Photos were taken during the first creating stage:

Day 1:

My group is able to finish half of the fountain structure on the first day.

Problems—

We follow the blueprint and find that the length of the 3 bottles is too long for the 4th one to fit in with the position. The plan is altered by cutting the 3 bottles and glue back, which also fixes the positioning problem.

 

Day 2:

The second half of the fountain is finished.

Several issues occur during the testing stage–

  1. many places in the product started to leak water, so we put more hot glue on the holes and taped some of the straws tighter.
  2. When we put the fountain up straight, the four skewers have different lengths, which makes the rush unbalanced. Our group adds extra cardboard and white foam under the foundation of the product.
  3. There are also places in the product that allows the air to escape, for instance, the 4th bottle. To make the system work, we used more hot glue to seal the holes and block the top part with clay and another cafeteria bottle top.

Below is the final product for Day 2:

Here is the second testing trial:

Yet, it still doesn’t work.

  1. water is still leaking out
  2. straw had break
  3. After reflection,  we think the air is still escaping

 

Day 3:

For the last day, we glued more holes and taped straws.

The product:

The third trial:

Result—Leaks more

Fix more—filling holes, adding tape

Fourth trial—fail

 

Final Result:

The final product doesn’t meet the success criteria (to normally function) we set at the beginning; also, we spend too much time debugging and don’t have time to finish the decorating part.

Feedback:

Positive feedback—

“good appearance”

“creative idea, ambitious”

“very cool idea, very different from the other projects”

“at least it’s a good decoration”

Improvements—

“if the tape seals one of the openings, wouldn’t it be really inconvenient for the user?

“maybe just get it to work”

 

Possible improvement:

If we have time for more improvement, we will probably go back and study more about the principle behind the fountain. Because if our product isn’t leaking water in any places, the fountain may not rely on “pushing air up” to function. More study of the fountain may help us, as we have more knowledge of the product, the better we can figure out what has gone wrong.

According to what we know now, the reason why the project doesn’t work is that it still has some places (not seeable by eyes) not sealed up, or the position/ material/ size is not right.