The DSLR is a great tool for documenting 2d and 3d design, but for 4d design you really need something that can capture video. (It’s true that some DSLRs now capture stunning video, but only for short durations and quantities and you’re still lugging around a full-size camera.) My “should have brought the video camera” regret kicked in as soon as I started experiencing how differently Japanese people interact with technology and their environment. Sure, I could take lots of photos and copious notes, but those aren’t nearly as good as 10-15 seconds of video.

It’s not just recording video that’s important, it’s being able to record video conveniently, in high quality, then easily move the video off the camera. With my full-size, miniDV video camera it’s pretty much impossible to take quick snippets of video given the overhead of getting it in/out of the case, turning it on, etc. On the other hand, the TGV5 is small and light enough that I can carry it in my pocket and within a few seconds have it out and recording video. (It’s even faster than getting my Droid out and recording.) Cheap/free software makes it trivial to take a 10-20 second clip, trim it if needed, then “Save As” for Flickr or Vimeo.

As an experiment I’m starting to document design — especially 4d design — using only short video clips. I’ve posted a couple of short clips to a new flickr set, “Japan + Design” which I’ll be filling with video and still clips as I get around to processing the backlog of photos.

There’s no chance of my getting rid of the DSLR any time soon as there’s no substitute for huge glass when it comes to taking good photos. However, I have stopped lugging it around unless I’m intentionally on a trip to take hiqh quality photos as the TGV5 is becoming my “go to” camera for documentation and swipe files.

If you have the budget to buy a production-ready 3D printer, you probably shouldn’t be looking at a MakerBot. Production systems have better resolution, support contracts, schmancy STL conversion software and all sorts of other niceties. The MakerBot Cupcake is not a Stratasys, you’re not just going to plug it in and be cranking out pretty models a few hours later.

However, if you don’t have a huge budget and you’re willing to spend time debugging, tweaking, and generally getting your hands dirty; if you’re ok with the smell of ABS fumes, the stepper motor “songs“, and tending to an occasionally fussy machine that will botch a part for no obvious reason; and if you enjoy hacking and iterative exploration of technology, then maybe you’re the right sort of person to put together a MakerBot Cupcake or other reprap-based 3D printer.

Home scale fabrication is the domain of garage-carpenters and basement-machinists, the MakerBot doesn’t replace either. To some extent, building and running a MakerBot requires some of these related skills. Do you have a feel for how tight you can turn a bolt holding two pieces of wood together before it snaps the wood? Do you know how to shorten a screw with a hacksaw and keep the threads clean? You already own a multimeter, do you have a thermistor probe as well? How are you at diagnosing a wiring problem in a stepper motor?

Of the various reprap-related projects, MakerBot Cupcake is pretty clearly the easiest to put together. I got mine up and running without much fuss, but I’ve been building things from kits or fabbing things from raw materials for many years. I still needed help from the MakerBot mailing list to sort out a couple of minor problems and I’ve been able to help a couple of other people with their problems.

If you’re primarily a designer, there’s a reason you should consider taking the plunge even if you think you aren’t the sort of person who is ready to build their own 3D printer: self-education.

I’ve learned a lot about fabrication working in the opensource 3D printing world that I was never exposed to using commercial systems. Learning how to use Blender to create models has been painful at times, but I find myself liking it more than Solidworks for simple projects. I’ve learned about bad STL code, the relationships between temperature and speed when laying down plastic, and more about the physical properties of ABS than I ever thought I would need to know. Assembling the MakerBot from parts exposed me to a few neat tricks you can use to make 3D objects out of sheets of acrylic, and some new joining techniques for thin surfaces.

This new knowledge is also helping my ongoing education as a designer. Now that I know some of the printing capabilities, I can change my sketching and ideation process to work around limitations or integrate limitations of the printer. I’ve also rediscovered the old metalworking path of designing a mold to create a basic shape that is finished on machine tools, but instead I’m printing 3D plastic that I can finish using hand tools or machine tools.

It hasn’t been the easiest tool I’ve learned to use, but building and using the MakerBot might be the “funnest” tool I’ve learned to use in recent years.

Technorati Tags: hacking, makerbot, reprap

In the 1980s the average person didn’t own a home computer. Those who did were likely to be gamers, hackers, tinkerers, or someone else interested in owning a computer as a hobby, not as an everyday tool. ~30 years later, computers are a part of everyday life, used for paying bills, keeping up with friends, publishing photos, and a whole host of other uses we could never have predicted back in the days of the SE and AT. We knew that home computers would change things, but we couldn’t predict how, no matter how many episodes of Star Trek or Max Headroom we watched on multi-generation VHS tapes copied from friends.

