A Sustainable Train of Thought

Project work has been consuming all of my time for the past couple of weeks. I’m up until 5AM on some days, I’m at school up to 14 hours at a time, I’m constantly working or thinking, and I’m having the time of my life. Our project and our presentation are both coming together rather nicely, although we still have a lot of work to do. We developed a strong story, and now we need to get everything into the computer. It’s easier now that we have a clear vision of what and how we’re presenting, but it’s still quite a ways to get there from here.

Once we’ve presented on Thursday and taken a well-deserved vacation until Tuesday, we’ll come back and spend time documenting our projects during review week.

In addition to being excited about my project, I’m also really fired up about the other projects people are working on. One project in particular deals with memories, emotions, and music. They’re collecting real data with a web form, which will be displayed via an interface that they’re developing right now. From what I’ve seen so far, it looks really good.

This group has been struggling with the expression and visualization of their concept since day one, but I think they’ve really got it nailed . . . two days or so before the presentation. But better late than never, and it looks like it will be really slick. The interface should go live after the presentation.

You can contribute your memories (anonymously, of course):

Memories mapped to music

The whole concept reminds me a lot of the fray, where people respond to published stories with stories of their own. Some really personal and private things are published—sometimes anonymously, usually not—and the quality of responses in turn stimulates more quality submissions. One of the interesting aspects of the music and memory project is that right now the web form has no feedback. That is, the results aren’t shown anywhere. Yet people have been contributing at an impressive rate, and a lot of it is quality stuff, really good stories. I’m sure that once these memories are published, the quality level of submissions will increase even more.

This group has taken the idea of the project sequence a little further than most (in that they will have produced a working website), but all the projects are good. I’m excited to see what people present on Thursday. I suspect it will be impressive. There is definitely something to be said about producing quality work, as it spurs everyone to match or exceed the previous mark. I think this spirit also exists among the faculty: the professors in the group leading the next project sequence have mentioned on a couple of occasions that they have a strong precedent to follow. And they rub their hands with glee as they remark on how they plan to exceed it…

All I can say is that I’m glad we have a week to recover (hopefully) before diving into the next sequence.

Right now, however, I need to get this presentation finished…

So a bunch of people are supposed to come by all the apartments in Talponia on Wednesday to inspect the rooms for tax purposes. Apparently, in Italy your taxes are determined by such things as how many bathrooms and windows you have in your house. I think the “rationale” is that the more windows and bathrooms you have, the richer you are, and therefore the more tax you can afford to pay.

I’m rather speechless in the face of such powerful logic, but I’ll say this much: I feel sorry for anyone with a greenhouse!

Today we had our mid-project presentations. Both the Turing machine groups and the Memory groups presented, with a short question and answer session after each group’s presentation. We’re starting the third week of a four week project, with the final crits on the 28th.

Stress level was high going into this presentation, for several reasons: it was my first presentation in a long time, it was the first real presentation at the school, and there’s always stress when you’ve worked hard on something and are showing it to people for the first time. We were fourth to present, out of five groups in the Memory project, and I was getting antsy right before we went up to the front of the room. I definitely need to work on breathing properly while presenting: I found I wasn’t really breathing while I was speaking, which has a detrimental effect on, well, everything.

Our presentation went really well, actually. One of the indications was that when someone had a question afterwards, one of the audience members was able to answer that person’s question. So I think the communication of our idea was successful. We still have a lot of work to do to get this thing complete for next Thursday, but we are definitely on the right track. The discussion after our presentation was helpful because it revealed some areas where we either need to rethink our approach or where we need to explain our concepts better.

It’s somewhat annoying that we will probably depart from what we presented today considering how long we spent creating and preparing for the presentation, but if we develop a better approach to this project then I’d consider it worth the effort. Of course this means that as busy as we have been for the last couple of days, we’re going to be even busier between now and next Thursday. Tonight I need to catch up on sleep (we were up until 5:30 this morning), and then there are some other projects and work to complete.

