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

This morning I discovered Pachube, a “service that enables people to tag and share real time environmental data from objects, devices and spaces around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.”

In the space of a few moments I looked at the river conditions in Bastrop, TX; humidity and “leaf wetness” in southern California; and data from various sensors in a home in Japan.

Ok, so poking around on a website is fun and all, but Pachube also will feed this data out. All I need to do to have my automated lights turn on and off in sync with those in the Japanese living room is pull a data feed from Pachube then use something like Arduino to drive the hardware.

What will be really interesting is when there are enough tag readers attached to something like this to track arbitrary objects through the network. Online package tracking will seem quaint by comparison.

Technorati Tags: arduino, pachube, rfid, spime

Some guy built one:

Technorati Tags: DIY, gun turret, grim meathook future

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.

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 away 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

Speaking of which, shameless plug for a tool I’m growing to love: Scrivener. After years of writing in emacs, making outlines in ascii then filling them in, I started checking out all sorts of outline/writing tools. In the past 5 years, Scrivener is the first thing to have me writing from the start in a tool and not an editor. Scrivener is a great tool and I’m beginning to get really sucked into for long-form writing, and it appears to have a sizable fan-base in the dramatic writing world as well.

Ok, so I’ll probably export the finished text to ascii and post it here; then load it up in emacs, mark it up in TeX and make a PDF. But I’m broken that way.

Technorati Tags: scrivener, tools, writing

The highlight for me was going to the student show for NYU’s ITP school. ITP is a 2 year program in computational art and design, that is, integrating computers into art and the design process. Their mission statement actually says it is “to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies [...]“, but mission statements don’t always accurately describe what people really do in a program. It was one of the reasons we were making the trip, but not the main reason and I really didn’t know what to expect given the sorts of student shows I’ve been to in the past. But I left the ITP show feeling both inspired and a little embarrassed at the quality of my own work of late.

In somewhat random order, here were some of my favorite works out of the ~100 that must have been on display:

Felted signal processing: It turns out that felt made from wool and steel wool has interesting electrical characteristics and can be used to control music effects in realtime. Best business card: email address on a slip of paper stapled to some wool.

EMBrace, a tool for translating Hertzian space to the physical space. I wish I could have worn it around a bit just to see how it worked, but the demo was pretty informative.

soft pneumatic exoskeleton, which is exactly what you’d expect, given the name. I stumbled across Che-Wei Wang’s website a few months ago while looking for Arduino information. The guy is not only a machine, he has one of the best student websites I’ve seen recently.

networked wildfire dectors. Networked, self-organizing wildfire detectors that are simple enough to distribute as a kit for kids to build in school. I wonder how many real-world, useful, no artsy-bits-at-all projects like this come out of a typical first-year ITP class project. If you’re in a wildfire-prone area and involved with a childrens’/science museum, you need to work with this guy. (I’m talking to you, Oakland and SoCal.)

We also hit a few museums: Cooper, the Met and the MOMA. The MOMA show, “Design and the Elastic Mind” was half the reason for this trip, and it didn’t disappoint. Thankfully, the MOMA didn’t enforce an idiotic “no-cameras” rule, so I got a lot of good photos to go along with the catalog that I bought. Their permanent collection is also pretty amazing, so I was able to take a lot of useful photos for my swipe file. If you couldn’t make the show, the catalog for the exhibit is totally worth the money. I bought one just because it had so much more information than the little placards by the exhibits. (Also, I think I’m going to try and get everyone I know who had work in the show to sign my copy on “their” page…)

I’d never been to the Met before, so just being in the physical building was cool, like the first time I went into Grand Central Station. You spend your entire life seeing these places in the movies but being there is completely different and not something that could easily be replicated with VR. Your eyes have to physically re-adjust and focus at things that are much father away than things typically are in a building. Sadly, the reason we went to the Met — the superhero costume exhibit — was a bit underwhelming. It was mostly fashion that’s already been on catwalks grouped with a handful of famous costumes. Of course, the Met banned photography for this exhibit, so I couldn’t get any good photos of the famous costumes on display. Adding to the annoyance, the catalog for the show was iffy at best. However, the massively amazing collection of stuff the Met has made up for the superhero exhibit and I was able to get a lot of reference photos of medieval and Japanese art.

And the Cooper? Disappointing, but that’s partially my fault. I’d just assumed that their extensive collections were at least partially on display, but they aren’t. You have to contact them at least two weeks in advance and make an appointment. Had I known that, maybe I’d have had a chance to see something cool, but instead I ended up paying to see the three current exhibitions, two of which did nothing for me. The vast majority of the space was used for a Rococo (my least favorite period?) exhibit while the “product sampler” exhibit (what a cool idea) was stuffed into the basement (bad idea).