Today, 25 years after the Great Pagemaker Massacre of 1985, we’re on the verge of another massive change in how our world works. I have no idea how that change will manifest itself, but I’d like to be one of the first to find out.

I just built a MakerBot Cupcake 3D printer, which is itself based on the reprap project printers. Since the first question most people ask me is “how much did it cost?”, I’m going to start off this series of notes talking about the economics of 3D printing.

In raw dollars, the Cupcake cost a little less than my first computer, a Commodore C64 with monitor, printer, and omfg, floppy drive instead of cassette recorder, all of which set my parents back a bit over a grand. While a grand or so in the early 80s bought a fair bit more than it does now, like other home computers, you couldn’t just buy the computer. We probably spent another few hundred dollars on software, joysticks, blank floppies, that weird “computer-paper” that the printer used and so on. Most of those things came from third parties, so there was competition to keep the prices down — you weren’t locked into buying blank floppies only from Commodore.

Like the C64, one of the selling points for the Cupcake is that it’s a cheap, no-frills device. Part of the fun in having a Cupcake is the DIY aesthetic of figuring out how it works, why it works, and how to keep it working. Another not so obvious selling point, is that the Cupcake is based on opensource software and hardware. If you’re not familiar with the 3D printer market, you’re probably thinking “so? I bought a cheap PC built from parts and run linux? What’s the big deal about an opensourced 3D printer?”

Commercial 3D printer companies, like most 2D printer companies, operate by selling you the “razor for cheap then making it up on the blades”. The profit isn’t in the printer, it’s in the supplies the printer uses and the support contract to keep it running. Next time you see a really inexpensive inkjet printer for sale, research the cost of a set of replacement ink cartridges. Compare the volume of ink in the cartridges and their price and compare that with the price of refill ink, or look at the effort some manufacturers put into forcing you to only buy new cartridges by using DRM. (There’s an excellent eBay scam that takes advantage of the pricing disparities: buy a printer, pull the ink cartridges, then sell the printer “like new” for near what you paid for it to someone who doesn’t know how much the replacement cost of the cartridges.)

Two things you usually have to buy from the manufacturer if you own a commercial, closed-source 3D printer are the material to print with and the base that you print on. The printing material is probably a spool of ABS plastic in a vendor-specific housing and the printing base is also ABS and also vendor specific. There’s a nice article over at Time Compression that goes into cost details to be considered when buying a commercial 3D printer, but we’ll skip to the chase and say we’re talking about US$ 1-2 per cubic inch on the proprietary systems vs. USD $10 per pound of raw ABS from MakerBot. Oh, and instead of those $5 one-use print surfaces only available from the vendor, the Cupcake prints on a variety of surfaces available at any art supply store, some of them reusable for dozens of prints. (I’ve used a small piece of acrylic for ~20 prints on the Cupcake with no signs of wear and tear.)

This is opposite to how 2D printing has worked going back to the earliest days of printing. Once someone had the idea to cut blocks of wood or cast lead as type, the printer could control costs by simply buying raw materials for the best price they could negotiate and recycling them when possible. Cast some metal into type, then melt it down when you no longer need it. Screw up a print run? No problem, we can recycle that paper. Wore out your wooden printing block? Have someone carve another and get back to printing.

When I learned to type (“yes, grandpa, on a typewrier, we know”) it was on an IBM Selectric that used a ribbon and “typewriter” paper. The ribbon was sold by IBM, but replacements were available from third parties. Likewise, I didn’t have to buy my paper from IBM, I could buy it from any office supply store. I could even buy paper that IBM didn’t approve of (as if such a thing existed). If my typewriter needed repair, I didn’t have to call the IBM tech, I could go to any typewriter repair shop I choose.   

This is pretty much exactly opposite to how 3D printers work now. If you own a FooCorp X1000 you are pretty much locked into buying everything from FooCorp. Having problems with your X1000? Is your support contract paid up? Are you allowed to even open it and try and fix it yourself without violating your contract?

