A great example of using tangible means to help students get some core principles of computing: http://www.core77.com/blog/education/ubi_de_feo_figures_out_how_to_teach_coding_to_code-challenged_designers_24625.asp
It doesn’t seem to be too deep, and I didn’t see any good tangible metaphors for class relationships, but doubtless this is a great way to get people over their math phobia when beginning to learn to code.
The product I’ve been working on at Cisco for the last year and a half has just launched!
See a brief overview, in the form of some tutorial videos that will run on the device: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUmxyLD63W0&playnext=1&list=PLFT-9JpKjRTCuOb5Q6kBX1YSIEUjZicHh&feature=results_main
After seeing Kenneth Snelson’s work when I was in high school, I’ve tried several times to reproduce the floating quality of his tensegrity sculptures. Whether I was using steel cable or fishing line, I was never able to create a rigid and secure enough bond between the tension and compression elements. A few weeks ago, I finally succeeded! The secret was to drill holes through the dowels and wrap the fishing line through them at least twice before tying it off with a square and/or double half-hitch.
1/4″ dowel rods with 6lb monofilament.
The other technique I developed is to cut a notch into the end of each compression element in order to temporarily catch the monofilament after wrapping it through the hole. This allowed me to more easily adjust and perfect the spacing and length of each tension link before committing to tying it off.
1/4″ dowels with 6lb monofilament.
After all that excitement, I’m enervated to build spheres, bowls, and to find out what else I can do with the medium. I’ve bought 32 gague steel wire, but SXSW has distracted me – maybe I’ll get back to it next week.
A few years ago I committed myself to getting rid of all the pressboard furniture I owned. It’s been a struggle, but this year I finally did it, and along the way I’ve put to use some of those woodworking skills Dad taught me.
Back in August 2012, My friend Kelsey provided the inspiration for me to sign up for the Create program at the Crucible here in Oakland so I could have access to a table saw and a wood shop big enough to make her a dining table.
Kelsey’s dining table, with bench. 2″ thick ash and 1″ steel square tubing. 7″ x 32″ x 31″.
Having conquered that, I went on to make the coffee table I’ve been dreaming about for several years.
My coffee table. 3/4″ red oak with 3/4″ square steel tubing. 6″ x 24″ x 13″.
Then I decided I was tired of living on the cheap, steel bedframe that came free with my mattress. It wasn’t quite as ugly and weak as particle-board, but the wheels were plastic – so I took it as inspiration to make a bed.
My bed. Red oak, stained walnut to match the dark interior of my apartment.
At right, just below the headboard, you can see a small diagonal notch. I designed the headboard to slip into this notch and meet the bed at a 17 degree angle, providing a great resting place for extra pillows, but it was too long for my current bedroom. Since the whole thing is held together with brass threaded screw inserts anyway, I added modular guides to keep the headboard on upright, and left the notches in place so I can use the headboard in the diagonal configuration when I move to a larger space.
Jon Stewart’s extended cuts of conversations with politicians cut through a lot the problems with the television format. He’s managed to take advantage of the internet’s potential to transform the sort of conversation that can happen. His recent conversation with Jim DeMint is the clearest example of this I’ve seen (though I’ve probably missed better ones): http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/wed-january-11-2012-jim-demint
It’s inspiring to watch these two guys open up each other’s minds a little bit (though I do feel like jon is the one with the pry bar in this case).
Looking at the dieter rams exhibit at sfmoma I was struck by the luxuriousness of using real, solid hardwoods in a mass-produced product. It may have seemed like a leftover or a throwback then, but now it’s the realm of tiny specialist firms and makers. I can’t imagine a way to make wood part of the integral functionality of anything I’ll soon design professionally, but even as a superficial design element on a cellphone or tablet computer it could be quite compelling to feel and live with a beautifully crafted pice of hardwood. Ibm, apple, and their ilk should invest in forests of ebony and mahogony now to prepare for a line of products in 60 or 100 years. I refuse to be impressed by the environmentally sustainable attitude that would demonstrate – but it would be a noteworthy step towards socio-economic sustainability to have to harness and develop an army of skilled woodcrafters to marry the nonuniform results of gnarled old trees to a streamlined global production and distribution apparatus.
“Historically, machines have been viewed as tools to be applied directly by people to perform tasks. … the tool is an extension of the human and is under the human’s control. … an intelligent machine could aid a person by suggesting ways to perform a task, explicate features of a problem, generate approaches (options) to problem solution, and/or evaluate alternative solutions to a problem. *Aiding* of this type is clearly different from *using* a machine to directly manipulate something physically present in the environment. …”
- R. G. Eggleston, Changing the Nature of the Human-Machine Design Problem; System Design; 1986; Rouse, William B. and Boff, Kenneth R.
InDesign’s Styles palatte is an advanced way to make documents more efficiently by quickly assigning attributes like color, size, font, etc. to an item. Below is a demonstration of how the dependency-tree organization that Adobe’s style sheets allow can also help to organize a document’s elements and standardize layouts. Because this dependency structure is a key aspect of object-oriented programming, it is similar to the relationships at the heart of HTML’s Cascading Style Sheets and it is a basic part of modern programming languages like Java.
