friday Archives - Switch - Digital & Brand

Last Friday Night: The Egg Drop Project

Teri — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 17:22:30 +0000

Last week was a pretty stressful one at the office. So I figured: what better way to unwind than to give the team a chance to throw eggs out of a third storey window?
Allow me to explain, starting with the disclaimer that no roads or cars were vandalised during this activity.
The Egg Drop Project is a classic, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already heard of it. The group is split into teams of 3/4, and each is given a raw egg and a limited selection of materials to choose from. The point is to build a structure using those materials that will keep the egg from breaking when dropped from a certain height.

Round 1: Easy

Teams could choose a maximum of 12 items from the following:

2 balloons
a handful of cotton wool
a handful of polystyrene thingamagigs
1 cardboard cup
30cm of masking tape
1 straw
1 kebab stick
1 sheet of newspaper
1 rubber band
3 squares of toilet paper
1 plastic bag
1m of cling film

Two of the teams opted to bundle up their egg in as many layers as possible before placing it between two semi-inflated balloons, providing protection from absolutely every angle. The third team went for a contraption that will maximise bounce on impact while preventing the egg cup from hitting the ground. Check out the super anxious moments of tension, captured only minutes before the great egg drop:

Team 1: Tom, Melissa, Mike and Bre

Team 2: Kristie, Roderick and Craig

Team 3: Andrea, Rik, Matt and Tina

The time had come. There was no going back. It was out the balcony, one contraption at a time, waiting to be inspected by the anxious team members waiting in the street below. You could cut the tension with a knife. Whose egg would survive the fall? Whose dreams would be smashed into a mess of yellow slime?

As it turns out: nobody’s. All 3 eggs returned safe and sound, with not so much as a crack to prove that they’d just fallen 3 storeys. Ah well – on to round 2!

Round 2: Not-so-easy

This time, the teams could only choose 10 items from the following:

1 rubber band
1 straw
1 kebab stick
10cm of masking tape
2 squares of toilet paper
1 sheet of newspaper

Things just got real serious. Ideas included:

None of which were any good, I’m afraid. All three packages hit the ground with an almighty splat that was heard all the way up in the boardroom.
So yeah – no clear winners, no clear losers, but a pretty fun session nonetheless.
Omelette, anyone?

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Last Friday night: the art of bookbinding

Teri — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 13:44:25 +0000

In another life, before becoming the designer that he is today, Brendon mastered the art of bookbinding. For those who don’t know, bookbinding is the process of assembling and binding together a pile of paper, in order to create a book – and yes, this can be done by hand.
Last Friday night Brendon decided to share his passion with us and showed us how to book bind our own books. Although he made it seem fairly easy to do, don’t be fooled: millimetric precision is required.
He managed to summarise three hours of work in just over one hour of presentation, guiding us step by step on everything we need to do in order to create a book – pretty much like those cooking classes you can watch on TV – just way cooler.

On top of that, he got to do his presentation dressed up as Steve Irwin, because not a single carnival goes by without the team putting on their best costumes. This year’s theme was ‘Dead Famous’ -have you seen the pictures yet? 😉

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Last Friday Night: A Trip to Peru

Richard — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 14:29:35 +0000

Settling on a personal favourite for my Friday Night session was pretty hard. I am a man of many interests. Choosing one proved to be hard. I’d have gone for photography, but Ed had dibs on that and spoke about it the week before.
I realised that, even though I’ve been sharing photos from my Peru trip at random intervals on Facebook, I never actually went into the long and short of the entire trip with anyone – no one got a blow-by-blow account of what went on in those two weeks in South America.
So I spent some time going through my photos and, with a much smaller audience than the entire world, I accepted that it’s OK to show less-than-perfect photos if they’re only meant to illustrate a story over a short period of time.
For pretty obvious reasons I can’t go through the entire presentation in a bog post about it, and I can’t go into as much detail as I’d like to over here, but this is a small teaser of some of the highlights from the trip (and last Friday night).

Chilled

I stopped to ask this chips vendor in Lima if he minded me taking a photo. His reply was, loosely translated: “Yeah sure, but I’m not going to smile for the photo. I never do.”
Peru remains indelibly stuck in my mind for many reasons, but the fact that there were so many varieties of potatoes must be one of the strangest things I found. There were times when we had 3 or 4 different potatoes in the same dish. This guy was selling normal potato crisps (chips), sweet potato ones, and, quite naturally, popped corn.

Coffee

We visited farms where a good amount of the world’s coffee and chocolate is grown and processed. It’s quite an eye opener to see how far something we consume on a regular basis has to travel before getting to us. It’s also humbling to see the hard work that goes into it at source (and that we tend to take for granted since it magically appears on a supermarket shelf close to us.

The Mayor

This was the mayor of the community on one of the floating islands in Lake Titikaka, on the border between Peru and Bolivia. She keeps a hand-made rifle to protect her fellow villagers (around 10 of them) when their husbands are out fishing – sometimes for days on end.

Pisco Sours

This is a photo I took in a bar of our hotel in Lima. It’s one of the two or three bars that claim to have invented the Pisco Sour – a delicious cocktail I’ve only ever had in Lima.
I’ll be writing more about my trip over the coming months – hopefully at some point I’ll find the time to put everything together in a format that I’m happy with, but till then you’ll just have to follow my pictorial and anecdotal stories that pop up from time to time on my Facebook page.

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