While the Cupcake is opensource, and one is not locked into buying ABS from MakerBot, it isn’t a completely self-sustaining ecology just yet. The first problem is that there’s no way to convert ABS models and scrap back into spools of ABS for printing . The technology to melt and extrude ABS plastic is there, it’s just a matter of someone building a melter/extruder that’s safe for home use. Safety might end up being the real problem as ABS fumes aren’t something you want to breath on a regular basis. Instead of recycling ABS on the individual level, perhaps the local door-to-door ABS recycling firm comes by and trades your scrap for fresh rolls of ABS, similar to the newspapers for toilet paper biz in Japan. One step further would be the ability to take broken ABS items and recycle them into replacement parts. If a knob or some other small part breaks, bring it over to my place, I’ll print you a new one then give the old one to the recycler in trade for more plastic.

So there you have the costs — under a grand and a dozen or two hours of your time to assemble it, adjust it, and get it running. Some of the money you’re “saving” by buying a DIY printer is going to be translated into hours of your time assembling, adjusting, and generally tweaking your Cupcake to get a decent print.   

Next we’ll look at who the real customer is and whether you should buy a Cupcake or just ship your STL to RedEye.

Technorati Tags: cupcake, diy, makerbot, reprap

1) Any ixd doing iPhone dev who needs pixel-precise templates should be able to make their own templates in Illustrator (equiv.) and print them out.  You know what’s better than spiral, lay-flat bindings?  No binding at all!

2) A physical drawing template? Is this 1980? Are we making flow charts?  A template that precise is either proof that you need to learn to draw or that you should be comping on the screen and not on paper. (If you have access to a laser cutter you could easily make your own.)

3) There are these things called “Post-it(tm) Note”s that come in various colors and sizes. They stick to things, say a whiteboard or a clipboard, so you can do things like rearrange navigation or swap out different comps for screens. You should try them, they’re really nifty.

Ok, four thoughts:

4) The reviewer writes: ” My sketching skills are teh suck, so[...]”

Yes, and they will continue to suck until you stop fussing around with templates and learn to draw freehand. I say that as someone who spent years making sucky drawings with rulers, templates, and other drawing “aids” that did nothing save prevent me from learning how to draw.

Technorati Tags: design, drawing, rant

Last week, we bought yet-another-cordless-phone after the GE died and the replacement handset would never sync properly with the base station. This time, I decided to go with a Panasonic, as some similar models had received good ratings in Consumer Reports and Costco had them for cheap.

Setting them up, I was happy to discover that instead of some cordless phone specific battery, they use regular NiMH AAA batteries. Plentiful and cheap when the time comes to replace them.

Now if I could just get a set of schematics and a parts list so we’d have a chance of repairing the phone itself, maybe I’d have a phone that I could maintain over the long run…

Technorati Tags: batteries, design, sustainability

Was I ever wrong.

We still have a full day of presentations to go, and if they’re half as good as today’s presentations, it will still be a total win for this conference. I’ve met lots of interesting people and my head is stuffed with new ideas.

Technorati Tags: interaction 09, ixda

Twitter, however, seems to be the perfect place for those one-liners that people feel free to ignore if they’re busy.

You can follow my “look at it if you’re bored” stream at allartburns.

Technorati Tags: quickie, surfing, twitter

Art That Learns, a class on machine learning and art installations taught by Osman Khan and Carlos Guestrin

Interactive Technologies and Live Performance, a class on technology and performance taught by Golan Levin and Matt Grey.

mTID research, wherein I reveal the invisible.

My fourth studio is an independent study on drawing, I’ll probably scan/post some stuff from that here.

More soon.

Technorati Tags: design, mtid, school

A “time machine” radio that allows you tune into a year instead of a radio frequency.

Technorati Tags: arduino, design, interaction, sketching

Today I was talking to a undergrad who is disillusioned with what he’s studying in industrial design studio.  While we were talking, I was reminded of something Papanek wrote that helped me figure out What I Want to do With My Life.

_Design for the Real World_, a book that got Papanek kicked out of the IDSA, really made me wake up and think about what it is I am doing and why.  The revised edition of _Design for the Real World_ is much better than the original, but the first paragraph stays the same:

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered shoe horns, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before (in the “good old days”), if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed. And the skills needed in these activities are carefully taught to young people.

Technorati Tags: design, life, papanek

Except that now, RISD is leapfrogging.

For those of you too lazy to go read wikipedia, “leapfrogging” is when you go from being way behind everyone else to being way ahead by skipping everything between “behind” and “ahead”. As an example, instead of ~30 years of desktop PCs and crappy software in schools, kids around the world are going directly from chalk and slate to OLPCs and mobile phones .

