P'unk Avenue Window

From the Google Lat Long Blog:

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.

View can view that as a larger map if you want. Go ahead and add Google Maps to your list of game changing technologies. Civic, artistic, environmental, social. Location based platforms open up a whole new world to what you can do on the web.

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 revising and polishing each group’s project objective copy and putting a finish on the Farm Philly branding material. You will decide on a domain for the project blog, purchase it, and with our help set up hosting. We will be working together to build a custom Wordpress theme, establish your user accounts, and begin adding content. You will spend the class assisting us with the design and gathering your research materials and other documentation of the project to this point.

For next week you will each have posted at least FIVE items of research, collected data, preliminary design, and other bits of documentation. You will bring with you to class anything you might need to continue getting the project blog caught up to your current progress level. You should continue to exercise the methods we’ve explored thus far, adding photos, videos, scanned notes, data, and copy relevent to your urban farming initiatives. As we are more than halfway through the semester, you should have copious amounts of content ready to upload.

In addition to publishing content, next week’s class will contain a short lecture/demonstration on mapping and leveraging google maps. You will learn to create and share maps, adding points, descriptions, paths, and add maps to the project blog.

GATHER:

• All relevant content you’ve created around the Farm Philly project to date, gather media resources, get organized.

POST:

• AT LEAST FIVE posts regarding your respective contribution to the project. Your posts will be categorized within your group and tagged appropriately.
• Upload your ongoing project photos to Flickr, tag them ides322, farmphilly, and anything else relevant to the project or their content.
• Start creating videos and upload them to your personal video sharing accounts, upload any existing video content. Tag it appropriately. Post it to the project blog.

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.

With everyone well-rested after the break, we will be reviewing your instructables and gathering feedback about your experiences putting work out in the world. Our hope is to have the presence of an audience motivate the work and create a larger conversation about Industrial Design, getting you interacting with the community outside school. This theme will continue to the end of the semester (and hopefully beyond). We love to see your work getting in the spotlight, Wes, Jesse, and Elissa were featured on the Instructables homepage. These things work.

After wrapping up with Instructables we will discuss the assigned readings regarding Personal Identity. We are all constantly broadcasting information on a number of wavelengths. What you say, how you say it, to whom it’s said, what you wear, how you wear it, how you spend your free time—these things aggregate to become your social persona. When you all become famous that social persona will become a personal brand.

We would like everyone to pay a bit of attention to what they are putting out in the world beyond their design work. For next week you will be creating “Day in the life” videos that shed some light on the men and women behind the work. Document the things you communicate to the world, how does that communication relate to who you strive to be? Essentially, the videos should communicate a “How to be me” thesis. All videos will be edited to one minute in length and uploaded to your video accounts. Embed the videos in your blogs and share a few reflections on the experience.

Week 7

CHECK OUT:

• Cargo Collective: a new portfolio site platform. You will need to apply for a beta account, but you might like this better than Coroflot.

CREATE:

• A one minute “Day In The Life” video documenting your daily experience as a member of a community, and a designer. Upload it to your video service account.

COMMENT:

• Embed your video in your blog, write a short post providing some context for your video and reflect on the experience. Feel self-conscious.

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
• A Layperson’s Guide to Graphic Design by Adrian Shaughnessy - Recommended, but not required.

WATCH:

• 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 customize your blogs and connect through your various accounts. 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.

Week 3

READ:

• Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Chapter 2 (Amazon, Google Books)

WATCH:

• TED Talk: Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law

CREATE:

• 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:

Week 2

READ:

• Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Chapter 1 (Amazon, Google Books)
• Steven Johnson, Emergence, Chapter 1 (Amazon, Google Books) – Recommended, but not required

WATCH:

• TED Talk: Jennifer 8. Lee: Who was General Tso? and other mysteries of American Chinese food

CREATE:

• 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?

“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.

Let’s begin.

Week 1

READ:

• Getting Real, Ch. 1 – 16
• What Should a Modern Library Be?
• What Should a Modern Library’s Website Be?

WATCH:

• Hillman Curtis’s Artist Series: Milton Glaser
• TED Talk: Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?
• The Machine is Us/ing Us

CREATE:

• If you don’t have them already, create Flickr, Google Reader, Delicious, WordPress, Twitter and Vimeo or Viddler accounts.

COMMENT:

• 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.