Due to poor planning we didn’t get to go to the Museum of Sex, but maybe next trip out we’ll manage it.

The rest of the trip was fun — we did obligatory things like shopping in soho, riding the trains and going to Times Square on Saturday night where we got trapped in massive crowds there to see Will Smith shooting a movie. The new Kinokuniya is way cool, the W Court is a great hotel, and almost every meal we had was excellent. It must be terrible having to decide between Nobu and Blue Ribbon Sushi when you want to go out for a treat. On the other hand, Hane Sushi (on 3rd at 38th) at half the price, was probably three-quarters as good as either.

As much as there is to do and as much fun as it is, I don’t think I could ever live in Manhattan. To begin with, I didn’t realize that automobile horns are legally a “deadman switch” in NYC and that you have to keep honking or your car will automatically turn off. And I get that space is at a premium, but damn things are crammed in tight. I used the restroom in one cafe where I could barely get in past the open door then close it behind me, and I’m not what anyone would consider overweight. Much of the city reminded me of the military submarine and ship tours I’ve been on — no wasted space and get used to being up-close-and-personal with people every moment you are not in your bunk.

The cost of visiting Manhattan might be quite expensive in the long run. We made reservations a couple of weeks in advance, so we got a table at a decent time at Nobu. I had the omakase at Nobu paired with a dry nama nigori — an amazing meal worth every last penny. So now that I’ve been to Morimoto and Nobu, I need to get to Japan and have omakase at Kaishoku Michiba and Koumei Ariake so I can decide for myself who truly is the best Iron Chef Japanese.

Technorati Tags: ITP, Manhattan, museums, Nobu, physical computing

What I am up for is explaining how desktop fabrication — 3d printers, laser cutters, cnc — is changing how I think about designing and making things.

I’m making this bracelet/armband/forearm protector thing as part of a random project that I’ve been wanting to do for ages. The short of it is, “what could I do with a full-on PC strapped to my forearm? Would it be useful or would it just be annoying?” Instead of what I used to do — just go make something — I’ve decided to approach it using a formal design process. I’m doing lots of sketches and variations, writing lists of requirements, coming up with “negative examples” of things I don’t want to do and so on.

Over the weekend I was sketching out how it would actually attach and started to look at all sorts of straps and elastic bands and then it hit me — I’ll just 3D print something that fits my arm nicely and put a little clip on it. It doesn’t need to have any sort of super-flexible adjustments to fit a wide range of people, anyone who wants one can just print out an attachment part that fits their own arm.

It was one of those “duh” moments, but to be honest, but this is what the future is going to be like in terms of design and manufacture.

Until now, bespoke manufacturing has usually been very expensive or time consuming (or both). Example: I just bought a nice pair of boots and paid an extra $75 over retail to have them custom made to fit my feet. I traced my feet, took some measurements, sent them off to the company, and 3 months later I got a nice pair of boots in the mail. Three months ago I could have bought the same pair of boots in the store and taken them home immediately, but I was willing to wait 3 months and pay an extra $75 for a perfect fit.

So, it’s 5 years from now and I decide to buy some new sunglasses to celebrate the start of summer. I walk into REI or Sunglasses Hut or wherever, look through their catalog, try on a few pair to see how things look. Then, instead of settling for the one that both fits best and looks best, I just pick the one that looks best and wait for them to print one out, customized for my particular facial structure and difference in ear heights. (That latter thing is a real PITA for some of us, nothing like walking around with your frames mismatched to your eyebrow line to make you feel like a real dork.) Or maybe I find a pair I like and pay a little extra to have the clerk behind the counter change the color. (Or, just as likely, I slip the clerk a $20 and they print a knock off of a designer frame, one that has an expensive licensing fee, using a pirate dataset the clerk downloaded from the Internet.)

It doesn’t stop there — pretty much anything you can make out of plastic or metal is going to be easily made on the desktop by someone with typical blue-collar training and skills. Business models are going to have to seriously change to adapt to this new way of thinking about the design/manufacture process. If you’re old enough to remember when the all-in-one color photo developer/printer machines came out, you also remember how much cheaper/easier it was to get your photos printed at the drugstore than at the pro photography store. The same goes for flat-bed scanners and desktop printers — I don’t need to run down to the copy shop to make a few copies, I can just do it here at home. Take that convenience for 2D media and translate it to 3D. I just broke the the little plastic knob on my stand mixer — do I mail order one from KitchenAid or do I stop in at the 3D print shop on the way to work and have them dupe one for me? Or maybe I use the 3D duper we just bought for the office and hope the boss doesn’t mind…

Things are going to change. They’re going to change in (I hope) wonderful ways that we can’t even begin to predict.