RISD is going to do the same thing.

Why?

RISD has Maeda.

There’s a 19th century-like hall of wonders called the “Nature Lab” at RISD, where students can look at something like 80,000 specimens from around the world. Which is a really useful thing to have when you need to study the physical structure of some random animal — why look at a book when you can look at an actual skeleton or taxidermy? Problem being, you need good light to study an object, and the Nature Lab is in a building, not outdoors in, well, nature.

Thanks to Maeda, the Nature Lab has artificial daylight and color adjusting lamps from Zumtobel.

That’s rethinking the education process in action. RISD doesn’t need a fancy computerized database with 3D holographs of everything, they just needed some state-of-the-art lighting in their historic building.

Technorati Tags: design, leapfrogging, Maeda, RISD

I switched to feedburner for my RSS feed since it can do things like include my del. bookmarks and the like.

Initially, I just have it set to pull my del tags once a day.

If it you notice any problems, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: feedburner

I’m the first to admit that I have a problem with constructive criticism. I’ve never been terribly good at gently nudging someone onto the right path with kind words; I’m much better at beating them with a stick when they go down the wrong path. I apologize in advance if this comes off as harsh, it’s really not my intent. I want us to be brilliant, I don’t want to score points by pointing out where people are screwing up.

I recently started reading RISD’s latest blog (yes, they have more than one), “RISD by Design” and my response was something like

“Oh yeah? Well we just updated our website design after 10 years! So there! Ok, well, we updated some of it, like the main page and a couple other things and a lot of the departments and the search engine still have the old style and there’s not much visual coherence across the campus other than.. uh… so, how about those Stillers?”

That’s not much of a response. As a matter of fact, it made me angry thinking about it.

How is it that a university doing leading-edge research in pretty much every domain including Internet technology (ex: CAPCHA) doesn’t have any sort of, “Hey, look at us!” blog or journal at the university level?

Sure, there are some people working on departmental and project blogging, but that’s a local level. Peter Lee has CSDiary that covers the activities of the CS department and Golan Levin has a personal blog where he talks about issues related to teaching and being a good student. CMU Design has a Twitter feed, which is really great for students in Design, and a couple of classes have had per-class blogs.

But where’s our flagship blog, authored by someone from the President’s Office or at least someone in PR? Why were we not one of the first universities to have a major public blog/journal?

Thinking about past organizations I’ve been in, some possible answers that come to mind:

• We don’t have to. Admission to Carnegie Mellon is highly competitive, anyone we want as a student or donor already knows who we are. There’s simply nothing to be gained from investing in some sort of Maeda-like showcase blog.
• It’s not a high enough priority. Various senior people think it’s important, but we have limited resources and can’t do everything we want to do.
• It’s a bad idea. For whatever reason, enough people at senior levels are simply opposed to the idea of having a presence in blog-space that they can block anyone else who wants to make progress in this area.
• We don’t think the contemporary online world is relevant to the education process.

I’d like to think it’s the first reason (“we’re so great we don’t need to advertise”) but on my grumpy days I suspect that it’s one of the latter.

Here’s why.

Last semester I helped with a class called Making Things Interactive. If you go look at the class blog, you might notice that it’s hosted at wordpress.com, not at cmu.edu.

Why? Well, we don’t have any blogging infrastructure at CMU. Nada. Zip.

Individual people have individual accounts on the campus network and some folk have installed blogging software on their accounts. However, the bandwidth limitations are pretty tight as my fellow student Jennifer Gooch found out the hard way. When her project One Cold Hand got national press, her site got hammered and was quickly shut down by IT because it was using too much bandwidth. It took several days to convince people within the system to change her bandwidth limits, during which she ended up moving her site to another hosting facility.

Think about that a second or two: We were getting really good PR on a national level for a student’s work and that student’s account got locked down because too many people found her work interesting.

Of course, many groups/departments have their own computing resources and self-host their servers, but by doing this they’re duplicating effort and wasting resources. In my program there’s a tiny little *nix box sitting in someone’s office running yet-another install of gentoo/apache and some custom CMS software. Why can’t we just fill out some sort of web requisition form and get a wordpress install up and running on a hosted campus facility? I host several sites (including this one) at dreamhost, so I can honestly say that it’s pretty trivial to set up a domain and get blogging software up and running if the basic infrastructure is in place.

