Anatomical Solar System

Ideating A Chaotic Orbit Complex

Youtian Duan
MDes Tech 2024
Doris Duanmu
MIT SMArchS Urbanism 2023
Abigail Swallow
MDE 2024
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1 Planets' Helical Motion

Inspired by the aesthetically satisfying tracing pattern of the planets' revolution and rotation in the Solar System, this project imagines a scene where chaos and displacement come into play. What does it look like when planets start offsetting from the determined orbits and vibrating in motion?

We use our body language to imitate the planets' helical motion, creating an organic version of the planetary mechanism. The generated trajectories were then parametrized and translated into Grasshopper, and visualized through randomly assigned colors picked from a cosmic color spectrum. Putting all edited paths together, we form a new orbit complex with distinct dynamics, depicting a disordered situation in the Solar System.

Project video
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2 Obtention of Raw Data from Movements
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3 Concept Sketches for Movements
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4 a Screenshot of the Iteration Process
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5 Grasshopper Script: the Process of Visualizing the Movements