Technorati Tags: desktop fabrication, design, pontificating

Why Design?, Philippe Starck at TED.

Technorati Tags: design, starck

Technorati Tags: design, sustainability

Technorati Tags: artisinal design, sustainability

Poking around the InterWebs today, I found an amazing collection of photographs of vintage computers. Interesting not because of their power or age, but because they show the importance of visual design during the days of supercomputers.

Mark Richards’ Core Memory is a collection of his photographs of some of the most visual interesting computers in history. Skip past the big bundles of wires and tubes and take a long look at things like the control panel for the PDP-8 or the button layout and typography on vintage IBM mainframes. The photos are collected in a book — “Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Comptuers” — soon to be published by Chronicle Books.

Where is that level of design in today’s high-end computers? Sure, Apple has a few nice products, but why are the vast majority of computers so damn hard on the eyes? Does it really cost so much extra to have a clean layout on the console of a rack-mounted blade or a desk-side case? My PC’s cd-eject and reset buttons are almost identical in shape and size, are located only an inch or two apart, and as are all the buttons on my PC, all the same color. Does it really add too much to the COG to hire a designer or even an intern and have them clean things up and fix major flaws?

Technorati Tags: beauty, design, simplicity

To be honest, I kinda sorta agree with him on unnecessary design when it comes to design in general in the US. I like our Alessi Diobolix bottle opener, and it makes me smile when I use it. But if it didn’t work properly, I’d either throw it out or hang it on the wall. The same goes for Starck’s $80 juicer that is more sculpture than function, even Starck admits it’s not a very good juicer.

How many decades have we spent with product design used to make things redundant before their natural life is over or difficult to use just for the sake of visual style? How many years did Detroit do nothing with their cars other than change the shape, unless forced by some government agency? Sure, you can make things function better with design — and that’s why I’m studying design — but how many designers out there are creating things knowing they will have a short life span then be discarded? How many clothes go to an early grave simply because the trendsetters say the clothes are out? How much cheap IKEA-like furniture have I bought in my life, only to toss it in the dumpster after it fails to survive a couple of moves?

The other quote that caught my eye was this:
“I will definitely give up in two years’ time. I want to do something else, but I don’t know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression.”

Which got me to thinking — maybe Starck is an example of what happens when sculptors and visual artists start working in the product design world instead of being artisans. When I here someone say they want to express themselves or communicate some greater truths, I usually assume they are an artist. I know people who love to write software (a valid means of expression) but who loathe working in the software development industry. Personally, I like cooking and like to think I’m a pretty good cook, but probably I’d slit my wrists after a few days on the line. I’d really like to know what set Starck off in this new direction.

When I started this journey, I was worried that after only a few months someone was going to pull me aside and say, “Hey, just so you know. Design isn’t for you. Sculpture’s over in the next building and we’ll arrange a transfer and get you all set up.” That hasn’t happened (and I don’t think it will), but in the past couple of years I’ve learned a lot about myself and the world as I try to seriously study this whole design thing.

Technorati Tags: design, starck, sustainability

Visually, this is a pretty boring journal. But journals are about words, and because I stay focused on words, it’s easy to read this journal on just about any device, from my XV6800 phone to a high-end PC. (Just checked and it looks pretty good in lynx as well.) I spent very little time making it simple, I just started ripping things out if I couldn’t justify their existence. So, there’s no autobiographical photo, no fancy widgets showing what music I’m listening to right now, no countdown-until-W-is-gone clock, do dynamic code generation, Flash animations, or any of that. True, if I were a freelance graphic — sorry, “communication” — designer I’d probably put a lot of effort into having a rockin’ web site that shows off my chops. But I’m not, so I don’t.

So, back to simple. If you’ve ever ordered anything from a supplier like Grainger or DigiKey, you know what a nightmare it can be to find what you’re looking for. For awhile now, McMaster Carr has gotten more of my business than, say, MSC Direct, simply because the McMaster Carr site is so damn simple and easy to use.

McMaster Carr is great for the hardware I’ve needed for some metalworking probjects, but in the past year or two I’ve also gotten back into tangible computing (aka “making electric things with embedded CPUs”). The work I’m doing now is mostly based on the Arduino, an AVR-based single board computer. The Arudino does for physical computing what high level languages did for programming — open the field up to more people by simplifying the interface and the programming environment. Yea for simplicity!

