“All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk, pulling a tooth, baking an apple pie, educating a child.”
more thoughts on this to come.. when finals week is over.
Just a quick note that may help early adopters. The new (v4) Adonit Jot Touch stylus doesn’t pair the way the old one (v2.1) did. If you have problems, don’t use the ipad’s bluetooth screen. Just make sure bluetooth is enabled, then go into your Jot capable app. As of this writing, that’s sketchbook pro, PDF pen, and Inspire pro. Make sure you have jot touch enabled in the settings. Pushing the “A” (closest to the tip) button should activate.
This didn’t work for me at first, and I discovered that the reason was that I had already had jot support turned on in the past because I had the v2.1 stylus. I had to turn it off and back on again in order to get the new stylus to pair. (the IT Crowd reference is not lost on me. lol)
Is it cliche to do conference recaps? I don’t know. I feel like this might be useful for folks who don’t get to go, or have simply never been.
So yeah. I live and go to school in Indiana, and as such typically go to the Midwestern IDSA conference. This year, the western conference has the theme of designer as entrepreneur, an idea which strikes my fancy as I’ve been studying entrepreneurship and plan to work it into my thesis, so I decided to hit this one too.
As is customary, the vendor booths are the first thing I encountered. Rapid prototyping and short run options seemed to be more on display than usual with companies offering some new processes like pressure formed plastics and a kind of pseudo investment casting aluminum process. There was also a booth from “slippynotes” a post-it like product that can be reused like a white board, and slid around the wall.
Software was also represented with the SolidThinking crew repping their Evolve and Inspire applications, Luxion showing off the new Keyshot 4 and Autodesk with their new cloud meets T-splines “360″ product.
Designcraft was in the house as usual, with some toys. This year some acryllic “build your own cars” which replaced last years ARPY’s.
The conference got rolling with the student chapter officer orientation program meeting led by Jose Rivera-Chang, followed by a portfolio review session. Next up was a great talk from Dario Antonioni covering ways to fund your projects with OPM. (other people’s money) Next, Jason Belaire led a panel discussion on portfolio practices. Finally, Erick Millan discussed his philosophy for designing for pets.
The night closed with a post party at Dash dot. Tasty food and networking.
Looking forward to tomorrow’s talks.
There are two products that I have a weakness for. Jackets and backpacks. I don’t know what that’s about, but I’ve seen some cool backpacks lately and wanted to share.
Madpax Blox Backpacks
First the Madpax Blox backpacks from thinkgeek. I like the look of the multilayered blocks. Who know if the pack is designed well from a use standpoint though.
Galaxy backpacks
Next up the galaxy backpacks from sprayground.com. These guys glow in the dark, and might be the perfect accessory if you already have black milk’s galaxy leggings or galaxy shoes. Sprayground has backpacks in some other fun prints too, like bandana print and stacks of money. they even have one that looks like it’s made entirely of gold lamé.
Timbuk2 Uptown
Moving to the more utilitarian side of things, I noticed this week that Timbuk2 has a few new offerings. The Uptown backpack looks pretty sharp and has a nice array or storage options. They’ve also got a new Race Duffel that looks nice. However, it doesn’t look quite as practical as my OGIO Endurance 9.0, but the Timbuk2 offering is definitely the better price point.
Timbuk2 Race Duffel
So what am I using lately? For everyday, it’s the OGIO Module. It’s the perfect size. It holds two moleskines, my iPad and wireless keyboard, with a zippered storage on the front that holds an array of pens, chapstick, audio recorder, pill container, eye drops and usually some other junk. It is a great size for carrying on the motorcycle or the bike. Best bag purchase I’ve ever made.
OGIO Module
I also have a couple of bags from Everki. I’ve had the Beacon for over a year now. It’s a great bag, although probably overkill for my uses. It is one of the few bags that will fit my ASUS G2P laptop. plenty of extra storage in two front pouches and two size, waist pouches. My only complaint is that the shape, placement and openings of the front pockets makes them kind of difficult to use. I also have the Urbanite vertical messenger bag from Everki. It’s a great bag, but was way too big for my needs. It has whole lot of storage options.
Everki Beacon
Everki Urbanite
I just saw a blurb on huffington post that had Clifford Nass talking about what he usually talks about; treating machines like people. If you’re not familiar, go check out The Media Equation and his other books. Why an article about him in the mainstream media? I’m guessing it’s because he worked on the google glasses. Sidenote: it kind of sucks that you have to commercialize science to make people care.
Anyway, the article is mostly nothing new. What was new from him, at least for me is his concern with multitasking.
What concerns you most about the direction of current technologies?
Unquestionably my biggest concern is the dramatic growth of multitasking. We know the effects of multitasking are severe and chronic. I have kids and adults saying, “Sure, I multitask all the time, but when I really have to concentrate I don’t multitask.”
The research to shows that’s not quite true: when your brain multitasks all the time there are clear changes in the brain that make it virtually impossible for you to focus. If we’re breeding a world in which people chronically multitask that has very, very worrisome and serious effects on people’s brains. For adults it has effects on their cognitive or thinking abilities. For younger kids we’re seeing effects on their emotional development. That does scare the heck out of me.
I have the same concern, and actually wrote a paper about it last semester. By the time the paper was done I had kind of stopped caring about the issue because I’d blown it up into a deep mindmap and kept getting stuck on the issue of efficiency as a sole guiding force to interaction design development. My thought is that we need devices that use less of our attention, but I think the problem is really more human than machine. Given more unused attention, we’d probably still be trying to cram other tasks in there.