The exciting thing, in one way, is the opportunity to integrate the concept of flâneuring, which something that I worked with while an undergrad at UD. We may or may not pursue this concept, but right now it appears to solve one of the questions several people raised during our discussion session. Briefly, we originally had the host describe a path through the city for the guest, but some people thought this was too rigid, that it didn’t allow for exploration on the part of the guest. If we introduce the concept of flâneuring, we can allow for exploration and use our tool as a safety net for when you want to return to known areas or to reach a specific place. Some of these concepts were implied in our presentation (for example, you can always put the map away or ignore its cues), but perhaps it’s better that we explicitly mention the concepts.

As with all the feedback we received from our presentation, we have to decide if it’s relevant and if we can or should incorporate it into our project.

Time to catch up on some sleep!

Just had to share this picture from Bennet, the local supermarket/WalMart wannabe just outside of Ivrea:

Attempting to make risotto tonight…

The pseudo-crit went pretty well today. We received a lot of useful feedback, and it looks like we’re on the right track. It’s a good feeling. We still have work to do, however! We need to develop our scenarios more fully and we need to work on our general presentation method. It’s important that we get our points across clearly and effectively.

Our next milestone is Tuesday. Each group will present their project to the entire first-year student body. This isn’t for crit purposes, but more to practice our presentation methods. I apologize for being so vague with what exactly we are working on for our project, but sometimes it’s hard to quantify or describe something that’s a work-in-progress. Once we’re finished, I promise to be more descriptive!

In other news, here are some links that may help give you a better idea of what the school is about:

Three short videos by Simone Muscolino, one of the guest lecturers during the “30-Second Visions” project:

IDII videos

Location and historical information about IDII and the town of Ivrea:

Location

More later…time for me to get back to work!

Here’s a bit of strange Italian trivia: in certain parts of Italy it’s illegal to turn on the heat before 15 October or after 15 April. This would explain why there’s still no heat in both Talponia and the Blue House, even though the weather’s gotten pretty cold in the last couple of days. Today it was 12C in Torino, with a low of 7C, although I suspect it’s colder in Ivrea as we’re right next to the mountains. On the way back from Milan on Sunday, it started raining and hailing. The weather before Saturday was consistently warm, but ever since Sunday the weather’s ranged from really chilly to cold. I could see my breath while walking home tonight. I can smell winter lurking behind the mountains.

A lot’s been going on lately. I took a trip to Milan on Saturday, stayed overnight, and came back Sunday afternoon. I’ve also been working on the Memory project for the last couple of weeks. It’s been frustrating at times, but I think we’re heading the right direction now. I’m just worried about coding the thing in Processing, as I don’t believe the programming language can express what we want to do.

Aside from schoolwork, I suppose the interesting news is my trip to Milan. This was the first time I’d been outside of the train station in Milan, and I had really no idea what the expect. I was pleasantly surprised. There’s a lot to see, and it’s pretty easy to walk around. A group of us had intended to depart for Milan together early Saturday morning, but I think some people overdid aperitivo the night before and weren’t able to haul themselves out of bed for the 8AM departure time. A group of four of us ended up leaving early, with the intention of meeting up in Milan with the rest of the students later that day. Thank goodness for cell phones!

After arriving in Milan, we decided to walk to the Duomo, which is the third largest cathedral in the world. I needed to find an ATM along the way, but this turned into a very involved process. Let me just say that taking money out from an ATM in Italy is a bit like playing Russian Roulette. The threat of death, of course, isn’t present, but there is a healthy amount of terror at times. For example, after inserting my card into one ATM, it decided to inform me that my card was being withheld and my bank notified. Thirty seconds later, out popped my card. Whew!

Admittedly, not all ATMs have such strongly worded messages, but I have run into my fair share of insufficient or zero balance warnings even though there’s plenty of money in the account. There doesn’t seem to be a particular rationale behind which machines will take my card and which ones won’t, so I inevitably have to visit five or so machines before I can get to my money.

Having successfully wrested money from yet another recalcitrant ATM, we grabbed some sandwiches and continued our trek towards the Duomo. Along the way, we ran across what I believe is the US embassy in Milan, as well as (after a wrong turn) the house of Versace. Or at least that’s what the huge plaque on the building seemed to indicate. After consulting the map in my guidebook, we headed through the fashion district, which, as one might expect, is filled with incredibly expensive things.

