The spark
Electronic design, 3D printing, flatbed cutting, and embedded programming were combined into one integrated work. Each stage tested whether the form and interactive system could grow together.
01 · Story
An unlikely material. A gentle giant.
The Whale began with a simple question: how far could cardboard be pushed as a serious material for public art, engineering, and interaction?
A life-size whale took shape from cardboard—an everyday material usually treated as disposable. The eight-metre sculpture became a symbol of creativity and environmental consciousness, responding to visitors through motion and soft LED light.
The project followed a spiral development process. A PIR sensor and servo first introduced movement; subsequent iterations added lighting along the mouth, synchronised with the rhythm of a visitor gently touching the Whale beneath its eye.
The vision
The project was conceived for collaborative making at FAB23 Bhutan: a sculpture shaped not by one maker, but by a network of participants contributing skills, ideas, and energy.
The design
The Whale was modelled in Blender, unfolded, and arranged as hundreds of templates in Adobe Illustrator to fit 1.4 × 1.1-metre cardboard sheets.
The interaction
A custom RP2040 board, PIR sensing, servo actuation, and LED lighting gave the sculpture a quiet sense of life and a response to human kindness.
The challenge
Scale brought practical questions: labour, cost, logistics, structural life, and whether an eight-metre build could be justified. Prototyping turned those uncertainties into decisions.
The shared result
The completed Singapore prototype proved the construction system and became a platform for collaboration, storytelling, and future public projects.
