Thursday, May 22, 2014

Building weeks Day 4 - visitors

sunshine sparkled with a few drops - again almost perfect weather conditions. To be honest its like camping with tools and we have as much fun as the students we hope.

We are often asked from other universities, companies or association to visit the bucky lab, and the answer of the question what they want to see is always the same : the lab ! Hmm... honestly if you mean the workshop its only out in the wild for 2 weeks within the semester, the rest of the year its only a studio in the attic with a group of highly enthusiastic students who mess around with crazy prototypes and a messy fully loaded storage room in the basement - called the bucky cave. So if you wanna see the bucky lab in its full glory you have to have a coffee in the tent during the building weeks.

Today was just a day like that, two docents from the University of Applied Science Frankfurt Main took the 5 hour trip to visit the the mobile workshop and had a chat with Dr. Bucky Lab. They are running the workshop in their faculty and started also with a course to build mock ups. We are more than happy seeing universities worldwide to start making full size prototypes, even other courses within our faculty are starting to do the same. So the concept of the bucky lab is a real success story.

Frank our contact from breur took a coffee in the tent and was wondering about the fast progress of the students work and left the tent with leaving a bag of goodies for the students and Frans from festool made a short stop in the workshop and brought some old systainers to keep things organised - its all about these generous support from the companies that make the bucky lab running. We are more than thankful to have their names on our boxes. They are the best !

Prof. Thijs Asselbergs stopped by and discussed a few new topics for the next semesters, maybe a few great new projects for the future…

While Dr. Bucky Lab is chatting with visitors from all over the world, Kees and Coen are busy all day long to keep his back free and the students the support they need. Thanks a lot to these two fellows !

Ah, talking about coffee, the coffee car is nearly finished and to be honest we think we need no wheels at all, we already found the perfect solution, but have a look …if anyone out there is willing to give us a machine like that, we would baptise it after him ! Who else would have a 10hp powered coffee machine furniture …

And when we cleaned the tent and zipped it tight we got a call from Martin Straver, head of Romazo
with which we collaborated the last 3 semesters, he handed the phone over to Iris calling from Eindhoven and she was barely able to talk - announcing that they just got the 2nd price of the Velux International Design award with their last semesters sunshade concept. The day can't end better !

We will report later about the award, for right now we would like to congratulate Iris and Anneloes for their victory.