currently

Fall 2007

• Design Workshop
• MC Magazine Internship
• Redial
• Show/Tell Studio

Cocurricular

• ITP Radio
• Stuff for Kids
• The Half Hour Cozy
• Thesis

archived

Spring 2007

• Designing for Constraints
• GUI in AJAX

Fall 2006

• Physical Computing

Other Projects

• Graphics
• Video
• Web

Search /projects

ITP Radio Show Reminder Service
In collaboration with Christian Bovine
Receive reminder phone calls a half-hour before your favorite shows air live! This is an opt-in service.

Project Description

Goals for Redial Midterm

Beyond the Midterm…

1. Call a number from the database 30 minutes before the show time with which it is associated.
2. Allow DJs to record their own reminder messages that will call listeners 30 minutes before show.
3. Allow DJs to kick out reminder calls through a voice menu. Restrict to their own show only by using long extensions unique to their shows.

 

Design for the Real World
Chapters 9 & 12

I have very mixed feelings about this reading. First, I just can’t help but wonder that if industrial design relies on mass production, can there be industrial design without mass production? If, for example, Ikea did not exist and people got their furniture from a local carpinter (if they did not inherit it,) then would the industrial designer and the carpinter merge back to one?

Second, the concept of “designing for the other 90%” for me raises so many questions that I don’t see raised in the discourse around designing for the other 90%. The biggest question to me is, why is there that “other 90%?” To me, the term “designing for the other 90%” can be rephrased “designing for the accumulation of wealth in a system of global capitalism.” I wish it were called “designing for a new world of redistributed wealth.”

This is not to say that I am against all the design concepts illustrated in the reading. For example, the bicycle and tricycle designs I would consider to be “designing for the redistribution of wealth” because it helps people be less dependent on automobiles and petroleum.

 

I observed Heather and Matt do their show, “Lazers With Lasers.”

http://flickr.com/photos/robotim/sets/72157602613584163/

ITP Radio setup:

• Turntable on a raised platform
• Tabletop microphone stand with microphone
• ITP Radio mixer or “board”
• Computer monitor, keyboard, mouse. The computer tower sits on the ground.

Key Observations:

• DJ will use his/her laptop.
• There are too many cables.
• It is hard to use the computer, which sits on the ground. The keyboard does not fit on the tabletop completely.
• The center space is unusable. This has to do with the fact that the ITP Radio stand is also the stand used for the thesis presentations. The stand has a sound two channel sound mixer built into the center, (separate and inferior in quality to the ITP Radio mixer,) creating a square foot of unusable space.

I asked Heather to configure the space however she liked.
She took the raised platform from under the turntable and put it over the unusable center space for her laptop. Matt suggested hanging the microphones to free tabletop space.

 

• Editor page from old site redirects to “about-us” page on new site.
• The old blog banner has been updated with a URL to the new blog. (This was done because we did not want to take the old wordpress content offline. And sometimes old blog posts show up in search results.)

 

Today my self-imposed meat and dairy abstention comes to an end. The past week has given me a lot to think about in terms of how much I need much I need to eat meat or dairy. But first, my meal roundup: For breakfast, I had an apple and some sunflower seeds. I thought a lot about yogurt and cheese. For lunch I had Indian food, just lentils and beans. I thought a lot about saag paneer. I snacked on some hummus in the afternoon and I had a cup of split pea soup. For dinner, I went to Moto and had fondue and pork ribs.

Ok so I ended my experiment a meal early. But I think the fact that I tried to go a whole week without meat or dairy was more valuable than whether or not I stuck to that the entire time. I was talking to my roommate Alice about this and she was telling me that she doesn’t deal well with restrictions, I think I am the same way. Telling myself no more of item X made me obsess over item X more than if I were to just moderate my intake of that item.

The past week I found myself thinking more about cheese and ice cream than I usually ever do. Interestingly, I did not think about meat at all. I thought about eggs a little. This experiment proved that I can definitely live without eating meat, and that I can definitely reduce my dairy intake but I think quitting ice cream forever is a bad idea.

 

www.flickr.com robotim's Columbus Circle photoset

Today is Columbus day in United States. Here we observe Columbus Day on the second Monday in October. In Canada, the second Monday in October is their Thanksgiving Day. In Berkeley, California, a group of native Americans celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day on Saturday, October 6. Celebrating indigenous people instead of Christopher Columbus started in 1990 at the first intercontinental gathering of indigenous people in Quito, Ecuador. The purpose of the conference was to mobilize against the quincentennial celebration of Columbus Day, which was October 12th, 1992. They declared that day as International Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People.
(Wikipedia Entry)

I went to Columbus Circle today and spent a few hours taking pictures and video. Interestingly, the monument at the southwest entrance to Central Park facing Christopher Columbus is called the USS Maine National Monument. The USS Maine was a battleship constructed at the Brooklyn Navy Yards in 1888. The Maine spent her active career in the Caribbean between Key West and Cuba, to protect US interests. In 1898 an explosion aboard the Maine led to the death of 260 men. This explosion was the precipitating cause of the Spanish-American War. The exact cause of the explosion remains a mystery to this day.

Christopher Columbus' expedition to the Americas was funded by the great Catholic Monarchs, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas on October 12, 1492. October 12 in Spain is called Hispanic Day. In most of Latin America except for Venezuela, it is called Día de la Raza, or "day of the race." In Venezuela it is called Day of Indigenous Peoples' Resistance. Domestically, there is resistance to Columbus Day. In the state of South Dakota, Columbus Day is known official as Native American Day. Also, this past weekend the police arrested 80 protesters at a Columbus Day parade in Denver, Colorado. (AP Article) Colorado in 1905 became the first state to officially observe Columbus Day before it became a federal holiday.