Getting back into tangible computing also means dealing with the dreaded mail order supply titans like DigiKey, Newark, Mouser, Allied, etc. Typically when you’re ordering parts, you make a list of what you need, then try and find each part in each catalog, get the price, sum everything up, figure out shipping, then go find out if the parts are actually in stock. It’s an hour or two with a spreadsheet and often both the online search engine and the printed catalog.

Octopart changes everything. It’s a search engine for electronics, but more importantly, it pulls data from all the major vendors and shows you — in real time — pricing and availability. You can make a parts list, then easily compare prices and availability across most major vendors then build individual shopping carts and place orders.

It’s an amazingly useful resource, but most importantly, it’s simple. Simple, simple, simple. There are no garish colors, no image maps, no egregious animations, no masses of corporate logos showing everyone they are affiliated with. Just plain text, thumbnails for search results to help identify parts, and navigation that doesn’t require FPS-developed reflexes.

Go play with it — even if you don’t know anything about electronics — and see what you think. If you think you’re ignorant of things electronic, then search for something you’ve used or heard of, like “9v battery” or “transistor” and just poke around a bit. By keeping things simple, they’ve taken something very complex — component selection and ordering — and made it a much easier task.

Technorati Tags: design, octopart, simplicity

Papanek and Hennessey’s primary focus is on both needless consumption and poorly designed things that people really don’t need. However, instead of a long rant against conspicuous consumption and designed-in obsolescence, they point out flaws in products and systems then suggest alternatives. Starting with the home bath and ending with community-level resources (like fire engines), many things we take for granted or assume cannot be improved upon are looked at with a critical eye. Their line of questioning includes things like, “how can this be improved?”, “why don’t we do this the way people in another country do?” to “do you really need this thing in the first place?”

These questions are ones that I think anyone interested in design or sustainability should be learning to ask about everything they encounter. An interesting proposal in response to over-consumption is shared ownership of resources and objects that one only occasionally uses. We do this for all sorts of things, from fire engines to library books, but why do we stop with institutions created in the past century?

For example, why don’t we share lawnmowers?

I own two — a reel mower that I normally use and a gas mower given to us by a relative. Both of my neighbors also own gas mowers, and I think it’s a reasonable assumption that any of my neighbors who don’t hire a gardener probably own a gas mower. When I use my mower, it’s rarely for more than 20-30 minutes every other week or so; the same is true for all the mowers my neighbors own.

So why do we all have to own our own mower, each requiring a fair amount of regular maintenance even though we only use each for a few hours a week? What if we each put a few bucks a week into the “mower fund” and were able to check a mower out from a local storage shed? (Similar arguments are made for shared deep freezers in apartment buildings and other shared appliances.)

And if we are all going to own so many mowers, do we all need gas mowers? I’ve mowed my yard with both the reel mower and the gas mower, and the reel mower tends to be faster, quieter, and easier to store. Factor in down-time for refueling, tweaking the spark plug, and the cost of gas/oil, and the reel mower starts to make a lot more sense, at least for smaller lawns. I’m pretty certain that my reel mower will also last much longer than the gas mower, and it cost about half what a new gas mower would cost.

Taking their argument a step further, why do we have grass lawns that require so much maintenance to begin with? Just because they were popular with the Victorians doesn’t mean we need to waste water growing plants just to keep them closely cropped. On a personal level, we’ve started redesigning our own front yard so that we will no longer need to mow or water it other than occasional spot watering during a drought. It just doesn’t make sense for us to water and maintain 500 square feet of grass simply because it’s green.

It’s this sort of process and thinking that makes the book of value. While many of the specific suggestions they make are irrelevant today (such as rethinking typewriters), the processes Papanek and Hennessey use to critically look at the world around us and improve things for the better.

Cite (if you’re interested in my generating BiBTeX refs in future reviews, please speak up):
Hennessey, James and Papanek, Victor. Why Things Don’t Work, Pantheon Books, 1977, 0-394-70228-X

Technorati Tags: design, hennessey, papanek, sustainability

Ages ago when I got my first degree, one of my photography instructors laid down a hard and fast rule before the first critique:

You will not speak when your work is being discussed in a critique. You will keep your mouth shut. You cannot respond, cannot make faces, cannot argue, cannot communicate. You are there to listen to what others have to day, not to argue with them, or in any way explain or discuss your work.

From day one we were forced to live with the rule that your work must stand on its own. Once it’s out there, you will not be present to explain it, justify it, or otherwise interpret it for an observer. In other words, if your work needs explaining, then it’s not ready. Granted, this was a fine arts photography class and the focus was on making work to be displayed in public, but being forced to sit and listen really changed how I received and thought about feedback.

