For this assignment, we were to read two readings and comment on three passages from them. The readings were:

1. Culture + Technology – Jennifer Daryl Slack & Macgregor Wise
2. Values and Valuing – Adapted from Carl Mitcham, ed., Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics

The first passage is the following:

We are persuaded by progress because we are persuaded by the logic (logos) of the argument that it is better to be efficient, rational, and scientific. We are also persuaded by the logic and ethic (ethos) of the argument of evolution (we trust science and scientists) that progress is inevitable, And finally. we are persuaded by the deeply emotional argument (pathos) of the sublime; persuaded by our own feelings of fear, awe, and expectation.

What I am interested in within this passage has little to do with logos and ethos and most to do with pathos or the sublime. I feel as though humans inherently have addictive personalities. I think that this is an addiction to the sublime. At a point in time, we changed from a species of hunter / gatherers (which metaphorically, all other species on earth are) to a species that would take control our their destiny through creation. As creators it is seen that we were taking the role of god (whatever your interpretation of that is), and god is something that has never truly been understood (if it were, I don’t believe that there would be religious wars). Thus, there is a sense of fear in that we have never actually understood the repercussions of our creative mind.

Despite the fear associated with creative developments, and despite the reasoning behind them (survival, utopia, progress) we have always maintained a tendency to create. I feel as though this tendency is an addiction. As if the apple on the tree of knowledge was laced with something that we cannot let go of, and if it will lead us to the demise of humanity, we will continue to create until that time. Not that it will, but I just feel as though our addiction is that strong.

I don’t feel as though this addiction should be seen as a negative aspect of humanity. I also don’t feel that all people are addicted in the same way. The things that we make can substitute the feelings of sublime, for example cigarettes give a feeling of fear (the may harm us), awe (they enhance a moment by altering your sensory perception of that moment), and expectation (the result of smoking may be harmful, but it may not, you won’t know until it does or you die). Thus, people feel vicariously sublime through the objects that we create.

I would agree that the persuasion of progress in it’s current state is as Slack & Wise put it, but I feel as though the sublime is stronger than we are lead to believe. The logos and ethos may change, but the pathos will not.

Second:

Langdon Winner explains that technological determinism is a belief that depends on two hypotheses:

1. that belief that the technical base of a society is the fundamental condition affecting all patterns of social existence and
2. that belief that technological change is the single most important source of change in society.

1. Our only true understanding of anything is through a moment. Anything beyond the current moment is modelled though our perception or our memory. The moment is a multiplication of sensory experience, pragmatic rationalization, and historical referencing. At no point in time have we been able to recreate this experience for a moment that is not the current one. Thus, we don’t truly understand the past.
2. History is communicated through an event based narrative. It reinforces the notion of linear causality, and though we can rationalize it pragmatically, we cannot understand it. We can make attempts to re-create it so that we have have better visual references to make sense of it, but we still cannot experience it.
3. The further that you move away from the current moment, the further or more different the experience would be. Thus, the farther back in time that we think about, the less we can understand.
4. Our social existence has been documented upon the technical base of society, beyond that even our rational is speculation about how that moment would feel.

Third:

If technology is conceived as a matter of control and dependence, of Master and Slave, it is set apart from human culture, treated as autonomous, then either blamed or praised. Either we have control over technology, or it has control over us; the effects in either case can be conceived as either worthy of praise or blame.

Throughout history, I really wonder if this conundrum has been so prevalent as it is now. When new tools were more explicitly beneficial, did people still blame them? For example, when the carriage was invented and people discovered that they could carry much more and much faster than ever before, did they dispute it and say that they liked walking with a heavy load? Did they blame it for taking away the pace that they were so used to or was it embraced as a welcome alternative to the ways that they were used to?

To me, it seems that this invention would be hard to blame, but it is hard for me to understand their experience. But, on the chance that the notion of blame did not always exist, I wonder if it something that is increasing. The blame and praise of our inventions is possibly an artifact of the intent that is put into them. For many reasons, we make things for betterment, but for many other reasons we make them for other reasons. The other reasons often have more to do with ego and self than betterment of their environment. I sure hope that we can achieve a level of culture that create things only for betterment, and in which the things that we create are considerate to every aspect of their environment.

That sounds like a long road, and I am sure it won’t be bricked with gold.

