Things are moving pretty fast lately on our corner of E. Passyunk and Federal. Apostrophe is rolling along at a full clip and we have all sorts of other exciting projects we’re in the midst of. Olivia Rabe recently joined the team to work closely with our clients on issues of content strategy and Apostrophe support. We’re even beginning to expand our studio space into the adjacent building.
If this sounds at all interesting to you, the best news is that you might be able to help us fill some of our new space: We’re looking to make another addition to the team so we can continue to build these amazing applications and still go home on time. Right now we are looking for a new developer, somebody who would assist in the creation of new Apostrophe features and collaborate on development of products for our clients.
If you think you might be the right fit, or know someone who is, read on after the cut. (more…)
As the news began to spread of the Red River’s record-setting crest level, the first order of the day was to help get the word out to as many as possible. This was especially true in Fargo, North Dakota’s most populous city, with 92,000 residents living in the vicinity of the Red River.
Thankfully, these platforms are relatively easy to use, and becoming familiar with them is like adding a bazooka to your already powerful arsenal of tools. The maps and mashups you create with them become tips of a massive, contextual, data iceberg. Naturally, we want you to become familiar with these tools. You will be working to create a map that can be used as part of the Farm Philly project.
Today, Rick will also be working with you to continue the customization of the Farm Philly site. The design and templates should be up to snuff by next week.
COMMENT
With the Google Lat Long Blog as a starting point, go find a mapping project that really inspires you. Write a short post about it on your personal blog.
CREATE
Use Google Maps to create a map that demonstrates a part of the food production and distribution system. Show us how something is broken and inefficient or demonstrate a sustainable system. Consider how you use lines and icons to visualize your data. Embed your map on your personal blog. In class next week we will choose a map or a group of maps to be featured on the Farm Philly site.
Continue to post in your sections on the Farm Philly site. You should have documented all of your groups’ progress to date by the next class.
Today we will be reviewing and critiquing videos from last week’s assignment. Looking forward to seeing some good stuff.
With this class we are going to move towards the end of the semester, setting the groundwork for your final project. Now that you have established some familiarity with these tools and techniques, we want you to begin to think strategically about how they could be used together for a specific project. You will ultimately be coming together to form groups around the Urban Farming project you are already working on together. Your task will be to document and promote, to get feedback and build community, to gather interest around this larger project. Think about which tools will be best for the job, and how they can be used together most effectively. Think about where it makes sense to create new accounts/identities/profiles specifically for your project.
When it comes to the topic of identity, you should be considering about how your individual identities can come together harmoniously to create a group culture and group identity. Your project should have a personality of its own. We will assist you in creating a custom blog template to provide a unique visual design for your publishing platform.
Each student will have an account to publish their individual contributions. Categories will divide the blog into the six subtopics of your Urban Farming project (grey water, hydroponics, green building blocks, shipping containers, community graphics, and the food cart). You will operate closely with your subtopic group to create and publish content. We will refine the details and deliverables as we go.
Week 8
WATCH:
We will watch the Hillman Curtis Pentagram video above in class.
CHECK OUT:
Modernista’s web presence. They are a creative firm leveraging ubiquitous internet tools without a central website. Consider this as you upload photos to Flickr, videos to your video accounts, etc.
STRATEGIZE:
Break into your six groups and begin thinking about documentation of your projects. Create Flickr groups, determine a set of tags, think about the design of the project site as a class. We can begin the design together. Next week we can help you set up a hosted Wordpress with a custom domain.
Today will be a day to go over everybody’s instructables project documentation and to reflect back on the first half of the semester. We will be meeting individually with you for the second half of the class period. We are also going to give noogies to Jared Delorenzo, Tim Peet, and Tom Reynolds for doing work, getting publicity for it, but not capitalizing on attribution. We saw the Eames hack project all over the internet a year and a half ago, but never got to know the perpetrators. Without a link back, publicity becomes a deadend.
Over break you will be submitting your final project documentation as actual Instructables entries. Some of you have already done so.
You will also have the opportunity to flesh out your wordpresses— documenting previous projects, current studio work, and personal accomplishments. As designers we often find ourselves playing the dual role of author, creating content and backstory for our work. For the next class you will be filling in that backstory. Your About Page should provide information ABOUT you. You should get credit for your work, building leverage with each new opportunity.
