I have another blog for Pittsburgh, nerdiness, and stuff that isn’t design thinking at flatline.net.

Teaching a class of mixed undergrad and graduate students is interesting.  I have undergrads who’ve only taken the pre-req (Intro to Phys Comp) and considering an IDeATe minor along side graduate students who have engineering or software backgrounds looking to learn more about making interactive things.

I think the biggest problem is that FB doesn’t have easy access to organized group discussion.  The events are ok, but the groups are basically a disaster when it comes to conversation over time.  Mailing lists, USENET groups, and conferences on private forums (like the well) are a great way to organize discussions on topics of interest.  These groups can have agreed upon rules, ranging from “no spoilers” to “no political discussion.”

One benefit of group conversations — I can avoid topics where I simply DGAS.  I can’t remember the last time where I’ve wanted to discuss sports with anyone, especially in a public place where every fan’s team is the best ballsporter or whatever.  So I don’t read those groups and I never have to see any words about fantasy teams or the sweet sixteen.

It works both ways, I do care quite a bit about politics and am involved at the local level.  I’m on several vintage motorcycle mailing lists and I’m pretty certain people on those lists have voted for Dotard, but politics has no place in a vintage bike discussion so it never comes up.  Same goes for gardening and cooking.  I like to do both, and I think I can have a civil discussion with someone who is a vegetarian or who has similar-but-different food allergies and have religion and politics only come up for curious reasons, not ranting/yelling matches.

So, back to words.  It’s been a year since I’ve had anything to say about design in a public space, but maybe I’ll give it another go.

I’m also doing some design work for my portfolio.   One is a software project for a x-y table interface to help people who need to crank out work and optimize time.  It’s almost feature complete for testing on the Lasersaur project, but I’ll probably redesign/recode every screen at least once before it hits Alpha.  That’s just how new software projects work, write what you think you should write, evaluate, then plan on writing most of it again now that you know what you want.

The other thing I’m doing is furniture and fixtures.   For decades I’ve used toolboxes for storage and it’s not so bad in the shop where I can hang walls of pegboard then store rarely used tools in a toolbox.  But in my studio where there is no room on the walls?  I’ve had a toolbox on my studio bench for 10 years and am constantly trying to find the right wrench or widget.  I made a rotating tool stand on a whim and it’s so damn useful I put it for sale on Etsy and made a demo video:

I’m doing that adult-thing where I finally clean out my closet from grade school, but unlike previous generations, I can just sell it all on eBay and maybe make some profit on collectible toys.  I did most of the Star Wars and Micronauts toys, now I’m going thru my GI Joe stuff and while researching prices, learning about the history of what was actually going on in the world when I was 10 years old.

GI Joe was a popular action figure in the cold war era then Vietnam happened.  At home, my dad spent most of my early years in MACV, Saigon, and hanging out with the Degar (Montagnard) people.  In the rest of the world, the draft, violent protests against the war, daily TV news coverage of the war, and Hasbro is stuck trying to figure out how to keep making money on GI Joe.  Before cancelling it entirely in 76 or 77 (and not bringing it back until the early 80s) Hasbro appears to have copied Fisher Price’s “Adventure People” and launched “Adventure Team.”  Two of the eight GI Joes are black (I suspect another was supposed to be Latino) and there are pages of new catalog accessories and outfits that were very much not about being a solider.  GI Joe isn’t just a soldier, he’s off hunting big game, rescuing people, and doing all sorts of not blowing up civilians and dropping napalm on the VC.

Check this catalog from 1975.  I have many of these toys going on eBay this week but I had no idea why they existed and no connection to their pop culture context.  The website has some layout/design problems, each of those “pages” is actually a topic and a link to a section of the catalog with a number of pages for that topic.  GI Joe wasn’t just a soldier, he was a “Radiation Detector,” “Smoke Jumper,” and “Emergency Rescue”(r).  Apparently grammar was hard in the 70s.

Today I found this article that pretty much says what I learned about the Germany military’s supplies in WWII is flat-out wrong.

Here’s the official history: the equipment issued to German soldiers during WWII was well designed, better engineered, and easier for them to maintain than our clunky Allied gear thrown together after we were ambushed by the Japanese.  The Germans had better machine guns, better tanks, better airplanes, better artillery (ok, so the 88 was a piece of genius), and we only beat them because, we’ll, we’re the good guys and fought for good things and maybe John Wayne.  Every tank battle was Shermans getting slaughtered by Tiger tanks, every hedgerow battle was a handful of Germans with machine guns against thousands of Allied soldiers with pointed sticks.