We eventually ended up at the Duomo, the front of which is completely covered in scaffolding. However, the rest of the building is visible, and I was suitably impressed. The building reminded me of the church in Cologne I visited earlier this year with Syd, except that the Duomo was much, much lighter in color. I’m sure they’ve done restorative work on the Duomo, and it’s amazing how different one’s sense of the building is when it’s light-colored instead of dark and sooty.

After checking out the interior of the Duomo, we decided to walk up to the roof. Yes, you can actually walk on the roof of the Duomo, and it sure is amazing. The weather was a little overcast on Saturday, so we weren’t able to see very far (apparently you can see the alps on a clear day), but that didn’t spoil the experience of walking on top of this church. We shunned the elevator and walked up the several flights of narrow stairs. I think we stayed on top of the Duomo for about an hour. I took a bunch of photos and was amused at how some of the steep sections on the roof resembled the trail on Hua San mountain in China. After walking around the entire accessible roof structure, I started to reconsider our decision to walk up and down from the roof instead of taking the elevator!

The Metro stops right in front of the Duomo, but we decided to walk (sensing a trend?) to la Triennale, which is a kind of pavilion or exhibition hall for art, design, and architecture. It hosts a variety of exhibitions during the year, and it just so happens that Marcello’s wife is the curator. Yes, this is the same Marcello from our “30-second Visions” project a couple of weeks ago. We were to all meet him at the museum around 1PM.

On the way from the Duomo to la Triennale, we passed through Castello Sforzesco, one of the landmarks of Milan that houses, among other things, the final, unfinished sculpture of Michelangelo. We didn’t know this until later, however, so we just continued on to la Triennale to meet Marchello and the rest of the students who hadn’t gotten up in time for the earlier train to Milan.

The big exhibit right now at the museum is the Andy Warhol Show. I was suitably impressed by this exhibit, which looked at his work from the perspective of how he developed his art. After reading more about the time period, the processes he used, as well as the points he was trying to make, I think I appreciate his artwork more. I still find some of his work strange and enigmatic, but some of his other pieces make sense now.

The other two exhibits were an architecture exhibit about a competition that solicited new designs for the center of Milan. A bunch of famous architects were involved, and I ended up wondering how one would tell Frank Gehry that his group’s design lost out to the group group with Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind.

The upstairs exhibit was about industrial design, and displayed a selection of winners from this year’s ADI winners. ADI is the Italian Association for Industrial Design, and there were some very interesting exhibits, including a Bertone Birusa, which pretty much stole the show as far as I’m concerned. I managed to take a photo with my phone, but there are much better pictures out there of this beautiful car. On a humorous note, the front-right tire was flat…go figure!

It’s getting late, so I think this is a good place to stop. I’ll finish this story up with another post some other time.

Photos from the Milano trip are now in the gallery with various stages of comments attached.

Too much to catch up on with only one post. I’ve been busy with this Memory project for the last couple of weeks, and it looks like I’ll be busy with it for the next couple of weeks too. The project’s going well, although I’m not looking forward to producing the final product with Processing: the prototypes were painful enough in ImageReady. However, now that we have a clear idea of what we want to do, hopefully things will progress smoothly. Just hope we survive the mid-crit!

Gotta get back to the project now, but I’ll write about the Milano trip soon…promise!

Since I’ll probably be spending a lot of time in this room, here’s a quick photo of my desk in Studio.

I find it funny that I swore I’d never find a use for the camera in my phone, and I in fact wanted a phone without a camera. I got this particular phone only because of the bluetooth capabilities (Sony-Ericsson T610). However, I’m now finding the camera useful for things like taking quick and dirty photos of places or things to post to my blog. Even though the quality is so poor, the pictures are still something I can share to give you an idea of what’s been going on.

I wonder if the designers who crammed a camera into a cell phone anticipated such behavior, or if they were simply looking for a new feature to add. I happen to think it’s all an accident, that given new technology in a form that’s accessible and convenient to use, people will figure out how they want to use it.

