Just another day at the office...

How exactly to you design a product the likes of which you have never seen for real, never held or tried? Thinking about it is a good start, sketches work well if your a visual person but ultimately it all ends up with prototyping.

How exactly do you figure out how far up your bicep an armour plate can come before it will start to restrict your ability to lift your arm? Prototyping.

So thats what I did. I sat down with a bunch of scrap paper and started to tape it into the right shapes on myself. Follow that up with some cutting away the restrictive/uncomfortable bits. Move your arm every way you can think of. Rinse and repeat until you end up with a paper shape that shows you the maximum amount of coverage can achieve without sacrificing any manoeuvrability.

I ended up making a forearm, bicep, shoulder and neck piece. It wasn't that easy especially trying to measure and cut bits off of the paper shapes all with one hand. However it did pay off, I very quickly discovered that my assumptions about where plates would have to finish were very wrong. Some plates can cover so much more space that you would think, whilst some cover even less than you imagine.

When I got onto the drawing stage the research that I had done here turned out to be highly valuble. I not only realised the the plates could look different than I was thinking but I also figured out some clever ways to get around the problem areas. Having only been able to construct the arm pieces I felt draw in the leg sections, obviously these test had had more affect on me than I realised. Ultimately I don't want to stray too far from common conceptions even if they are wrong. Movies are plagued by factual inaccuracies that must be perpetuated, because if the audience thinks its right even if its not you have to do it that way, else they will think it is wrong. There is no point in me changing the way the armour works to be more accurate if it looks more wrong to the viewer.

Luckily for me, nothing of this sort exists and most people haven't ever worn armour of any kind so if I show the ability to flex in a slightly unrealistic way they will likely buy it, but I don't want to push that too far.

So with my mind map dealing with the practical extras that need to be thought about when designing the full feature suit, and my paper armour informing me about how to layout the plates, I can begin to focus on the fun part. What it all actually looks like. TO THE DRAWING BOARD!!!!