My team designed and prototyped the stage in the above video

Alice Sheppard is a wheelchair dancer and she came to Olin with an unusual challenge. Could we make her a stage that would enable her to showcase the unique beauty of wheelchair dancing. Also, could we do it in three weeks?

We quickly learned as much as we could from interviewing Alice and conducting co-designs to explore her vision of the ideal stage. Next, we physically prototyped ramps in order to get her feedback on key parameters like slope, friction, length, and awesomeness. After many rounds of prototypes (and a few all-nighters), we ultimately arrived at a stage that looks like this:

Process

Because we wanted to “skin” the surface of the stage with flattenable plywood sheets, we were constrained in the shapes that we could create. After talking with some math professors, it turns out the surfaces we were looking for are described as having zero Gaussian curvature. To design these special surfaces, I taught myself Rhino (a computer aided design software) with a powerful mathematic plug-in called Grasshopper. Using these tools we found a shape that met the constraints from Alice, math, and fabrication.

The stage we ultimately created was a huge success: Alice loved it, and she immediately began choreography of her latest piece, Descent, that is currently being performed around the world.

Read about the full process and see more intermediate designs here