Anyway, apparently the furniture in Studio is all custom, designed and built by the architect who did the remodel of the school building. I find the space works pretty well…there’s a community feel to the space, and the chairs are comfortable. I like it. Sure, there’s been some fighting over who gets the red chairs, and we have a temperamental network connection (which is still faster than the one in the dorms), but they’re minor issues.

Time to get dinner and then it’s off to do some more work. Ciao!

Just a little note about the computers we got from the school:

14” Apple iBook G4, 1.2 GHz, with 256 MB RAM.

Office Pro Mac X

Acrobat
Photoshop 7
Illustrator 10
Premier 6.5
InDesign 2.0

Freehand MX 2004
Dreamweaver MX 2004
Flash MX 2004
Fireworks MX 2004
Director MX

Rumor has it we’ll be getting more RAM, but if that doesn’t materialize, RAM prices are relatively reasonable (512MB for ~$100), so I may look into getting more on my own dime.

I don’t have much experience with the Macromedia products, so I shall have to spend some time getting up to speed with the technology. I’m particularly interested in Flash. Marcos Weskamp is one of the students in my year (you may know him from newsmap), and he’s done some pretty cool things utilizing Flash. I don’t know when I’m going to find the time to fool around with the software, but I’m sure I’ll manage. It’s hard not to be inspired and pushed by my fellow students. It’ll probably take me a long time before I can do anything like what Marcos is doing, but I gotta start somewhere!

The only other comment of note for the moment is that the keyboard on the iBook is all strange (at least to me). The layout is not the same as the layout on my old iBook. I’m not sure if it’s an international keyboard or if it’s specific to Europe. It’s taking me some time to get used to the key positions, particularly because you can set the keyboard to behave as if it were laid out as described (i.e.: each key does what it’s supposed to do) or you can set it to another language. So right now I have it set to the US, which means that although on this keyboard the 8 and 9 keys are shown to produce the left and right parentheses when holding down shift, on the US keyboard layout the 9 and 0 keys are the parentheses. So I have to type on this keyboard while ignoring the actual symbols on the keys. It’s sort of strange at times, and I’m glad I’m used to pseudo-touch-typing, because otherwise I’d be completely lost.

Anyways, here’s a shot…

Today we began the first major projects of the semester: Graphical User Interfaces. These projects are meant as vehicles to teach us programming and graphic design skills. As we work on the projects, we’ll be taking skills courses concurrently. There are two projects: Touring Turing, and Memory as Information in Motion.

The common thread between the projects is that of memory. The Touring Turing project deals with developing a graphical user interface for the Turing machine. I’m not in this group, so I can’t describe in detail what a turing machine is, other than to say it is the basis for all modern computational thought. It is the theory behind the practice of computing. So any computer works along the principles described by the Turing machine.

The Memory as Information in Motion project is much broader and less well-defined. I’m in this group, and, well, I can’t really elaborate on the project because it’s still in its nascent stages. Whatever we come up with has to involve memory, and it has to offer a graphical user interface to observe and interact with the project. Yeah, it’s vague.

A quick note that Graphical User Interface in this situation does not mean we’re dealing with widgets in the Windows operating system, or something of that nature. Instead, we’re dealing with the principles of the Graphical User Interface: how do you display information? The widgets and windows you see on the Mac and on Windows machines are based on Graphical User Interface principles, and they are expressions of those principles. We are to develop a set of principles to express our ideas of memory. I’m working with a partner to brainstorm and develop some ideas for Thursday’s class. Tomorrow and Friday we have a skills class focusing on graphic design (in my case) and on programming for those not familiar with programming.

We have four weeks to develop and build this thing, so I can imagine we’ll be working pretty hard. Still, I’ll make an effort to keep up with the blog during this time. I don’t know how much I can or will be able to describe of my project work during the process, but I’ll certainly be happy to share the results, whatever they may be.

For those technically inclined, we’re using the Processing programming language. Processing is a thin layer over Java (or so I’m told – haven’t actually used it yet), and it was developed with designers in mind, so it’s easy to grasp and allows you to do powerful things without having to know too much about programming. The website probably has a much better description of its capabilities, if you’re interested in learning more about it. I’m just excited to be learning about design principles…