In the short term, what we need is a blogfarm running Wordpress. We don’t need CS to go into NIH mode and create yet another parallel-but-different-solution, we just need a bunch of blades in racks running wordpress and some support from IT in the keeping-it-running-and-updated department. Even if the Powers That Be don’t get blogging, at least give those of us who do the infrastructure we need to set up and run blogs on local, supported servers.

Once the infrastructure is up and running and people are using it and we start getting attention, we can more easily convince the Powers That Be why blogging/journaling is so important to the future success of our university. If a mere art school like RISD (sorry, cheap shot, I know :-) has a public face in the online world, why doesn’t a cutting edge, interdisciplinary research university like Carnegie Mellon have a public face that’s an order of magnitude better?

I have negative free time to help with this sort of thing, but my program could really use a locally hosted blog/website where we could show off all of our work. Right now I’m looking at setting up something on ning to promote our program and asking my advisor to spend a few $ to make the ads go away; I’m more than happy to help someone who has the time/energy to lead this charge.

So. Time to “shut up and skate”, as we said back in the day. I don’t have time to help build a ramp, but I’m happy to help sweep leaves out of an empty pool.

Technorati Tags: blogs, cmu, risd

The problem is that most (ok, almost all) mashups suck or are at best novelties. You might listen to them once and think, ‘how clever, they made something using “16 Tons” and “Material Girl”’, but you’ll never voluntarily listen to it again or wander around singing it in your head. Simply finding two songs in a similar key/tempo and blending them does not guarantee it’s actually good music.

However, there are a few artists that take songs that sound good, mash them all together, and make a better song than any of the originals. “Gosh, if only this song had a better bridge and this one had a better drumline, hey, I know…” Better still are the artists that don’t stop at two songs, the ones that take three songs, mash them up, and filter/mix them so it sounds like it’s one big band. And then there are the really good ones that make videos to go along with their remix/mashups.

I recently discovered this collective in Japan that works under the name “Orcrec” that does almost everything perfectly. They have a blog filled with work , but it’s on the other side of the pond and the connection is iffy. Lucky for us there’s the Youtube.

First, there’s their Starry Sky YEAH! Remix, which is based on three other songs:

• Beastie Boys, Ch-Check It Out, an ok rap song but the beats just don’t work for me.
• Capsule, Starry Sky, shibuya-k pop with really long stretches of barely audible lyrics. (I have the CD this is from and it’s actually pretty good electronica/pop music.)
• Daft Punk, Technologic,minimalist electro with almost dada lyrics about technology.

But you put them together properly and “holy fuck this is a great song!” Note that they also mixed three videos together as well and also filtered the audio tracks for better transitions.

The second amazing Orcrec track, Gamegirl Master, is based on Underworld’s “Rez/Cowgirl”, Fatboy Slim’s “Renegade Master (Wildchild)”, and Perfume’s “Game”.

I happen to like two of these songs to begin with, and while Orcrec didn’t put as much effort into the mixing as they did with “Starry Sky YEAH!”, they made an all new video for the mix using footage from TRON. Even without the snazzy new video, the mashup they made is still better than the sum of the parts and arguably better than two of the three songs. (Rez/Cowgirl is arguably one of the best 10 electro songs of all time.)

The thing is, you can waste all day on youtube looking at stuff like this. At least %90 of it is crap made by kids who didn’t change the music, they just made a new video (aka AMV) for one of their favorite songs using stuff from anime and movies or video of themselves dancing and lipsyncing. But if you’re lucky, you’ll stumble along someone with the skills of Orcrec and rethink what the limits of your medium are.

Technorati Tags: design, inspiration, mashup, orcrec

Technorati Tags: physical computing

This morning I was watching video of some flocking behavior and it it hit me that this is a perfect example of what Braitenberg is talking about in Vehicles when he describes “the law of uphill analysis and downhill invention”. A key reason for using thought experiments is that as outside observers, we are often unable to comprehend why something exhibits a specific behavior and are unable to build or define a structure that would exhibit a specific behavior. On the other hand, we are able to build simple things and understand their behavior because they are things we have created. His suggestion is that rather than spend lots of time and energy trying to analyze behavior from a top-down perspective, try building things from the bottom up and see if we can replicate the sort of behavior we’re trying to understand.