As an aside, those interested in the world of Graphic Design can supplement this week with a reading from Design Observer about the often subtle role design plays in our lives. Remember, we are available at any time to discuss visual design concerns.
Week 6
READ:
What’s In A Name? by Steven Heller, Director of the Design Authorship Program at SVA
Achieving an Absolute Aesthetic by our own Rick Banister. Some of you watched part of this last week. We’ll be showing it in the second section today.
CREATE:
Your instructable. If you haven’t done so already, take your revised project documentation and create actual entries on the Instructables site. Get some eyes on your project by participating in the Instructables community.
More refinements to your blog. By the time you get back from spring break, there should be no more Hello Worlds or default About descriptions. Use your real names.
COMMENT:
Post your thoughts on the readings to your own blog. Write as if you have an audience other than us. As if maybe next week you’ll be linked on Gizmodo or Wired.
We are looking forward to hearing everyone’s plans for the Instructables project. This week we will be focusing on the project proposals, helping people refine their ideas and preparing them for documentation. We will also be furthering the discussion of intellectual property as you are now becoming contributors to this community of idea sharing.
Your assignment is to produce the finished documentation of your instructable by the next class. Next week we will be critiquing this documentation before you actually submit any of it to the Instructables site.
Feel free to comment here, email us or find us in the Campfire chat room if you have any questions or need any further help.
Week 5
CREATE:
Execute your instructable idea and have the finished product ready to bring in to the next class.
Write a project abstract and create step by step instructions on how to build your instructable.
Your project abstract should state the problem you chose to solve (i.e. the danger of cyclists being invisible to drivers at night), why that problem was interesting to you, your proposed solution to that problem, the process by which you reached a solution, and an in-depth description of your final product.
COMMENT:
Post the abstract and instructions to your own blogs. Include photos and video!
Up to this point our goal has been to get everyone familiar with the core tools of web citizenship and to communicate some shared understanding of how these tools are affecting our society. So far, so good, right? Our tumblr is humming with content from around the class, most of you have begun to customizeyourblogs and connect through your variousaccounts. We will continue to spend some time going over these tools, particularly in refining the designs and themes of your blogs.
Hopefully last week’s video got some of you thinking about what happens to all of this content that you are creating and publishing on the web. Even though he gave the talk in the video last year, it remains a hugely relevant topic. (One perfect example: Lessig will be speaking next week on the issue brought up by Shepard Fairey’s HOPE poster.) Our next assignment is a project through which you should be able to see some practical applications of what Lawrence Lessig is talking about.
Instructables is a website that allows users to share DIY projects with each other and the rest of the world. By creating and sharing these how-tos, users are able to engage in the robust community of the Instructables site while developing valuable content for their online presence. Many of you are already creating projects that would make perfect instructables, so we’re going to spend the next two weeks putting your work out there for others to enjoy. There’s a bit of extra good timing in this project: if you make a really exceptional project with a green twist to it, you could win a laser cutter.
No readings this week!
Week 4
CREATE:
Decide on the project you’d like to turn into an instructable. You will spend this week preparing the sketches and prototype for your project.
COMMENT:
We want to read your thoughts on other Instructables and on the inspiration for the project you choose to develop. Post these thoughts on your own blog with a link back to this post.
Last week, everyone was assigned the task of shooting some photography, uploading it, and tagging it on Flickr. We’ve been keeping our eyes on the results of this assignment. We have also collected (almost) everybody’s services for aggregation in our class tumbelog.
With all of this content being generated and aggregated in all sorts of different ways, how is our concept of intellectual property holding up? Even as we become numb to the idea of “stealing” digital media, we are also generating our own digital content to which these laws supposedly apply. Larry Lessig is a lawyer and a champion of this very issue and his work is helping us sort out these new definitions.
In our Shirky reading for this week, we will be delving further into Flickr as a case study on how these self organization tools are creating other opportunities that we never would have dreamed of.
Your network. Through services like Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Vimeo and Viddler you can all connect your accounts with your classmates and with others around the world. At the end of this week, you should all have friended or followed each other in as many services as you have signed up for.
In addition to connecting with your friends and classmates, you should also be looking for other artists and professionals that you can connect with through these tools. Examples: Clay Shirky is on Twitter, Adam Greenfield is on Flickr and Delicious, Brian Crabtree uses Vimeo. Who are the people that interest you?
