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

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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.)

 

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.

 

Ideas to share in class today

Pre-thesis concept
The Tools Around Us
An examination of popular, available, and accessible technologies that can be used tactically to effect social change.

Related concepts

• psychogeography
• art and public art
• urban space, public space, the difference between the two
• street theater
• parks, statues and monuments
• The 1871 Paris Commune
• The inversion of the public and private in terms of what is valuable to society (Benjamin Barber talk, “Agency and Art in a Hyper-Consumerist Culture”)
• The Chicago School, Free Market economics, and Milton Friedman

Statues in New York

According to the NYC Parks Department, there are an estimated 1,200 monuments, about which 300 are sculptures. The Parks Department has a searchable database of all the permanent art and monuments in the city parks. Searching the keyword “columbus” will return 10 results.

Questions on my mind right now

How public is art? How much do citizens own public art? When does a sculpture or monument cease being art? How much are we responsible for it? Can popular will change public art? Can we change the meaning of it and how?

Terms that are popping into my head, they will need defining if definitions do not already exist:

• Statue modification, statue improvement, statue transfiguration, statue transmogrification
• Monument correction
• Psychogeographic disorder (applies to locations perhaps?)
• Psychogeographic therapy (therapy applied to locations that syffer from psychogeographic disorder)

Does Columbus Circle suffer from psychogeographic disorder? Does it need psychogeographic therapy?

 

Redial Week 3 Homework

I have created a find me, follow me application in my dialplan. You can try it out by calling the ITP Asterisk number then enter my extension (#221.) Basically, I used a lot of GoToIfTime commands to route your call in an attempt to find me. It works like so:

• If you call me when I’m in class, it will send you to a voicemail box with a greeting telling you that I am in class, leave a message.
• If you call when I am working in the equipment room, it will ring the phone in the equipment room.
• If you call between the hours of 10 PM and 4 AM every day, it will send you to a special “Tim After Hours” voicemail. (wink, wink)
• Calling all other times will route the call to my mobile phone.