ALL ART BURNS

There’s a reason I haven’t been updating this journal and it’s not because I got sucked into twitter/facebook. There’s just not been much to say about what I’m doing right now — it’s either portfolio work in progress or stuff I can’t talk about due to NDA.

Adding to the workload is the fact that I’m a homeowner in the northeast which means I have to cram most of my home improvement work into a few summer months. In ~6 weeks, the house will be sporting an environmentally friendly rear deck and stairs made of locally sourced black locust. I want to avoid synthetic/composite decks, sealing a cedar deck every 2-3 years is a pain, and there’s no redwood to be had this far east. I was whining about all this when a friend of mine from Pittsburgh suggested black locust. It’s a regional hardwood that has evolved to deal with the local climate had has an outdoor rating of 75+ years without being painted or sealed. It isn’t as cheap as pine and cedar, but the thought of having a deck that will easily last 50+ years with no maintenance makes me quite happy.

On my recent trip to Japan I took my hand-me-down-but-new-to-me DSLR with the intent of documenting my trip and stuffing my swipe file to the brim. I didn’t take my video camera because it was too bulky and required too much attention: tapes that have to be managed, batteries to be charged and swapped, etc. Once I got there I quickly regretted not bringing the video camera and picked up a pocket-sized HD video camera, a Sony HDR-TGV5.

The DSLR is a great tool for documenting 2d and 3d design, but for 4d design you really need something that can capture video. (It’s true that some DSLRs now capture stunning video, but only for short durations and quantities and you’re still lugging around a full-size camera.) My “should have brought the video camera” regret kicked in as soon as I started experiencing how differently Japanese people interact with technology and their environment. Sure, I could take lots of photos and copious notes, but those aren’t nearly as good as 10-15 seconds of video.

It’s not just recording video that’s important, it’s being able to record video conveniently, in high quality, then easily move the video off the camera. With my full-size, miniDV video camera it’s pretty much impossible to take quick snippets of video given the overhead of getting it in/out of the case, turning it on, etc. On the other hand, the TGV5 is small and light enough that I can carry it in my pocket and within a few seconds have it out and recording video. (It’s even faster than getting my Droid out and recording.) Cheap/free software makes it trivial to take a 10-20 second clip, trim it if needed, then “Save As” for Flickr or Vimeo.

As an experiment I’m starting to document design — especially 4d design — using only short video clips. I’ve posted a couple of short clips to a new flickr set, “Japan + Design” which I’ll be filling with video and still clips as I get around to processing the backlog of photos.

There’s no chance of my getting rid of the DSLR any time soon as there’s no substitute for huge glass when it comes to taking good photos. However, I have stopped lugging it around unless I’m intentionally on a trip to take hiqh quality photos as the TGV5 is becoming my “go to” camera for documentation and swipe files.

“Before I tell you that story, I have to tell you this one.” — Howard Waldrop

A million or so Internet years ago, I scored an AT&T 3B1 in lieu of back pay and set up a UUCP node by the name of “flatline”. I handed out a few shell accounts to friends who not only owned a computer but a modem as well. In doing this, I had joined a tiny group of people who would soon write an “@” sign on their name tags when attending a convention and coordinated “@-parties” to get together and exchange email addresses and UUCP connection information.

We were not mainstream computer science types nor were we socially incompetent basement-bound computer geeks. We were people who believed that electronic communication was the future. We thought it was great that we could send email for free from the US to other countries and that we could have an international messaging system that transcended operating systems and (most) human languages. We didn’t just think it was a good idea, we went out there and made it happen.

I had found, in a way, my tribe. It was a great feeling to hook up with a crowd that was both diverse in source population but of a similar mind when it came to goals and activities. We were libertarians, democrats, dead-heads, skate punks and full-on computer nerds, we argued about damn near everything, except we all agreed that electronic communication was the future.

When I moved to the Bay Area to work at startups I had a similar feeling, but the crowd was too big and the connections too many to have that real feeling of “my tribe”. There were so many of us that we belonged to something larger than a tribe but smaller than a nation. It was good, but not as good as the small tribe.

“Now that I told you that story, I can tell you this one.”

For the second year in a row I’ve attended the IXDA “Interaction” conference. It’s a small, focused conference of people who are interested in interaction design in all its forms.

Last year I was still in design school and went completely fanboy after the event. Now I’m not ashamed of that because the thing I love about going fanboy (or seeing one of my friends go fanboy/fangirl) is the honesty of the emotion. The self defense drops away, the unfiltered gushing cranks up, and while everyone is a little embarrassed afterwards there’s no doubt that the emotions and feelings expressed were honest if not a bit poorly worded.

This year I still “feel the design love” as we say at Carnegie Mellon, but I feel something different as well. I feel like I’ve found a new tribe of people from diverse backgrounds but with similar goals. Whether or not I’ll end up being a member remains to be seen but I’m looking for ways to prove myself.

