Make It - Major Studio 2
Make It is an intervention into the typical purchasing habits of Americans, in this case the control group was half of my Studio classmates.
See a more in-depth description of the project in my previous post here.
Make It: an Intervention - Major Studio 2
ABSTRACT
The reality of being a person in the world, in as much as you are reading this brief in a developed country in a large thriving and affluent city, is that you cannot pull yourself out of a system wherein the things you buy are made by people from far-flung areas of the world without taking some fairly drastic measures. These things, these objects, are then brought to you over the long distance. You will never really know what materials and physical work went into these things you buy. This system of shipping and selling goods across vast distances to a huge variety of people, though not new, is new in it’s large-ness and disconnect.
My project aims to bring awareness to this complex system. I will create a platform that invites people to ask me to make something for them that they were going to buy at a store. I will then document to process of making the thing and compare it to the original thing and the costs and systems and implications of that original thing.
The research and the making together will make this project more tangible and lend an element of alchemy to an equally unseen process. The interaction between myself as the maker and the buyer will be analyzed and mined for insight.
AUDIENCE
The audience is any member of a society where most members generally have the expendable income to select preferred brands of any general sundry in a store at will.
PRECEDENTS
Miranda July “Learning to Love You More”
Keetra Deen Dixon’s body of work
Stephanie Rothenberg “Invisible Threads”
Francis Alÿs “When Faith Moves Mountains”
"Hertzian Tales" by Anthony Dunne - Major Studio 2
From the foreword of the 1999 edition: Dunne believes that “the most difficult challenges for designers of electronic objects now lie not in technical and semiotic functionality, where optimal levels of performance are already attainable, but in the realms of metaphysics, poetry, and aesthetics, where little research has been carried out.” “[D]esigners have not exploited the aesthetic dimension of new materials with the same energy that engineers have exploited their functional possibilities.”
These two quotes indicate the point at which we find ourselves: efficient beyond our IT department’s wildest 90’s dreams, responding to emails from our moms before the ping is finished ringing out from our smartphones. But designers have never really moved beyond the position of placing the technologic guts into containers, creating “semiotic skins for incomprehensible technologies.” The narrative of consumption has not yet changed. The existence of skeuomorphs is a great example of that. Why does a computer calendar have to look anything like a physical paper calendar? Aren’t we all beyond needed those physical forms to teach us how to use things? Or rather, if the digital model deviates even slightly from the real thing then we are left confounded when a new and useful but still calendrical version would have prompted us to expect new things and learn new a better uses for the form. To relate this to Jaimer’s point, we are plugging brand new exciting things into systems that were designed, in the case of the calendar, thousands of years ago. How can that be anything but a limitation on the functional possibilities? Letter writing, files and calendars were produced with the technology of their time. Not to mention the loss of intimacy in using office equipment for familiar communication is another place where a system of human love and connection is having a feeble and crude tool to facilitate that communication. video chatting as opposed to emailing is a start. but the typical placement of the camera and the screen make it impossible to make eye contact with the other person, one of the biggest benefits of speaking and communicating in person.
"Program or be Programmed" by Douglas Rushkoff - Major Studio 2
"In the long term, if we take up this challenge [of programming], we are looking at nothing less than the conscious, collective intervention of human beings in their own evolution. It’s the opportunity of a civilization’s lifetime. Shouldn’t more of us want to participate actively in this project?" Douglas Rushkoff has managed to articulate my own thoughts on the state of our networked world and has managed to metabolize several thinkers on the topic in an amazingly succinct way (Lanier, Postman etc). I found myself nodding in agreement most of the way through this short and sweet book. Writing ABOUT this book is challenging because Rushkoff's ideas are so dead-on that I'm in danger of simply quoting the entire book.
In the discussion in class someone, probably Dave Carroll, said that being critical about AND with technology is our main duty. I agree, and have agreed for years before I knew I agreed. Working in a corporate software and hardware technology environment for the last 6 year I was surrounded by people jumping into apps, analyzing and bitching about software update this or that. I was never fully engaged in those conversations as I had the distinct feeling that we didn't have the right to complain. That if we were so smart and wanted these magical toys to work the way we wanted them to we should be more involved. But I didn't know how easy that could be.
Then there is the anxiety. The knowledge that we constantly could and should be doing new and different things, wrapping up email conversations, posting new stuff, feeding the insatiable time suck of web correspondence. To paraphrase Rushkoff's first chapter on time: an anxiety sinks in because the computers are waiting for me to do something, we are never NOT connected.
My particular generation are strange middle children in all this change. I wrote some papers in school by hand, some were researched entirely online, all within two or three years of still being in grade school. I asked out a first date on IM, yet I refused to get a mySpace page until it majorly jumped the shark. Perhaps it is this broad scope of experience that has let me see two things clearly: I am more than my "likes" and I am responsible for everything I say and do in every sphere of public life, including the web. Identity is important on the web because there are social constraints that are more likely to be followed when people can connect an identity to the person saying things. But even I have been slow to reveal my real name, and things like spokeo.com are not helping to push me forward in that realm. Not because I am ashamed of what I do and say but because there are other people writing the rules about what can be done with that information. Which leads me to conclude that learning how to control these powerful tools is the most important thing I could learn, and I have known that for a long time but it took reading Rushkoff's book to articulate it. We have to grab our own destiny and not fall one step behind every great media innovation. If we do that, things like PIPA and SOPA would never be proposed because those with the power to do so would have no doubt that a rule so blunt and stupid would never work on us programmers. Perhaps they wouldn't even be the ones in power but we, the programmers, would.