I guess I need to revisit this idea. How can we reduce the cognitive overhead of multitasking while still multitasking? A Nass-like solution seems ideal, since we have the ability to deal with multiple other humans. (ex: mother with a minivan full of kids) Surely though there is even a finite number of humans we can deal with at once.
I really don’t have a good answer. I’d love to hear other opinions.
This post will be a little tangential, but bear with me.
So today, I’m sitting in Design History class watching Art & Copy for probably the 6th time. [If you're not familiar with the film, it's a documentary about advertising. It's really much more interesting than it sounds. You can watch it free on youtube. If you care about art or design at all you'll probably enjoy it.] I think I had an “A-HA” moment. Not “take on me” but an idea about my career in design. Lately I’ve been looking down the throat of an internship hunt, and in the process realizing that I don’t fit the mold of any of the internship positions that my educational track mandates. It’s been a great source of stress and driven me to do a lot of soul searching on the topic of “what am I good at”. After hearing David Kennedy [of Wieden+Kennedy, the design firm that hosts the "basket" as seen in portlandia] say that he hated advertising and the love/hate situation he and Dan Wieden had with the advertising were what drew them together forming the firm, a light bulb went off for me.
I’ve traditionally hated the idea of advertising. It seems manipulative and dirty. It causes people to do things that aren’t good for them. ..and lets not get started on child targeting advertising. I’ve always felt, rather unfortunately, that I am built for such work. I’m fascinated by social science. I have a good working knowledge of human cognition and how it relates to design and persuasion. I’m also a pretty good communicator and have an ability to distill ideas down to easily manageable nuggets. These strengths aren’t yet doing a lot for me in Industrial Design and Interaction design. Well.. they are, but not enough to give me leverage over my competition. I’m currently going through an entrepreneurship certificate program, another area that I have some negative opinions on, and seeing my skills working in that arena as well. Seeing these guys with the same concerns I have, and managing to move forward in spite of them was kind of inspiring. Rich Silverstien and Jeff Goodby had some good things to say as well. To paraphrase, it’s not crappy when it’s done right.
Ok. Time to jump the tracks.
Bones Brigade documentary
All this thinking about advertising reminded me of the excellent Bones Brigade documentary that Lauren and I watched on Netflix a while ago. Aside from being a really cool story about a team that really defined the sport of skateboarding, this film covered some of the art behind the brand. At the time, skateboard ads were this bland, pseudo-sporting goods style that showed average kids in full on, ugly colored safety gear. Bones Brigade brought in this artist called Craig Stecyk, who started doing all this off the wall (sic) design for the print ads. Most didn’t feature skateboards at all. They had fire, taxidermied animals, etc. To paraphrase the explanation given in the film, they were selling ideas, not skateboards. Such a great commentary. It was so amazing to me to learn the genesis of this style of art in advertising. I was not a skater growing up, but I rode BMX, which experienced a similar, but not as pronounced change in advertising. This kind of art was ubiquitous to me in my semi-suburban, 90′s highschool years. I remember seeing art from skateboard magazines early on. It seemed so acceptable even though it was kind of out there. I remember one particular Toy Machine ad that had little claymation figures that I tore out and saved. The disruptive format that Bones Brigade put out there is still in use today.
So, anyway.. where I’m going with this is that this film is great, especially if you grew up in the 90′s and had exposure to skateboard culture. I really love being able to trace ideas back to specific points. This is the most solid example of that that I’ve encountered.
Before Bones Brigade
After Bones Brigade
In the past week, I’ve been doing some early explorations of generative modeling. In my case, I’m using Rhino 5 with Grasshopper. I have to admit that I’m still a bit stymied in terms of finding a _good_ use for it beyond adding some weird detail to surfaces.
If you want to see some examples, check here.
For whatever reason, I set out to build surfaces from joined spheres. It makes an interesting surface.. kind of like lizard skin or some such. Initially I was assigning a random 3D pointfield to a cube (which is the default shape for Grasshopper’s 3D populate) and then using those as the center point of a sphere of random size. It’s pretty, but limited in usefulness.
Sphere-ish object generation with Grasshopper.
I really couldn’t wrap my head around a way to limit the point field to a non cube object, (I suspect I need to use “inside” and then “cull”) so I decided to do it by surface, which seemed like it would limit the number of spheres. (good for processing time)
Sphere surface
Next I started putting in whole objects. I ran into a problem where the random generator started making the same number a lot, but with the help of my prof, it now works reasonably.
Input and Output
It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty close to what I want. The next step is using this for another project – I’m doing a bronze casting, and thought that this kind of form would be perfect for it. These kind of shapes aren’t great for a lot of manufacturing techniques, but casting should work well.. the only problem will be cleaning up my initial model. It will be a 3D print of this form, and in the nature of the prints from the 3D printer at school, it will be very grainy. I’ve really not come up with a good way to sand a sphere yet…
Anyhow, I think the object I make is going to be a drum lug – a part of a percussion drum that allows the head to be tightened down. see illustration.
Drum Lug
I figure I can have 8 or 10 of them cast and build a drum with them as a good way to show off the casting design. We’ll see how it turns out. If you’d like to play with this yourself, here’s the setup I’m currently using.
Grasshopper script
