Endangered animal prototype — Giant Panda
The animal that first came to my mind as endangered species is the giant panda, for I have been a volunteer to take care of pandas, and learned a lot about them. They are lovely animals who live mainly in South Central China. They spend most of the time eating, but they could digest just a small percent of the nutrients in foods. Bamboo is their favorite, but only a few part of bamboo could pandas eat. Also, giant pandas do not like reproduction activities. (Sometimes they are just too lazy to do these due to what it said in the documentary at the Giant Panda Breeding Research Center.) Due to all these reasons, they are endangered animals now, and many need to live under help of workers at the research center.
To finish this prototype, I researched and observed more about the giant panda. One of pandas’ feature is two black ellipses around their eyes, and what makes them seem charmingly naive is the rotation angle of the black ellipses. Furthermore, most parts of giant pandas’ body seem like round and circle, such as its round head, ears and main body etc. Therefore, I want to catch these main features to begin prototyping.
At first, I took a look at the materials I collected, and chose some to make a giant panda. Since the starting point is to make good use of waste, I tried my best to reduce other materials like new paper and clue used in this project. So I decided to cut small incision to split joint instead of cluing too much. And I tore off the golden paper outside the container to make it white instead of painting it to white directly.
At first, I took a look at the materials I collected, and chose some to make a giant panda. Since the starting point is to make good use of waste, I tried my best to reduce other materials like new paper and clue used in this project. So I decided to cut small incision to split joint instead of cluing too much. And I tore off the golden paper outside the container to make it white instead of painting it to white directly.
But I still do not do how to make the leaves instead of using new paper and painting them to green. Then I just came across the wonderful idea — the coffee’s package of Starbucks! The design uses recycled clothes to help customers carry coffee, and the clothes is green. So I just decided to use these.
Then I drew a sketch to help me organize the idea.
The material I chose for bamboo is the sushi rolling (the tool to make Sushi), because I though that bamboo and the sushi rolling are related somehow. Most Sushi rollings are made from bamboo, and it could be a severe waste, for every time we bought laver to make sushi, there would be a sushi rolling alongside in the package. Actually, I could be recycled, but few people did reuse them. And wild giant panda are suffering from destruction of their habitat and lack of foods (bamboo). So I cut sushi rolling to make bamboo’s prototype.
Below are pictures of the making process.
And final prototype from different angles.
