve and Carvey from Inventables), or 3D printer. They could incorporate any other tools into the project but the assigned tool had to play a significant role in their tile. What they did with that tile was up to to them as long as it was appropriate. The tile could be up to 3” tall and had to have three-dimensional aspects to it. When looking straight down on the tile, it had to match the exact vectors and overall color(s) they were given. The flag I used as a starting point is the flag posted on Chicago’s Wikipedia page.

I was a little worried that a lot of variation in the color of the tiles would cause it to lose the overall look of the Chicago flag. The materials would end up being a combination of wood, acrylic, HDPE, corian, PLA, and paint, and since I don’t have the best artistic eye, I decided to mock up the flag with some variation in the colors of the tiles. The Chicago flag is supposed to look like this (black border added so the top and bottom white stripes aren’t lost to the background):

After I broke it up into the separate vectors, it looked like this:

126 tiles, one for each of the 126 students taking Innovation and Creation Lab (4 sections of the course)

To see if it would look strange to have variation of white, blue and red, including wood as white, I made this: