My friend Valerie started a Master’s program in publishing at NYU this fall, and needed a concept for a book to make in a marketing class she’s taking. Thinking about the current financial crisis and various worries that people seem to have about the entire economic system failing, we threw together a concept for a guide to stages of financial, governmental, and societal collapse.
rainforest deforestation
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I’m in the middle of transitioning to the post-school, post-thesis, workaday world, so I don’t have much to talk about in terms of my own work. I saw Sarah Illenberger’s work this morning and thought I would mention it– she makes incredibly beautiful and delicate knit organs.
For my final, I worked with trying to refine my idea of visualizing campaign speech texts between Obama and Clinton. While this is somehow still a relevant idea, I came to some conclusions about datavis. It’s hard to just take a mass of data and just try to “visualize” it without an agenda about what you’re doing. It’s hard to rectify my idea of having a “painterly” kind of effect with really including a lot of information about the material.
in any case, having a third dimension to scroll through, while keeping the kind of effects i want may be a way of keeping the visualization painterly while not getting it too busy with pop-up tooltips and things like that.
here’s the code:
(more…)
Here is the PCB, fresh from Advanced Circuits. I threw it together and mocked it up with the battery from sparkfun for size. It looks like it’ll be fine. For scale, I measured it against my thumb. It’s a little thicker than I’d like, as I’m thinking about casting a resin box for it (probably not in time for the thesis presentation, more likely for the show), and the size may make it kind of unwieldy for a pocket. Otherwise I’m pretty happy with it.
The last couple days I’ve been doing some writing of the thesis paper. Tomorrow, I debug the xbee circuits with the new PCB controlling them, and hopefully plan out how I am going to build the insecurity prosthesis that has me kind of stymied at the moment. Triage time!
Also, this is a really nice review of the new Iron Man movie, talking about a lot of the same stuff that I’m working through as I write. Zeitgeist?
This is great. Artist and photographer Nina Katchadourian patches spiderwebs.
Over the weekend, I put together an early outline for the kinds of things I want to cover in my thesis paper. It needs another revision, and will undoubtedly be edited down for scope as I work. In this case, I tend to go too large in what I want to address in my work, and will probably want to focus more literally on the projects and interactions that I am building rather than writing a research paper in and of itself. There’s time for that stuff later. The outline is here.
After re-stringing the anxiety prosthesis, i worked on making an PCB design for the body component of the alienation prosthesis. I wanted something pocket sized so that you could keep it with you at all times. I figured a key chain would be a nice object to make, so I kept it pretty small. This design measures in at a little over 2 inches by 1 inch and maybe a half inch thick. It’ll use a flat lithium polymer battery to give power, and has a tiny switch so that it can work during a presentation and not be out of juice. For today, I’m working on a final debug of the electronics in the alienation prosthesis, and in the evening I’ll be moving into making a final prototype of the insecurity prosthesis.
Here is the presentation I gave today (10.4 MB).
It was pretty okay, I got some really good comments from Nancy Hechinger about how to frame my work and clarify definition. Useful… exactly what I needed to hear before moving into the final framing of my work before the presentation before the thesis committee.
the last couple of days I have been working really hard to try to finish the anxiety prosthesis in time for my presentation in class today. Here’s link dump of my progress. Generally, I put it all together, moving from sewing the two pieces together to screwing them together, adding grommets to route the bunches of thread that will control the hackles into, replacing the pulleys with very tall eyelets, and making eyelets that will route the thread over the shoulders into the grommet holes. Overall, it’s been pretty successful, but needs some fine tuning to have it work well while being worn. I like the action and motion a lot though. Video is coming.
Bonus shot of me testing the fit in the bathroom.
finished the sewing up of the boxes. took some glamour shots. The next step is to make a pocket-sized controller for the xbee and then it’s done! whew!
(besides calibrating and testing the lighting and stuff like that, but i want to have my little victories)