As a software type interested in kinetics and robotics, “top-down vs. bottom-up” is a very familiar argument. Every time I work on a distributed computing problem in CS, I (and my cohort) default to a top-down, control-the-flock algorithm that makes each element of the group do its thing. When I got into MIMD programming on supercomputers, I would solve problems by having different nodes exchange data needed to make decisions, but it was still “Thing A decides what to do after taking orders from or talking to thing B”.

I’m pretty certain birds aren’t having little chats about where they are headed next, and they’re probably not psychic, nor do they otherwise communicate with one another across space and time. My assumption (not being a biologist or psychiatrist) has always been that the “separation, alignment and cohesion” argument explains things; as a software type, it’s something I find easy to implement. How birds can see/think/react so quickly to small objects at a distance is beyond me, but again, I’m not a biologist.

Looking at things from Braitenberg’s perspective, what if it’s a much simpler solution? Perhaps the birds aren’t going through an observe/calculate/act cycle and are instead merely responding to the cues of their neighbors using learned behavior memorized (or evolved) during their lifetime. Pattern A results in Action A, Pattern B results in Action B, etc. If there’s an error — hey, that’s not pattern A — then a quick decision is made to either continue with Action A, go back to the previous action, or react in a new way to try and solve the problem.

I don’t know if that’s the right answer, but I’m starting to think about making some Arduino-based flocking robots for a little tabletop exercise. Even as a thought exercise that I never get around to building, it’s an interesting question. Can individual bots learn to flock based on keeping distance from things next to them and learning a set of patterns to repeat based on the movement of their direct neighbors?

If the flocking of birds, the action of ants and bees in colonies can be explained or modeled using this bottom up behavior (I suspect it can), how would we humans benefit by implementing similar, bottom-up mechanisms?

For example, why does Amazon need to collect all sorts of data about me (in an identifiable, non-anonymous database) just so I can get “other people who like what you like” style suggestions? Why do we need a centralized last.fm server to track all our listening histories — why not share it with people physically near me as I wander around town or post updates to my “Universal Friends List”?

On a more abstract level, instead of Master Control Programs sucking in data and spewing it back out, why can’t our MP3 players and book viewers and phones and laptops exchange information with nearby peers, constantly updating and exchanging anonymous lists of data, analyzing it, and reporting back to us?

Using the insect world as a parallel, what if all of our electronic devices behaved more like bees in a colony, each doing simple things with nearby (physically or electronically) devices leading towards a greater benefit for all? Do we really need our technology to be set up in a virtual army, taking orders from other systems in a hierarchy run by governments and international corporations?

Vehicles is an easy book to read and a hard book to describe. It really is one of those, “trust me, read it” books that you force on your friends until they read it just to get you to shut the hell up. Which, to me, is one of the best things you can say about a book.

Technorati Tags: Arduino, Braitenberg, review, Vehicles

I didn’t actually “throw away” three pens as much as “dispose” of them or, in essence, “destroy” them. They’re not recyclable that I’m aware of and not refillable, either. So there’s 1.5 oz (yes, I weighed them) of plastic and a tiny bit of metal that I destroyed by sending to a landfill.

How much oil did I just destroy? Probably not that much. But those pens came in boxes, factories needed to make the ink used to color the plastic, all of that had to be delivered somewhere. Still, probably not that much oil for three pens.

On the other hand, how many pens have I destroyed in my life? I remember buying disposable ballpoints by the box in college, so I’m guessing a lot of pens, so maybe, what, a gallon of oil? A barrel of oil? I’m not going to go all Jamais Cascio and calculate the amount of oil I’ve destroyed in the form of ballpoint pens, but I’m going to hazard a guess it’s a non-trivial amount, especially if you include the fully-loaded cost of the designing, making, and distributing of the pens.

Side note: Years ago I switched to mechanical pencils just because I like the feel more. I still have some of the same mechanical pencils I bought seven or eight years ago — including my favorite, Ohto Pro-Mecha architecture pencils. I have worn out four of the Ohotos (all .3, I guess I have a heavy hand?) and need to fix/replace/recycle them. Of note, they’re made almost entirely of aluminum with only a small amount of plastic. If I can’t fix them, I can always toss the metal bit in the recycling bin with all the other metal scrap that I take to the dealer once or twice a year.

So, I threw away — destroyed — three pens yesterday. How many have I destroyed in my life? How many have you destroyed? How many have we collectively destroyed? How much oil have we collectively destroyed in the form of disposable pens?

