ALL ART BURNS

Last weekend I was almost ready to finish my furniture project and write it up here, then Katrina crossed over into the Gulf. By Sunday morning, I couldn’t think of much else — I have family in New Orleans and in western Louisiana.

Judging by my coworkers’ reactions, there are a huge number of people who just don’t get how bad this is.

There are at least a million people homeless and jobless for the next 2-3 months. The dead aren’t even being counted, that’s just how awful this is.

Right now, put everything you can in your car and drive several hundred miles away. Now, live for 1-3 months on whatever is in your bank account and your car. If you’re extremely lucky, you were able to drive to a relative’s house that won’t charge you rent and will let you sleep on the floor. The rest of you, well, how long can you live in hotels when your employer stops paying you in a couple of weeks because they’ve gone out of business? Your house and all your stuff? Maybe flooded, maybe blown away, maybe burned, maybe looted. You have nada. If you were smart, you remembered things that people demand to see before they will hire you — birth certificate, passport, that sort of thing. If you were lucky, you were able to bring a photo album or your pets along with you when you evacuated.

If you can read this, you’re probably doing ok. So get out your checkbook or credit card and
donate cash to the Red Cross. If you can spare the time off work, donate that as well. Call your local Red Cross office and find out how you can be quickly trained to help in the Gulf.

If all the danger and medical stuff scares you, if you’re a lard-ass computer geek that gets winded going to the mailbox to get the latest Gamefly disk, there’s still things you can do to help now and in the future. Instead of trying to get Bloodrayne to do something kinky, put your brain to work thinking about what you can do to help. Hell, get your Amateur Radio ticket and work communications — you get to be geeky and do volunteer work all at the same time.

My brother and his family got out in time. They pretty much have what they could stuff in their car and nothing else. Take that and multiply it by tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of families who had to evacuate, and you’ll begin to understand just how bad this is.

Technorati Tags: katrina | hurricane | radio | volunteer

Updated to the latest WP, but kept the old style as much as possible. Will design something proper when I have a bit more time.

Been finishing the project from my furniture class and working on other art projects, haven’t had time to post much. Will have photos of everything soon, I promise, along with some articles and reviews I’m wrapping up.

Technorati: personal | overwhelmed

Been awhile since I wrote much about anything, so I’m going to lump a bunch of stuff into one big post.

Blobjects and Beyond
The “Blobjects and Beyond” show at San Jose Art Museum of Art is worth checking out if you’re in town. It has a bit too much Karim Rashid for my tastes, but the consumer electronics and furniture displays are nice. Too bad you CAN’T TOUCH ANYTHING except a couple of demo items.

However, I disagree with the premise that “blobjects” are some new and innovated design element. 20’s and 30’s streamlining certainly predate/predict the Corbin Sparrow and Marc Newson’s beautful aluminum couch. It wasn’t simply about form — then-moderm metal casting and shaping techniques favored swoopy, curved shaves with only critical work edges machined flat. I argue companies like South Bend were making “blobjects” back in the 30’s. Check out the protective cases and structual components of the South Bend 10 Heavy or the
South Bend Light 10.

This Semester
The one studio class I’m taking is still going really well. I’ve got a good instructor who really wants to help us develop a broad range of techniques and who provides really good feedback about our work. There are a lot of people in the class who draw better than I do, but they can only draw in one or two styles and are having to unlearn/relearn a fair number of skills. Because I can’t draw to begin with, I think that I’m having an easier go of it in some ways.

We turned in our mid-term portfolios last week and while putting mine together I could see a marked improvement in my ability to draw. I actually am a bit ashamed I haven’t been trying harder given the improvement I’ve shown with only moderate efforts.

Applying to a Big Name School
The BNS called the other day to say that they’d inform me of my status between 15 Mar 05 and 15 Apr 05. I’m not really that anxious or panicky, I either get in or I don’t. I did the best I could on my portfolio (which I’ll put online soon) and my application and now I get to wait.

If I get in and want to go to school full time I’ll need around $200K to cover tuition and living expenses for four years. Let’s say I do it entirely on student loans, that means I’ll be 41 or 42, $200K in debt, and looking at jobs that pay $60K-$80K a year. If I’m lucky, I’ll have my loans paid off around the time whatever’s left of SSI kicks in. My other option is to delay enrollment for a year and try and get a job at the university. After six months I’ll be eligible for two free classes a semester, but that means I could be 44 or even 46 before I graduate, but I’d also be debt free.

Career Stuff
I’ve been paying more attention to job listings lately for various parts of the ID world. Even if I don’t get into school, there are plenty of design-related opportunities out there that I might be able to use as a entry point into becoming a full-time industrial designer. I have some basic model-making and metal fabrication skills, enjoy solving hard software and hardware integration problems, and have a strong work ethic and track record and the references to back it all up.

I’ve also discovered that my natural ability to flip between macro/big-picture thinking and micro/detail oriented thinking is something that needs refinement and that I can show in my design and art work. In the past 20 years I’ve worked with plenty of software engineers who could only see the big picture or the little one and ended up being difficult to work with as a result. How many times have you been in a meeting with someone who refused to agree on a design unless it could be proven to resolve any case anyone could dream up or who refused to discuss anything else until all the low-level data structures had been codified in a schema that was then written in stone? I’m neither of those people, and I often find myself negotiating between the two and translating’s one language to another. It’s a skill I’ve developed for the software world, now I need to learn how to apply it to art and design.

design | college | blobjects

Keita Takahashi spoke at GDC this year. I didn’t get to go, but I found some online coverage at
Gamespot (http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/11/news_6120232.html), GameSpy (http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/595110p1.html) and 1Up (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3138803).

Some of the best games out of Japan have been designed by artists and industrial designers, and not by engineers or marketing types. This is encourages me — when I think of things I’d like to do with a Design degree, video games and controllers are on the short list. (Also on the list: controllers for teleoperated robots, new displays for motorcycles, giant fighting mecha for robotwars like duels, and kendo practice automata for folks who don’t live near a dojo.)

Technorati: Katamary Damacy | GDC | kendo | design