So here I am, part-time design student, and in crits people are responding to comments about their work and even arguing with what other people are saying during a crit. Many of the crits I’ve been in have been completely unstructured, leading to one person getting a huge amount of feedback on their work while others don’t receive any feedback at all. To be honest, I’m not sure how productive it is to challenge or argue with the feedback being given to you during a crit. Asking for clarification, counter-examples, or to take a line of reasoning further seems like a legitimate response to feedback in a crit, but going so far as to tel the other person that they’re wrong?

I haven’t personally seen anyone break down in tears or get into a yelling match, but it seems I’m the exception. I’ve heard stories of it getting to the point of tearing up drawings, destroying models, yelling matches, and so on. These aren’t third-hand stories, these are, “Yeah, like last semester when Mary’s model got thrown out the window” or “was that the crit where Bob just started crying and ran out of the room?” If you’re running a crit and people are having breakdowns, destroying work, or getting into yelling matches, what are the students actually learning?

To be clear, I’m not talking about situations of the sort where the instructor declares the work sub-par across the board and bails on the crit. I think “you as a whole didn’t work very hard and this would be a waste of everyone’s time” is a reasonable response, as long as it’s delivered in a factual manner, and not an angry rant.

Maybe it’s the “art vs. design” mentality or maybe it’s just differences between schools, but it’s something I apparently need to get used to if I’m going to continue my studies in this area. Personally, I just can’t get worked up enough about some of these things to actually be angry. If my work is bad, then I need to go work on it more, if yours is bad, you need to go back and work on it more. However, if someone yells at me during a crit or destroys my work, I think I’ll just get up and leave the room. In my opinion, there’s really no point in trying to constructively engage someone throwing a temper tantrum or being violent, especially in what should be a constructive environment.

Technorati Tags: critiques, design

The PRK went well, I’m working on a nice write-up of the entire procedure and my recovery experiences. Doc says I’m 20/20, possibly 20/15 in the right light, I have no halos or other visual artifacts. I’m still a little light sensitive, so low-light situations feel very high-constrast to me, but I’m completely fine to drive at night, etc.

I cut way back on classes this semester so I could focus more on work and art projects. Next semester I’d like to take some 2D design and color theory, but for now it’s just Intermediate Japanese 2 and a tangible computing class.

A design degree is still the goal, but my focus on ID has turned into a general inquisitiveness about design. I’ve read a bit about the Bauhaus curriculum, and I think I’m going to try and put something together for me that would be a self-directed degree in Design that includes 2D, 3D, interaction, service and maybe some d-theory to boot. I’m still really interested in things like furniture, tangible computing and nomadic technology, but I’m now interested in the fundamental design theory that’s the common ground behind all the different [Foo] Design disciplines.

And process. I’m becoming obsessed with process at a theory level — what defines process, what is common in process between different disciplines, etc.

Oh yeah, and I have a partner and a day job and a cat and friends and other things that I’d like to keep paying attention to while doing all this other stuff.

More soon.

Technorati Tags: design, personal

However, the good news / bad news thing is that I’m finally getting PRK surgery to correct my vision after finals are over. I probably won’t be able to use a computer for a week or so after that, so there’s half the vacation burned. I suspect that after a week of being laid up on the couch listening to audio books I will be ready to do some serious blog-catching-up, so maybe I’ll pull a marathon in the two weeks before school starts.

Technorati Tags: excuses excuses, personal

I want to be a designer because…
… I want to make things that will improve people’s physical and emotional lives.

There’s another answer, but it’s more than 15 words:
… I am unable to stop asking the “why” and “how” questions about the world and I think studying design will help me find some answers.

Those are related statements, but one is a process that will never end, the other is an action I want to be able to perform.

When I started down this road a few years ago, I was convinced I wanted to study ID and move into the ID job world. The more I learn about capital-D design, the more I start looking for commonalities between design and other knowledge domains. When I started learning to draw objects I started seeing things differently and laying out diagrams on whiteboards differently. Learning about the American System of production in the 18th and 19th century has started me thinking about how desktop fabrication will change business models of global corporations. Looking at how color and typography are used, I am beginning to understand why I hate the default text coloring in most source code editors and starting to think about ways to improve the text display.

The more I learn about design the more questions I have and the less sure I am of my previous answers to questions.

But that’s a good thing, in my opinion.

(Oh, and here’s my answer from a year ago when I first answered this question.)

Technorati Tags: design, future