Changing a tread on a tank, a hot barrel on a machine gun, or dealing with gas masks was something done in every army during WWII, but the Germans must have had amazing skills to maintain their more complicated equipment.

Or maybe they didn’t.  They gave up and started using captured equipment that didn’t require all the maintenance.  The above article discusses the MG42 machine gun and the Tiger tank, amazing bits of machinery that turned out to be too expensive to support and use in combat.  Two iconic pieces of German design and engineering from the late 40s — the BMW motorcycle and the VW “Beetle” — were done after the war and for consumer markets.  The VW Beetle is more like a Sherman tank than a Tiger tank and the BMW motorcycle is very much a complete do-over of the bikes used by the German army.

Putting it in today’s context:  imagine going to work and waiting so long for the IT administrated Windows and OS X software to update before you can start work that you “borrow” something from the other side.  Maybe you buy a laptop and run Linux, Windows, or OS X and do your work there.  At some point your official machine is working, so you transfer your work over and continue your job.

There’s a lot of industrial design history out there that might need a similar revisit or even revision. How did we get to the IBM Selectric?  Why were the EO and Magic Link PDAs total failures while Palm cornered the market?

Ok, so I went over the word count limit but I also missed a year or so.

This is a port/cross-post of something I wrote for my friends on FB, but I want to share it with all the people I know and don’t know over on Twitter and on my blog.  This isn’t a pro/con XYZ topic, it’s about how I see the world as long complex conversations.  Because I see the world this way I really suck at not looking like an idiot on Twitter, forget not pissing off my friends in the process.

—cut here—

Over in the BBS and USENET worlds we had ideas like conferences, groups, and topic and discussion threads. Today I see a lot of “why don’t we discuss XYZ?!?” and I think, “but we do. There’s an XYZ conference and at least three or four ban/support XYZ topics in conferences like Current Events, Politics, and Today’s News. We’ve been talking about this weekly, if not daily, for the past 20-something years. Yes, some of us are tired of hearing the conversation on legalizing XYZ or making it a felony, but it’s there if you want to join.”

On Facebook there is no place where those sorted discussions happen, have a specific context, and are archived for future reading. I can’t easily say, “last year Bob and Alice had a big argument about this topic and did a bunch of research. If you start reading at Ban XYZ 2011 around post 37 you’ll see links to all the .gov sites that contain the stats.” Likewise, if I don’t care about professional sports, I can’t just unsubscribe from ProSportsTalk and have all that discussion removed from my feed.  Go talk about football or baseball, have fun, I just won’t wade through it all every day.

Over on Twitter the posts are so short that it’s hard to get past posting URLs, simple statements of fact, opinion, or belief. Hell, that sentence probably wouldn’t fit on Twitter, much less something like this with paragraphs and quotes and such. There’s going to be no real discussion on Twitter as a result, and long-winded people like me end up sounding like idiots more often than not by trying to take a post (like this) and sum it up in 140 characters or less. Which is also to say, I’ll go back to using Twitter to post URLs for the public and not much else.

Where this all really breaks down is that emotionally charged events, from politics to crime to natural disaster can be hard to actually discuss in these forums. Chris Rapier and Fawn Fitter both started some, well, adult conversations on Facebook, especially compared to what is impossible to easily filter out on Twitter and that I refer to as “yelling”. So if you draw a line from Twitter to Facebook then keep going you get to the sort of conversational forums that I’d like to see more of. Yes, there’s lots of topic-specific websites these days and I do use them, but I’m not personally friends with people on those forums as I am on Facebook.

This lack of discussion context makes it hard to be relaxed about some classifications of posts, especially on various sides of a topic. On a more complex conferencing system than Facebook or Twitter, if XYZ is a crazy new diet we can make jokes about it over in the DarkHumor area and have a serious discussion about nutrition over in HealthEating.  In the same way, there’s no  conveient regional topics on Facebook  for all of your favorite local restaurants there that I can avoid until a few days before my next visit to your town when I want to scope out where I’m going to eat.  Right now I probably don’t care very much about the best seafood where you live, but a week before I visit I want a core dump of restaurant info.

Or do I get a non-Apple laptop? I do more and more design work that would be easier if I could get to 3d apps on Windows, Visio, and other business-related apps. My Big Desktop Machine at home had always been some sort of UNIX workstation, transferring my data to a Big Apple Desktop worked nicely when OSX was released. I won’t lose any Mac licenses if I go to a Thinkpad, I can just transfer them to my other Mac and continue to use CS5, Omni tools, etc.

