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Aaron Dunkerton

aaron@aarondunkerton.com | www.aarondunkerton.com

A thorough understanding of a material, process or intended scenario should always lead the design process. Rather than separating form and function, I try to make them work together to generate outcomes that are justified, necessary and that look nice too.

Bird Brick

A five-piece cavity nesting box for new build instillation; designed for the conservation of House Sparrows, and manufactured using a traditional brick-making process.

Over the last 50 years the UK has lost over 44 million British Birds, 20 million of those are the much-loved House Sparrow. Once one of the UK's most numerous birds, their population has decreased by almost 70%, and they are now classified as endangered.

One of the causes of this decrease is thought to be due to a loss in communal nesting sites, like old buildings.

Bird Brick provides a nesting site for sparrows, in the form of five traditionally hand-made, clamp-fired bricks. These are installed, in clusters of two or three, into new builds or garden walls to suit communal nesting habits. The material properties of brick, low thermal and moisture movement and high durability, make the cavity ideal for nesting without affecting the building structurally, as well as being visually unobtrusive.

The final designs were hand cast with the help of MBH Freshfield lane brick factory in West Sussex.

Potraiture

Slip-cast, ceramic pots cast in disposable paper templates, the silhouettes of which portray the varied proportions of the human form.

By casting with paper nets, folded into 3D moulds, the preparation time was reduced from two weeks required for plaster moulds, to only two hours. A system was devised to showcase this process. Proportional data was collected from individual people, and put through a series of formulas producing measurements and dimensions of each net. The cast pot physically visualises the proportion, age and gender of the subject, generating the pots size, number of sides and the size of each face.