Welcome to Slot Shelters, a student building and design project leveraging online cloud tools to create a global dialog around pattern, community identity and structure/shelter needs.
Students explore community identity and shelter needs through pattern design as well as through physical and virtual structure models. The project envisions a growing decks of building cards created by students around the world. 4th and 5th Grade students from schools, both inside and outside the U.S.A., will collaboratively design these cards using hand drawn patterns and digital patterns distilling ideas of their environments; past, present, and future. Students will build models of shelters. With an expanded understanding of design prototyping and visual vocabularies, students will then collaboratively create digital buildings addressing a local need in Google SketchUp. Students’ structure designs and reflections will be cataloged on the Slot Shelters project website.
The final outcome will be 3D shelters in a Google SketchUp warehouse collection, an online library of printable decks of cards, an ISSUU Slot Card building Kit of student generated patterned cards and large printed slot cards using students’ designs. The online library of printable cards will allow visitors to the website to pick and choose slot cards from the collection and print these on their printer to build mini structures of their own. Each card will include student explanations of meaning and source image for the card design. The large printed slot cards aim to bring people together in playful experimentation as they assemble the 40″x 22.5″ cards in outdoor public spaces creating shelter constructions, which metaphorically connect communities. Locally in San Jose, the Slot Shelters project will instill a vision of aesthetic possibilities and anchor Silicon Valley with a sense of place.
Slot Shelters will utilize a variety of digital tools: Repper Pro, Sumo Paint, Google SketchUp and VoiceThread.
What are slot cards?
Slot cards are cards that have cuts in them so that the can be connected to each other to form structures. This sample is made from a deck of Mexican lotería cards.
The cards that inspired Slot Shelters are the Ray and Charles Eames House of Cards, Totem Building cards , Todd Gilen’s Building Cards and Damion Ortega’s slotted tortilla cards.