COMMENT:
You can continue to write your thoughts on the assignments as comments on this post or you could consider the option of writing your responses in your own blog. If you do the latter, you will need to link to this post from within your response to create a trackback. Think about how this can be an asset to you as you begin to collect these thoughts and essays on your own blogs.
In the last class, we laid out the spirit of this course. This week our section overlaps with the Junto, so we’re trying to tie some new themes together here. The assigned readings should have served as an introduction to the topic of the modern library, and we’re looking forward to seeing what comes out of it all in the discussion tonight.
One of the recurring themes throughout the course will be to be how technology is affecting our ability to come together and organize ourselves. This theme was heavy in Geoff’s thoughts on the library. It’s how the Junto got off the ground. It’s a big part of how we approach education and business. We believe that a firm grasp of concepts like emergence is a crucial part of what we referred to last week as “web fluency.”
On to the the focus of this week’s assignments:
Self-organization is a theme of the Clay Shirky chapter. He describes how shifts in technology allow for self-organized behavior. People are able to come together to solve problems for a specific time without the need for on-going management.
Jennifer 8. Lee on the origins of Chinese American dishes— how Chinese food restaurants do not have a central organization coordinating their cuisine, menus, interiors, etc, but yet you can get a very similar experience across the country at a Chinese food restaurant. She credits this to self-organized and emergent behavior.
Self-organizing and emergent behavior have deep roots, but technology can accelerate the process.
Go to a library inside the city (extra credit if it’s not at UArts!) and take photos of the library environment as a study of what uses the space is optimized for.
Upload your photos to flickr and tag them with appropriate keywords. Make sure they are all at least tagged with “ides322.”
Find and join and existing flickr group related to libraries and submit your photos to the larger pool.
COMMENT:
Write your thoughts on the assignments as comments on this post. Try to integrate your thoughts on both the readings and the video. How do the concepts overlap? What does the bigger picture look like?
Today our friends at monome finally moved from Philadelphia to the Catskills.
When first heard about the interfaces monome creates, I assumed they were in a city like New York or Berlin. It was a great treat to discover they were based here in Philly and even more exciting when we were able to visit their studio. It has been out of a simple loft in Kensington that monome (Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain) have manufactured all of their units over the past two-plus years. Over that span of time I have become the proud owner of two of their creations, and consider myself lucky to have even stumbled across their project in the first place.
This November they literally bought the farm. I had a chance to talk to Brian over the weekend and what they have planned for their new space is truly inspiring. We’re sad to see them leave the city, but we will be looking forward to hearing about new and wonderful things from Upstate New York.
“Creativity is as important as literacy.” – Sir Ken Robinson
Today marks the first day of a new project that all of us are very excited about. The five of us will be collaboratively teaching a course – IDES 322: Techniques Studio – in the Industrial Design department at The University of the Arts. This is a class where students learn the basics of creating a website and putting their work online. In the past, this has meant a primary focus on web design practices and tools: Photoshop, HTML, FTP. Given the opportunity to take the reins this semester, we have decided to let these topics take a back seat and move in a different direction.
“My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them. Pretty ruthlessly” – Sir Ken Robinson
We will not be teaching this technology. We are interested in how to be web citizens, how to be fluent on the web to both promote your work, but also how best to stay connected to interesting and important developments in your field. We believe that Adobe Creative Suite and its ilk have been replaced by the likes of WordPress, Google, Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter and Tumblr as the tools to master before establishing your presence on the web. We will be exploring these tools’ potential in a practical sense as well as discussing how they are changing the industry. Part seminar and discussion, part hands on studio work, we are all very much looking forward to what we will be able to learn from this process.
In keeping with the new spirit of the course, we will be blogging all topics and assignments here, on the Window, and asking students to respond to readings and discussion in the comments.
Write your thoughts on the readings as a comment on our blog.
Link to your other sites and to any documentation that you create on your blog, in your Flickr account, etc.
Link to all relevant blogs and feeds you have in your Google Reader.
Our goal for this week is to get the tone set and the dialog started. The next class isn’t until February 5, so we want to have these lines of communication firmly established to stay in touch over the next two weeks.
![[found on WIRED blog]](http://window.punkave.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/eames.jpg "eames")
