Students engaged in Slot Shelters explore community identity and local bus shelter needs through the creation of physical and virtual models. The project envisions a growing deck of building cards created by students around the world.  Students from schools, both inside and outside the United States, design physical cards using hand drawn patterns and digital patterns reflecting on local environments. Students collaboratively build physical brainstorming models of bus shelters using these cards. Then, with an expanded understanding of design prototyping and visual vocabularies, students collaboratively create and refine their bus shelters in Google SketchUp. Students’ prototype designs and reflections will be cataloged on the Slot Shelters project website. The Seeking Shelter Design Challenge launching on September 14^th at the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial will allow students to submit phases of their work to contests which will be conducted in October and in December 2012.

The final outcome will be 3D bus shelters in a shared  Google SketchUp warehouse collection, an online library of printable decks of cards and an ISSUU Slot Card building Kit of student generated cards and design structure ideas. The online library of printable cards will allow visitors to select and print cards cards from the collection to build mini structures of their own. A large installation of a conceptual bus shelter showcased at the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial will bring people together in playful experimentation as they assemble cards in an outdoor public space and add components to the full scale model. Locally in San Jose, the Slot Shelters project aims to instill a vision of aesthetic possibilities and anchor Silicon Valley with a sense of place.

Slot Shelters utilizes a variety of digital tools:  Repper, Google SketchUp, and VoiceThread.

Conceptual Slot Shelter flow chart

This project is made possible through funding from the ZERO1 Art & Technology Network and Target. Google SketchUp and RepperPro ZERO1 Biennial workshops made possible with a rental donation of HP Elite Book Tablets by the Krause Center for Innovation. Makedo is generously sponsoring prizes for the cardboard prototype design challenge.