ALL ART BURNS

My loose plans to start a design and fabrication startup have turned into a ref’s orders.

“Game on”, as they say.

A sea change at work has made me remember it’s good to get off the ship while it’s in the harbor and I did. I’m still going to look around for a nice gig at someone else’s firm, but while I’m doing that I’m also going to be putting pencil to paper, soldering, printing, lasering, and welding.

What makes me feel good about this is how quickly some work has shown up. It’s not a for-a-living level of work, but it will be great additions to my portfolio and CV, and lead to more work.

For you digifab types, I’m also cranking up my lasersaur, reprap/makerbot, and general digifab hacking at the nerd blog.

I’ve started working on a taxonomy of feedback for physical computing. I know, “aren’t there enough taxonomies already”? Well, yes, so what’s one more… It’s not so much that there’s something wrong with the ones I’ve found so far, they just tend to be either narrowly focused — task focused VR or haptics — or are behind a paywall and not easy to share with others.

The goal here is to chart out all the possibilities in an attempt to get people thinking about tactile/haptic feedback from some new angles. Honestly, if I see one more tactor-anything I’m going to hit with a hammer. Enough with the pager motors already! We have 5 senses (arguably 20-something), let’s use more of them.

Starting out, I’m using a simple tree: person -> body part -> sense

person->finger->pressure (sensitive)
person->finger->temperature (sensitive)
person->arm->elbow->temperature (normal)
person->leg->foot->sole->pressure (weight)

So, two questions:

1) Has someone already done a good job of this and I simply haven’t found it yet?

2) Is there a preferred format for this sort of thing that’s easy to mail around and text edit?

(p.s. Yes it’s arguably a folk taxonomy but I’m in no mood for pedantry.)

Slowly catching up on all the blogging stuff I ignored while building a lasersaur and doing Stuff That Pays the Bills.

In 15 words or less, complete this sentence: “I want to be a designer because…”

“they solve problems, and I want to teach other people how to solve their problems.”

I was going to cut an adaptor plate out of aluminum, but my pal Golan challenged me to do something on a Makerbot/Reprap that used as few non-printed parts as possible.

Final version requires one non-printed part, a 1/4-20tpi jam nut:
3D printable Kinect Tripod Adaptor

(If you have a high-quality printer, you could print a threaded insert.)

I’m starting to experiment with a shapeways store.

Currently there’s just an antenna mount of interest only amateur radio people, but I’m working on a few more items on the store that I am prototyping with my Makerbot Cupcake before uploading to Shapeways.