For three days we’ve talked about all sorts of little-d and big-d design over meals and at bars. We’ve sat in boring talks and talks we wish would have went on for hours. We’ve traded business cards, scribbled notes on napkins and yelled ourselves raw over DJs playing dance music. We’ve drank too much, ate too much, and probably pissed off all of our twitter followers with a seemingly endless stream of #ixd10 tagged messages.

And I’d do it all over in a minute.

Ok, maybe a week or two. I need some time to work off some of the shrimp-grits and pulled pork and sweet tea.

Here’s hoping we see one other before IXD11 in Boulder, CO.

Which is a different question than, “Is the MakerBot Cupcake the right 3d printer for you?”

If you have the budget to buy a production-ready 3D printer, you probably shouldn’t be looking at a MakerBot. Production systems have better resolution, support contracts, schmancy STL conversion software and all sorts of other niceties. The MakerBot Cupcake is not a Stratasys, you’re not just going to plug it in and be cranking out pretty models a few hours later.

However, if you don’t have a huge budget and you’re willing to spend time debugging, tweaking, and generally getting your hands dirty; if you’re ok with the smell of ABS fumes, the stepper motor “songs“, and tending to an occasionally fussy machine that will botch a part for no obvious reason; and if you enjoy hacking and iterative exploration of technology, then maybe you’re the right sort of person to put together a MakerBot Cupcake or other reprap-based 3D printer.

Home scale fabrication is the domain of garage-carpenters and basement-machinists, the MakerBot doesn’t replace either. To some extent, building and running a MakerBot requires some of these related skills. Do you have a feel for how tight you can turn a bolt holding two pieces of wood together before it snaps the wood? Do you know how to shorten a screw with a hacksaw and keep the threads clean? You already own a multimeter, do you have a thermistor probe as well? How are you at diagnosing a wiring problem in a stepper motor?

Of the various reprap-related projects, MakerBot Cupcake is pretty clearly the easiest to put together. I got mine up and running without much fuss, but I’ve been building things from kits or fabbing things from raw materials for many years. I still needed help from the MakerBot mailing list to sort out a couple of minor problems and I’ve been able to help a couple of other people with their problems.

If you’re primarily a designer, there’s a reason you should consider taking the plunge even if you think you aren’t the sort of person who is ready to build their own 3D printer: self-education.

I’ve learned a lot about fabrication working in the opensource 3D printing world that I was never exposed to using commercial systems. Learning how to use Blender to create models has been painful at times, but I find myself liking it more than Solidworks for simple projects. I’ve learned about bad STL code, the relationships between temperature and speed when laying down plastic, and more about the physical properties of ABS than I ever thought I would need to know. Assembling the MakerBot from parts exposed me to a few neat tricks you can use to make 3D objects out of sheets of acrylic, and some new joining techniques for thin surfaces.

This new knowledge is also helping my ongoing education as a designer. Now that I know some of the printing capabilities, I can change my sketching and ideation process to work around limitations or integrate limitations of the printer. I’ve also rediscovered the old metalworking path of designing a mold to create a basic shape that is finished on machine tools, but instead I’m printing 3D plastic that I can finish using hand tools or machine tools.

It hasn’t been the easiest tool I’ve learned to use, but building and using the MakerBot might be the “funnest” tool I’ve learned to use in recent years.

Technorati Tags: hacking, makerbot, reprap

Decided to give SketchUp Pro a test-drive after discovering that Blender is problematic on the G5/PowerPC and that the free SketchUp is missing some features I need.

On the download page is the usual demographic survey, which includes this gem:

Industry:

• Architecture
• Cabinetry
• City Planning
• Civil Engineering
• Computer Consulting
• Construction
• Contractor
• Entertainment
• Facilities Management
• Gaming
• GIS
• Graphic Design
• Hobbyist
• Home Building
• Interior Design
• Landscape Architect
• Marketing
• Mechanical Engineering
• Software
• Survey

First, note the lack of “other”. You are going to tell Google exactly what it is you do or you cannot download the software. How can you have data-driven decision-making when people can weasel out and choose “other”?

Now, note the horrid inconsistency in the hierarchies of the various industries listed and the amount of overlap in some of the categories.. We go from the extremely broad categories of “Entertainment” and “Software” to the very specific discipline of “Cabinetry”. I guess if you’re a furniture designer who doesn’t specialize in “Cabinetry” you’re just an “Interior Design” person. Or maybe “Entertainment”, because people sit on your furniture while being entertained. Isn’t “Gaming” a form of “Entertainment” and “GIS” a type of “Software”?

Of course, the only design disciplines mentioned are “Interior” and “Graphic”, I guess Industrial and Interaction Designers aren’t really designers, they’re “Mechanical engineering” or “Software”. It’s also interesting that the only two design disciplines called out are also the ones commonly (and incorrectly) associated with women designers: interior and graphic.

Technorati Tags: design, google, rant