After a lot of looking and testing I ended up with a loaded Thinkpad XT220 — a laptop that can convert to a touch screen tablet. I spent twice what I’d have spent on a MacBook, but I think I came out ahead on the cost/features rule. Not only do I have a touchscreen laptop (that uses a stylus or finger), I have a dock with a DVD burner and a ton of extra ports, an external battery pack that gives me 9 hours of work time, wireless networking via mobile phone SIM, and a bunch of other features I’ve barely touched. (First app I purchased? VMWare so I could run an Ubuntu VM alongside Win7.)

What hit me during the transition and moving all my data (and life?) from MacBook to Thinkpad was not “Apple sucks” or “I love IBM” but “I needed and still need more change in my life”.

I still use Thunderbird and Firefox, but I’ve had to change a lot of my other daily apps. New address book, new calendar, new RSS feed reader, some new dev tools, new screen managers, new AIM client, and a lot of other little things.

Each of those “little” things brought change with it, and each change gave me a chance to step back and look at how I’d let Apple control my work environment. Sure, iCal was “free”, but like other “free” apps it cut into the Apple development market. Over in Windows land there are a lot more choices (that usually require a purchase) but I have more say in what I install and use on my laptop. Sure, there’s a lot of crap products out there but there’s also a wide range of 3d modeling, engineering, and other software that just isn’t making it to the Mac. Rhino 5 is going to be great for OSX users, but that’s only one of several high-end, high-performance modeling packages.

Even simple is not simple. I had to change over my RSS feeds and for the first time since we have had RSS feeds there was a chance to re-organize them. I deleted dozens of dead/zombie feeds that haven’t been touched in years and took the feeds I read and sorted them in a relatively different manner than before. NetNewsWire is still my favorite Mac app, but on Windows I had to find a substitute (picked FeedDemon). Moving to that substitute meant new models for reading, ordering, sorting, and finding my RSS news.

Calendar life also changed. I don’t know when this happened but Outlook really got cleaned up for solo/non-business use. It’s not the rathole I’m used to having at the paid office, it syncs with my phone and google and everything else.

Then there’s the new features that I’m still getting used to, like logging in with a fingerprint, real wireless networking with a mobile phone company, 6-9 hours of battery life, and something I’ll write about soon, way more buttons than any laptop needs to have.

— How EL-wire works
— How to solder the wire and assemble controllers
— Using EL-wire in clothing, signage and other projects
— Safety and design considerations

Each student will receive a starter kit with 2 meters of wire, an EL-wire controller, batteries and additional components. Additional lengths of EL-wire in a variety of colors will be available for purchase at the class.

More details, pictures, and video are on Hack Pittsburgh’s web site.

“Game on”, as they say.

A sea change at work has made me remember it’s good to get off the ship while it’s in the harbor and I did. I’m still going to look around for a nice gig at someone else’s firm, but while I’m doing that I’m also going to be putting pencil to paper, soldering, printing, lasering, and welding.

What makes me feel good about this is how quickly some work has shown up. It’s not a for-a-living level of work, but it will be great additions to my portfolio and CV, and lead to more work.

For you digifab types, I’m also cranking up my lasersaur, reprap/makerbot, and general digifab hacking at the nerd blog.

However, after bonking my head in the basement I also found the latest Jameco catalog, and something about it just isn’t right.

sigh.

The goal here is to chart out all the possibilities in an attempt to get people thinking about tactile/haptic feedback from some new angles. Honestly, if I see one more tactor-anything I’m going to hit with a hammer. Enough with the pager motors already! We have 5 senses (arguably 20-something), let’s use more of them.

Starting out, I’m using a simple tree: person -> body part -> sense

person->finger->pressure (sensitive)
person->finger->temperature (sensitive)
person->arm->elbow->temperature (normal)
person->leg->foot->sole->pressure (weight)

So, two questions:

1) Has someone already done a good job of this and I simply haven’t found it yet?

2) Is there a preferred format for this sort of thing that’s easy to mail around and text edit?

(p.s. Yes it’s arguably a folk taxonomy but I’m in no mood for pedantry.)

I discovered this while getting ready to assemble my Mk.7 Stepstruder and realized I could print another pair out faster than I could dig through the entire house looking for the first set I printed.

Which makes me wonder — why can’t I do this when I can’t find the cap for my pen or some random generic plastic part for a battery pack? If it’s easier to print one out than find it, what happens when I find the one that I lost? Toss the one I printed in the Imaginary ABS Recycling Bin?

In 15 words or less, complete this sentence: “I want to be a designer because…”

“they solve problems, and I want to teach other people how to solve their problems.”