Task: Find 5 examples of products that appeal to you from a design perspective and post images and descriptions of them. Discuss the elements that make them appealing to you. Be specific.

* You will notice that there seems to be an error with the numbering of these items. Don’t worry, despite what it says, I assure you that there are 5.

1. Powers of Ten (Picture above) – In an attempt to pick an Eames product to showcase, I found difficulty in choosing from the amazing array of icon items that they have designed. One of my favorites, though, is this short film that they produced for IBM. Not only do I appreciate the aesthetic qualities of their films, but this film in particular has a very interesting underlining meaning. I interpret it as an attempt to define infinity, which we have a very difficult time understanding. Watch the video here.

1. Apple Mac Pro – “Meet Mac Pro. It’s the fastest Mac ever with advanced 8-core performance, workstation graphics, and millions of possible configurations.” – Apple.com

In my eyes, this is the greatest 20th century computer. It is thoughtfully designed on the exterior and interior. In an age where most computers were made to become obsolete within a few years, this design has existed for 7 years and continues to be produced. The paradigm of computer is fast changing, but as a desktop computer created at the time that it was, this computer seems to be near perfect.

1. 10,000 Year Clock – “The idea to build a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long-term thinking came from computer scientist Danny Hillis and was published in the form of an email to friends. Later it was followed up with an essay published in the 01995 Wired magazine “Scenarios” issue. Danny reasoned that by actually building a remote monument, the discussions around long-term thinking would be far more focused and it would lend itself to good storytelling and myth — two key requirements of anything lasting a long time.” - Long Now Foundation

I really love the concept and the delivery of this idea. There are few things these days that promote longevity, and this does so in a very natural and poetic way. More information can be seen here: http://longnow.org/clock/

1. Theo Jansen’s Kinetic Sculptures – “Since 1990 I have been occupied creating new forms of life. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don’t have to eat. Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storms and water and eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.” – Theo Jansen

Along somewhat of the same lines as the previous item, these sculptures are also very beautiful and very poetic. They are very intricate, calculated, and mechanical, but the movement is so well engineered, that it is very fluid and organic. They are a great example of how are creations, despite their perceived complexity, are the most basic of objects in comparison to nature.

1. Shure SM58 - “The Shure SM58 is a professional cardioid dynamic microphone, commonly used in live vocal applications. It has built an enviable reputation among musicians for its robust construction and technical performance, and is considered the industry standard for live performance microphones.Introduced in 1966, the SM58 remains one of the best selling microphones in the world today. The SM stands for Studio Microphone.” Wikipedia

Though this product is not often thought about as a beautifully designed item, it’s reputation is still quite impressive. As mentioned in Wikipedia, this microphone has been selling for close to 50 years. In that time there have been many technological advances, yet this microphone has continued to improve it’s presence as the industry standard.

I will be taking a course on speculative design in which one required element is blog posts. Since the content of the course is somewhat inline to what has been posted on intwo in the past, I will be updating intwo with the required posts for the class. As always, discussion is very welcome, we would love to hear what you have to think about the material posted.

Grids are a designers best friend. Trusting, working with, and breaking the grid are all things that you should be familiar with if you are doing communication design. In most graphics programs it is easy to set this up and there are many different ways to do it. When working with the web, though, there are not as many commonly known tools to achieve the pixel perfect results that you want.

There are increasingly more frameworks sprouting up that give you flexibility to work with a solid, cross browser grid with ease. For a lot of these you can find Photoshop, OmniGraffle, or Illustrator templates that will allow you to design with the grid that you will be working with. Once finished the design process, though, I am not aware of anything to guide you through the rest of the development.

Last week I went on a search and found a few resources to create a grid overlay in your browser. I found this, this, and this. What I found to be the most flexible, though, was Allan Jardine’s ‘Grid’ bookmarklet. It grabs a little widget that overlays on top of the site that you are viewing and allows you to structure a grid on top of it with whatever parameters you want. I thought that it might be a pretty useful tool, but still didn’t necessarily help me as I like to edit my CSS in cssEdit and it doesn’t have the option to use bookmarklets.