BIC says they sell “24 million BIC(tm) stationery products every day” (emph. mine). They also say, “BIC(tm) products are the choice for any consumer who wants to protect the environment.”

Say what? If I want to protect the environment, why would I buy disposable pens and disposable lighters and disposable razors, all made using oil and intended to be destroyed instead of recycled or reused? I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe it’s actually bad for the environment (and a waste of money) to buy things knowing you’re just going to destroy them.

Ok, so how do I go about not destroying any more oil in the form of disposable pens? Let’s try the “reduce, re-use, recycle” solution.

Reduce: It’s difficult to reduce the amount of drawing and writing I need to do, but can I reduce the amount of pens I use? Is there an alternative to disposable pens? I like Prismacolor pencils, and they’re good for some of my drawing, and when I toss the shavings and the stub into the trash they’ll go to a landfill where maybe they’ll decompose. They are a bit of a pain to use on a plane or in a car as they have to be sharpened often and they’re also fragile — dropping them will break the core and make them useless. They also don’t work well with some paper and they aren’t as permanent as ink. Face it, I’m still going to need to use ink pens of some sort.

Reuse: Another option is to stop throwing away — destroying — the entire pen. Copic makes a number of pens that use refillable inserts and replaceable nibs. True, those go in the landfill once they’re empty/worn, but the body of the pen is metal and will last quite some time before getting tossed into the recycling bin. I’m still using one I bought several years ago, and I’ve replaced the ink and nib a few times now. (Copic also makes a wide variety of refillable/repairable markers along with disposable pens and markers.) When I was a kid, replacing the insert was pretty standard and I still have a couple of U.S.Gov. black ball-point pens that would work fine today had I a refill handy.

For note-taking in class and general writing, I’ve switched over completely to fountain pens that can be refilled from a bottle of ink. Yes, they can be a bit messy some times, but I’ve bought a few 3oz jars of Noodler’s water-resistant ink, enough to last me a kerjillion years. I suspect the nib on my pen will also last me most of the rest of my life as long as I don’t drop it on concrete or somesuch. If I didn’t like refilling I could buy ink cartridges, but again, I’m destroying oil when the cartridges are empty.

Recycle: Not an option with any of the disposable pens I’ve seen. If someone is making pens that I can put in with the #1 and #2 plastic (all my city takes), please let me know. I’m pretty certain none of the pens I destroyed yesterday were made of HDPE.

So, there’s my solution: fountain pens for most of my writing, Copic markers and Prismas for drawing. I suspect I can go the rest of my life without destroying nearly as much oil as I used to in the form of disposable pens.

Am I saying that people who use disposable pens are evil? No, and I’ll continue to use Sharpie Industrial disposable markers when I need to make semi-permanent marks in the shop. (However, I should buy them in bulk instead of in the three pack that uses paper and plastic packaging.)

What I am saying is that we destroy a lot of oil in the form of disposable pens, and that there are steps we can take to reduce the amount we’re destroying. Each of our solutions will be different, but collectively we can prevent a lot of oil from being destroyed.

Technorati Tags: oil, pens, recycling, sustainability

Let me start by expressing my (probably unpopular) opinion: the vast majority of “conceptual art” has failed whatever purpose it was trying to serve. If I have to read a sign or a placard or a guide book to understand your art, then you have failed as an artist because your work did not communicate whatever it is you were trying to communicate. (And if I can’t understand what you’re trying to say after reading your explanation, maybe you should consider a new career.) I’m having a particularly dim view of “conceptual anything” right now, having recently visited the Carnegie Museum “Life on Mars” exhibit. There were some real gems here and there, but I still stand by my one sentence lolcat review:

“ART: UR DOIN IT RONG”

Now I can tell you this story that masquerades as a book review.

Recently my pal Golan Levin told me I should read hertzian tales in response to my blathering on about computational situational awareness, and I dug up a copy and put it on the “in” stack. When I saw the words “conceptual design” on the jacket I spit up a little bit in my throat and considered putting it way at the bottom of the stack. However, after seeing some of the work in the MOMA “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit, I realized I was probably being a little unreasonable and that I should at least give the book a fair chance. (More importantly, Golan is a very sharp sort who wouldn’t suggest I read something that would be a waste of my time.) The last time I was on a plane, I brought along it and a backup book just in case I got more than airsick.