As a step toward demonstrating how Object Oriented Design principles can amplify the effectiveness of designers, I’ll show how styles work in Adobe’s InDesign software. Eventually I’ll connect the dots to show how this is like Java:
a. Using InDesign Paragraph Styles to Assign and to Organize (today)
b. Other Dependency Tools in Creative Suite (May 2011 – soon if you let me know this is useful!)
c. Dependency Trees in Programming (June 2011)
1. I’ll start by looking at paragraph styles. If you create a new text box and find the “Paragraph Styles” palatte, you’ll see that – by default – InDesign is already using paragraph styles. It assigns text to the “Basic Paragraph” style, which is typically set to 12pt Times New Roman.
2. If you copy that textbox (leaving the original there for reference) and change the text in any way – by making it bigger, for example – you’ll see that InDesign still highlights the “Basic Paragraph” style in connection with the new textbox. However, if you look closely you’ll see it’s added a plus sign “+” beside the style name – this indicates that there is something else besides “Basic Pargraph” happening with this textbox. Adobe calls this deviation from the assigned style an “override”, meaning that this textbox has a paragraph attribute that overrides the paragraph attributes defined for “Basic Paragraph”. InDesign will show you specifically what has changed in a tooltip for an overridden paragraph style. In my example – with an invisible cursor, like all the others – the font size is all that’s different between the selected textbox and anything with a non-overridden “Basic Paragraph” style assigned.
3. [to do: show an insert -> Use Styles to Change Many Items at Once]
4. If you click the “new style” button within the Paragraph Styles palatte, InDesign will create a new style called “Paragraph Style 1″. InDesign doesn’t automatically assign the selected item to the new style – but it does create the style defined with all of the attributes of the selected item. To assign a style to the selected item, click the style. (You’ll notice that when you select another item – the original textbox for example – the Paragraph Styles box will reflect the style of that now-selected item.)
5. Creating another box helps to understand style dependencies*. If you select the second box (assuming you set it to Paragraph Style 1) then copy and paste it (or use the alt+click&drag shortcut) and create a new style for it as before (don’t forget to click the “Paragraph Style 2″ list item in the paragraph styles box), InDesign will automatically make the new style dependent on Paragraph Style 1. I’ve changed the font face of box 3 (before creating Paragraph Style 2) to help distinguish the boxes.
6. A style dependency allows us to change the look of many items with a single action – even if they’re assigned to multiple different paragraph styles. In particular: a base style (the style that another style is “based on”, in Adobe’s language) will pass on its attributes to dependent styles.** In the current example, this means that if Paragraph Style 1 is changed, items with Paragraph Style 2 assigned will inherit the new attribute (as long as that attribute isn’t one of Paragaph Style 2′s overrides).
To see this in practice, right-click (option-click for mac) on “Paragraph Style 1″ and select “Edit Style” to see the options panel. Select the “Character Color” palette and choose something other than default black and the textboxes assigned to both Pargraph Style 1 and 2 will respond (they’ll respond immediately if you select “Preview” at bottom left).
7. The first screen – the “General” palatte - in the Style Options panel makes explicit (if not entirely clear***) how the attributes are assigned. In the current example, Paragraph Style 2 has been created based on Paragraph Style 1, as indicated in the “Based On” field. This means that all of the attributes not listed under “Style Settings” are defined by Paragraph Style 1.
8. The interface doesn’t do a very good job at showing which attributes are inherited from Paragraph Style 1. Changing “Based On” from “Paragraph Style 1″ to “Basic Paragraph” will give a sense of which attributes come from the currently selected style (the ones that don’t change – in the example, the font face), and which ones come from the base style (any attributes which change – in the example, the color. This still leaves plenty of ambiguity if both base styles define any attributes the same way****.)
To demonstrate this relationship structurally, I’ve created a network diagram showing which attributes are passed to which textbox for each of the previous two steps.
The real power of this method is in creating more complex layouts. Let’s assume, for example, you wanted to create a document with multiple levels of headings and multiple kinds of annotations – you might end up with something like this.
The diagram detailing which attributes are overridden for each dependent style shows how a given change would cascade through the network. For example, changing the font of “Body Text” to Futura would also cause all the other styles to become Futura; adding a Futura override to “Heading” would cause all three headings to become Futura without affecting any of the annotations.
A conversation over beer with a tech guy I’m working with at Toca brought up the open systems interconnection model, a seven-layer technical protocol that underlies the internet and most other networking hardware/software. This is relevant because it occurred to me that this is a stellar example of the levels of abstraction concept (aka ladder of abstraction) – in that there is widespread agreement on what it means and what is on any particular one of these levels, despite the fact that the meaning and/or referent of “more abstract” and “more concrete” often depend on where one spends the most of one’s time.
A New Yorker piece compares the way the media presented (a particular event during) the Iraq war to the way one chooses to frame a scene:
“a famous study carried out more than half a century ago, when General Douglas MacArthur, who had just been relieved of his command by President Truman, visited Chicago for a parade and a speech that were expected to attract enormous public support. The study, conducted by the sociologists Kurt and Gladys Lang, found that the Chicago events, as experienced by people who attended them, were largely passionless. But for television viewers the events were dramatic and inspiring, owing to the cropped framing of what they saw.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/10/110110fa_fact_maass#ixzz1A0Yt4l2X
This reminds me of one of John Grimes’ great observations about photographs: the photographer’s primary tool is the edges of the picture, or choosing what gets left out.
It’s clear this principle applies at a more abstract level: any story or communication is more about the frame in which it’s presented than it is about the details of the content or the texture of the wording or other media. This is sufficiently closely linked with the concept of the lens or perspective of the presenter as to be considered identical – but what is its relationship to the context in which it’s presented (physical, timeous, and social) or the identity (ethos) of the presenter?