To circumvent that minor problem I did the following:

1. Added a “Grid” button in my header file:
   <a id="grid_overlay" href="#">GRID</a>
2. Styled it to be out of the way:
   a#grid_overlay {
   color: #252525;
   text-decoration: none;
   position: absolute;
   padding: 5px;
   top: 0px;
   left: 0px;
   }
   
   a#grid_overlay:hover{
   background-color: #33ffcc;
   color: #fff;
   }
3. Used jQuery to select the button, and ran Allan Jardine’s bookmarklet code.
   function fnStartGrid(sUrl) {
   var nScript = document.createElement('script');nScript.setAttribute('language','JavaScript');nScript.setAttribute('src',sUrl);document.body.appendChild(nScript);
   }
   
   $('#grid_overlay').click(function(){
   fnStartGrid('http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/design/grid/media/js/grid-loader.js');
   return false;
   });

The one obvious downfall to this is that it has to pull code from his server, and therefore you need an internet connection to use it, but it has been helpful to me, so I thought that I would share.

Good Magazine has some of the best, most relevant content on the internet right now, and their videos often feature simple and intuitive information visualization.

Chris Neidl of Solar One is running a campaign called “I heart PV“. Inspired by science museum exhibits, they have built a prototype device designed to attract people on streets in high-traffic areas. It’s a cell phone charging station with a “preciousness” to it.

The goal of the campaign is to make New York City the Solar Power capital of the East Coast. One big problem that energy companies have to solve is maintaining capacity during peak hours – when the sun is out and everyone is running their AC. PV to grid technology alleviates just that problem, by boosting capacity during just those times of the day.

There are pictures on Flickr of the construction of the PV charging station.

Watch the video in high quality here.

New Scientist writes about a patent filed by George Stetten, utilizing a miniature camera in conjunction with machine vision (algorithmic pattern recognition), to provide clues about the environment to partially or fully blind people. Spotting an obstacle, the fingertip-mounted device would give tactile feedback (vibration) to guide the user around it. It could also help the user locate switches and controls.

I think a new age is dawning for sensorially challenged people. In 2004, I worked together with an international group of designers to build a wearable device that deprived its’ user of her visual sense, and replaced it with auditory feedback. It was an experiment in pseudo-synaesthesia, but the technique could easily be applied to empower visually impaired people.

I visited the Austin Makerfaire this weekend. One day (with a late start) was not nearly enough to experience everything, or to participate in any workshops that were going on all around, but I did get a good idea of the makings and craftings going on around the U.S. and the world. Below, I’ve listed the people and projects that inspired me the most.

MIT FabLabs (article, video) are labs that make available to the public d-i-y fabrication of atoms from bits. Nublabs, a Cambridge, MA brainchild of three MIT students and alumni, is an independent effort to use the fablab model to empower the local community and “solve socially significant problems”. By hosting lecture series and afterschool programs, nublabs hope to spread the spirit of do-it-yourselfness to people and grow a small army of socially responsible crazy inventors. I wish these people the best, and hope to see something similar start up in Austin soon!

In terms of sustainable design, a couple of solar-energy companies were present. Sustainable Waves brought their fire truck converted into a stage powered (at least partly) by solar power. Austin EV and ACE Technologies were showing off Electric Vehicle conversions, and Austin Sun and Wind had solar panels on display.

Instructables.com had a table at the faire where they promoted their DIY Halloween Contest – anyone can enter with a project from one of many categories. Examples are “hack-o-lantern”, “green halloween” (scarily repurposed items), “gizmos that go zZapp”, and “scary food”. Enter by November 9th!

There was a lot of craft-related exhibitors as well. Brandy Davis of Pigseyart makes journals out of vintage books, and she will custom-make journals from books you send to her. She makes sure to keep a few pages of the old book in the journal. Some of the pulp sci-fi journals made me want to read the whole book!

Maker Store was selling DIY-kits for Make Magazine projects, and inventor Mitch Altman’s TV-B-Gone and Brain Machine. There was a workshop area where you got help putting the kits together by soldering parts and programming microcontrollers. This is an awesome idea, both in terms of business and getting people started with DIY electronics. Where do I sign up to be an instructor?

I do have some critique to offer for the event organizers. While new subscribers to Make or Craft Magazine received a free day pass, no discount was offered to current subscribers. It was hard for me and my wife (both subscribers) to afford coming in even for a day ($25 each), and we felt bummed that our support for the magazines wasn’t recognized. It doesn’t make sense to hunt for new customers while ignoring your existing ones. Come on, O’Reilly!

