Sketches & Ideas

here we go!!

INITIAL IDEAS

Interactive Characteristic Stress Diagram

As a structures professor, my goal is to help architecture students understand how internal forces work when structures carry loads. It’s not an intuitive concept and many students lack the basic knowledge to grasp it easily.

Over time, I have tried different ways to make learning easier. In the image, you can see a small board where I’ve sketched bending moment diagrams for four basic isostatic structures—essential ones for students to learn. I provide each student with a personalized board that includes two graphic scales (1:50 and 1:100) so they can carry it with them. By using it daily, they can memorize key functions and better visualize common stress diagrams.

For my Fab Academy final project, I plan to design a visualization tool where students can experiment with a structure, apply different loads, and see the bending moment diagrams in real-time.

Design Conditions:

• Structures: Must be isostatic.
• Stiffness: Structural elements are assumed to have infinite stiffness.

In my initial idea, I thought about designing an interactive frame where students could place loads, define the beam span, and set its external connections.

Bending bench

But that idea didn’t quite convince me, and I kept brainstorming something more fun, engaging, and intuitive. That’s when I came up with the idea of designing a bench where students could sit, and right in front of them, there’d be a frame with an LED system showing the stress diagrams of the bench in real time, based on their weight.

The bench will have two cantilevers on each side, but the dimensions are still up in the air —I will need to test some wooden beams we have got in the workshop to see how I can make it work. On the main beam of the bench, I’d add individual seats, each equipped with a pressure sensor to measure the loads applied to the structure and their positions. With this data, I’ll design a program to calculate the bending moments at each point where the pressure sensors are placed.

This bench will help students visualize and better understand the forces and reactions in structures in a hands-on way.

Students proposals