I never cracked the other book. Dunne managed to both educate me about what conceptual design is and isn’t and really get me thinking even bigger questions than before about situational awareness and observing invisible spaces.

hertzian tales has two major components: the relationships between conceptual design, product design, and Hertzian space; and documentation of Dunne’s process in developing conceptual design pieces to investigate Hertzian space.

Dunne starts with a history and survey of conceptual design and product design. I think that many of us outside of capital-d design would probably describe “conceptual design” as “experimental design” — the design of objects not to fulfill a certain set of criteria, but to create either a physical or thought experiment that lets us gain a new perspective on some concept or object. These sorts of things can range from asking questions like “What if I had glasses that kept track of how much TV I watched and went dark if I’d watched too many hours in a given day?” or what sort of products would be useful for a lonely guy that had just been dumped by his girlfriend?

I like both of these because they don’t so much give you real answers as give you answers that make you ask more questions. What if my glasses went dark when I drove by a jumbotron screen, or just as a movie was ending? If I need “Accessories for Lonely Men”, which one should I get first, “Sheet Thief”, “Plate Thrower” or “Cold Feet”? It’s obvious what the products are going to do, who they are for, and why (in theory) someone would want such a thing. Well, maybe not. Do lonely guys really need reminders that they are lonely? Do I really want my TV watching regulated by glasses instead of common sense? Probably not, but thinking about these sorts of imaginary (and humorous, admit it, you laughed or at least smiled) products is a good way to open up one’s mind and think about existing technology and society from a new perspective.

Dunne’s survey of conceptual design projects is also useful in that he shows how they are relevant to the design of real products or how they change how we think about our relationships with technology and society. He doesn’t declare a bunch of truths because he’s an art professor, he substantiates his opinions with both factual history and well written arguments. As an example, I probably wouldn’t have taken Daniel Weil’s conceptual radios very seriously if I saw them in a museum, but Dunne gives them a context that helps me understand some of what Weil was attempting to do.

Having led us off with a history of products and technology, Dunne then moves into Hertzian space. The idea of Hertzian space is that all of our electronic devices radiate radio frequencies (RF) as part of their operation, and that is a new space for us to explore and observe. It’s usually not a device’s task to generate RF, it’s merely a side-effect of it being electronic. RF Interference (RFI) from all this radiated energy is enough of a problem that most nations have some sort of legal restrictions on how much RF can be emitted (or “leak”) from a device. In the US, turn over just about anything that uses batteries or plugs into a wall and look for the legalese about “FCC Part 15 compliance”. That’s the manufacture declaring that they’ve followed any rules that relate to how much RF is leaked from the device.

It’s not just radios, computers and mobile phones generating RF, it’s pretty much every technological component of our society. If electrical power runs through it, from the transformers on power poles to the alternator in your car’s engine to the washing machine in the basement or your wireless doorbell and garage door remote, it generates some sort of RF. (If you’re interested in learning more about RF interference or radio theory in general, check out amateur radio websites like the ARRL or EHAM.)

What Dunne asks us to think about is, What can we learn about ourselves from looking at the Hertzian space? What tools do we need to develop or use to look at this space? The book finishes with documentation of a couple of Dunne’s projects in this area, both at the personal/object level and at the city level.

In the end, the book is a kind of conceptual design project in and of itself — it lays out a bunch of information, takes you through a line of reasoning, and then chucks you off a cliff with a bunch of unanswered and open-ended questions about what you’ve just read. Dunne doesn’t make any claims to having answers, he just points you in the same general direction he’s headed and gives you a gentle shove.

Which is probably the sort of book I like reading the most these days. I’m tired of people telling me their answers, I want them to make me ask more questions. Even if you don’t agree with his opinions or like his projects, Dunne will leave you with more questions than answers.

(Edit: Anthony Dunne, on “design for debate” and a Bruce Sterling talk on speculative/science fiction interaction design.)

Anthony Dunne, hertzian tales. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005.

Technorati Tags: Dunne, design, hertzian space

Yes, that John Maeda and that RISD.

So, pretty cool, huh?

What’s even cooler, is that Maeda is blogging regularly about RISD-related stuff at “Our RISD“.

I’ve never met Maeda and I’ve little desire to go to RISD at the moment, but I appreciate the opportunity to reading the thoughts of someone whose work I respect and admire and get a behind-the-scenes look at a major design school.

Technorati Tags: academia, blogging, maeda, risd