The branding inside the event was consistent. Each exhibitor had a standardized MAKER sign with a picture, description, and a weblink. There was also a lot of workshop-type booths where you could make something – a kite, a lunch bag, or blinking clothing, for example. What I found lacking was clear signage of WHAT you could make, INSTRUCTIONS how to make it, where to START, and WHO you could ask for help. (Some of) the volunteers helping out at the various stations did little to engage the crowd. Perhaps this was because we visited the faire late the second day, but I believe that this great part of the event (actually making stuff) could be made even better by just a few simple measures.

I want to make sure that the time I spend reading other people’s ideas is well spent. How do I make sure of this? Well, the one thing that I have, and that no one can take away from me, is AGENCY. If I do not act on new ideas that enter my mind, I deny my own humanity. The purpose of being human is to act, to make small changes in our collective history of the Earth.

What is ACTION? It can be something simple that you never show someone else. Draw a doodly picture, hum a made up song. But the most powerful actions are those that communicate ideas to other human beings, with the potential to change the way someone thinks.

I confess that I am afraid of laying my mind out in the open. I even have trouble making up my own mind on issues. It’s a result of being an extreme relativist, that every point of view can change given a different vantage point. But this is the heart of ACTION: collect the evidence, make up your mind, take a stance, and make it happen! Have the confidence to stand up behind an idea, then take the action to advance it. Evolution is life. Stasis is death. You have been given the power to act. Embrace ACTION.

What inspires you to take action?

It was probably two years ago that I stumbled across Folkert Gorter. I found him because I liked the work that he did, but I bookmarked his site for another reason. One of the sites in his body of work was named SpaceCollective. I clicked on the link and found a glowing orb with the words “Coming Soon”. When I provoked the orb with my mouse it subtly changed to reveal a log in form. I thought that this was quite peculiar.

It is not that often that you find something on the internet that has been created (or partially created) by a very talented professional, with a very distinguishable, thought provoking name, and a log in form with no explanation. I even asked Google, but no help. There have been a few times in the past two years that I have re-visited the orb, checking to see if there was any progress. But all visit came up to be a disappointment. The SpaceCollective had disappointed me, that is, until today.

Following a link from Smashing Magazine, I once again was acquainted with the SpaceCollective, only this time no to be disappointed:

SpaceCollective. Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Things used to be easy and unambiguous. You found advertisements in magazines and on billboards, art in galleries and museums, and people expressing themselves by means of graffiti and defacing of private/public property was thought of as a nuisance by most. This is an oversimplification, but bear with me.

Over the years, as the urban environment got denser, it also got more cluttered with ads, and street art took on a new poignancy and presence. Today, anyone in an urban environment is subjected to thousands of commercial advertisements, but also non-commercial messages per day.

Clearly, this constant stream of information desensitizes people to messages, and it’s getting increasingly harder to catch anyone’s attention. To do so, in fact, means that advertisers need to break out of the very pattern they are helping to create. The holy grail of advertising is to cause passers-by to do a double-take. This can be accomplished by creating alien interjections in the urban web, somethings that doesn’t fit in, that stands out semiotically.

Weburbanist has a great article series on what’s sometimes referred to as Guerilla Marketing. Read more at these links:

• Guerrilla Marketing 1: History of Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 2: Origins and Evolution of Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 3: Major Corporations Go for Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 4: Guerrilla Marketing versus Viral Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 5: Guerrilla Marketing for Good Causes
• Guerrilla Marketing 6: 10 Types of Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Marketing 7: Is Guerrilla Marketing Right for You?
• Guerrilla Marketing 8: The Future of Guerrilla Marketing
• Guerrilla Art Versus Guerrilla Advertising: What’s the Difference?
• Creative Guerilla Marketing Campaigns

An example of guerilla art: Recently, Graffiti Research Lab and the Anti-Advertisement Agency teamed up to subvert big-screen-TV ads at NYC subway stations. By putting a laser-cut foam stencil over the still-running TV screen, they transformed the commercial messages into a luminescent projection of their own propaganda. The idea of a backlit street medium was originally concieved by Ji Lee as abstractor.tv.

With this adbusting-campaign, called Light Criticism, AAA and GRL are postulating that “the real graffiti problem” (read: the real public space nuisance, uglifier of the urban landscape, and medium of stupifying propaganda) is commercial advertising, not street art.

Higher-quality .mov video at AAA