7 in 7 Data Visualization - Major Studio 2
SOFT SCIENCE - A DATA VISUALIZATION
7IN7 1 - book scans that included images
7IN7 2 - books by relative size
7IN7 3 - how often I stuck with my algorithm
7IN7 4 - number salad
7IN7 5 - book topics, outliers excluded
7IN7 6 - relative amounts gained, as perceived by me
7IN7 7 - Numbers tell a story
For more information on the process and the inspiration see the previous post.
7 in 7 - Major Studio 2
A Process for Neither Haste nor Waste
"Devise a repeatable algorithm to find 7 items in the Gimbel Library (or Constoria library). Clearly document the algorithm, how artifacts were selected and the content documentation of the artifact itself. A project shall emerge by the 7th day from pure inspiration. Any combination of artifacts may be used towards the resulting project."
Haste nor Waste Why the title? Because I ponder, and fuss, and pick too much so this project will be firstly about speed. Not haste. Haste means something done without thought. I would like to constrain my thought to manageable increments so that excuses have no time to arise.
DAY 1
My first day at the library I immediately saw six research guides for each of the main topics displayed in colorful paper right at the library entrance. These would be my touchstones for the first 6 days. I will pick a book from one of the call numbers from each of the 6 sheets and then a random 7th artifact of my choosing. By the sixth day I will have learnt the layout of the library well enough that I will challenge myself to choose the 6 subjects and the 7th random without the aid of the research guides. The choosing of artifacts today will be done by listening to the 7th song on a random album in my iPod. once the song is 1:17 seconds in (77 sec) I will stop and choose a book from that section and call number. The book must have a 7 somewhere in the call number.
Once I have selected the books, I will choose seven illustrations/images/designs/paintings etc from each book and scan them.
That is all I can think of for the algorithm for now. I am allowing myself to change the mechanics of the search once a day though not necessarily every day of the 6 days. This will help to encourage fresh thought and trump any redundancies that might occur in the search algorithm.
DAY 2 Today I arrived at the library and had the impulse to find the 7 smallest books I could from each section of the library. Within each tiny book I endeavored to find the smallest image. Sometimes that smallest image wasn't that interesting so I opted for small but more interesting. It was really delightful to find all these tiny books. Tiny books tend to be very focused on their subject. The little-ness also helped me to keep from pondering too much, there was always an obvious choice even if it wasn't the most exciting one.
DAY 3 Today I arrived and decided that I would search for 6 books based on the research guides and a 7th totally random using the constraint of the name of the author or the title had to start with an F (F is the seventh letter of the alphabet). I would then scan the 7th and 77th (and if applicable, the 777th) page of each book. This yielded some interesting results but made the selection of the images a little excruciating since I had no choice in the matter of what was depicted on the 7th and 77th pages of each book.
DAY 4 Today I made an amazing discovery: there are 5 more research guides to choose from with whole sections of the library yet to explore!
So I took to mixing and matching and decided to go by color, taking all warm-toned research guides and finding books from those respective sections that matched those colors and then furthering the algorithm by choosing a photo from inside the book that matched the cover color. I'm pretty pleased with the results. At this point I've abandoned the original search algorithm almost completely in favor adding further randomizing complexity by making a new agolrithm each day. The constants so far have been: 7 books, 6 based on research guide sections, the last a totally unrelated choice.
DAY 5
It's Super Bowl Sunday and I'm planning on celebrating like every good American: eating a lot of meat at a friends house. But first the algorithm. I've brought Nick along and I think I'm going to ask him to compose the strategy for today's selections.
At first I waited, not knowing how he was making his selections. He came back with 7 books, all with covers featuring red and blue prominently, the colors of both teams playing in the super bowl tonight.
Then we headed up and started scanning, with him marking a page quickly and handing it to me. I also marked a page that I selected almost at random, with some quality control to be sure there was image content on the page. Only after a few scans did I realize that Nick had chosen the 77th pages of every book. I was more than pleased with results.
DAY 6 - the last day in the library
Today I arrived at the library wanting build on the loose algorithms I've been developing. Today was all white, or as much white a cover as possible from every aisle until I had 6 appropriate books and the 7th i chose from the Design And Technology section of the stacks in honor of my program. Then I began searching for images within the books that had as much white space as I could find.
Domain Map - Major Studio 2
First started with some post-its I borrowed from Dan. If they were touching I considered the topics and skills related in some way. The singular connection options of a traditional Venn diagram were not flexible enough for me and it took me a while to generate a new variation that conveyed the same connections I had made in this draft.
I was very pleased with the final version on the left. The squares' shapes and proximity to each other within the larger concept squares managed to begin to convey how I feel these ideas are related to each other.
domain map draft