A Sustainable Train of Thought

Our bios have finally been posted on the IDII website:

http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/en/people/students/firstyear/index.asp

On the first day we officially met for orientation, we took a bunch of photographs because it wasn’t clear who was supposed to do them or when they would be taken. Well, two months later we were called into a room to have our photos taken, and these are the ones you see here. I kinda like the one of me that we took on that first day…I’ll have to see if I can find it.

Speaking of getting things done (per my last post), here’s a short video clip that I made of some people working on the La Mia 500 in the lobby of the school:

Making this clip felt like commandeering a gurney in a hospital: am I going to stop and think and wait around, or am I going to make things happen? I mean, what am I truly waiting for? Myself? If that’s the case: Hey me, let’s get this show on the road!

Whew! It’s Sunday, Applied Dreams are over as of last Friday, and my life is finally returning to some semblance of normalcy…or at least what passes for it around here. Guess how much sleep I got between Wednesday and Friday?

Applied Dreams: I was very pleased with how things turned out. Which was a nice change from how I felt after the last presentation. I don’t know if I completely nailed it, because I’ve had my head in this stuff for two weeks and it makes sense to me, but I think I got my message across. Most importantly, the person we most wanted to see my project was able to be in the audience and he “got” it and seemed pretty excited about the concept. Certainly the physical form of my project could be improved (I don’t claim to be an industrial designer), but the core concept is strong.

I worked like a dog, though, to get it into presentation form… Over the weekend I started to have doubts about where things were heading, and I ended up just brushing them aside while I focused on some of the things that people were saying from my crits. This turned out to be the worst thing I could have done.

The biggest lesson I learned from this project is that you have to care about your work. Caring about your work imbues it with quality. (Note: I was surprised to find the complete text of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is available online.)

So on Monday I had to face the facts: my project was “heading towards banality”—not an easy or pleasant thing to hear, but it was true. And it took me the rest of the week to turn things around to the point where I cared about the project. The difference being that I was in control of the project, and I wasn’t just implementing someone else’s suggestions or beliefs.

As a designer, I can’t just do what someone tells me. I have to know what my beliefs and values are, and stick to them. Otherwise what I do isn’t really worth doing: if I don’t care about my work, then who will?

So part one was redefining what I wanted to do, and part two was making it happen. And that’s the part that was most painful, seeing as most of the work took place in the last couple of days before the final presentation.

A key part of redefining what I wanted to do was taking control of the situation. Was I going to sit back and try to work with what content I had access to, or was there a way for me to go out and make some content?

I really like the author Harlan Ellison, and someone once made a comment about him that he’s the kind of person you’d want around in an emergency, because he’s the kind of guy who would commandeer a gurney in a hospital, make a racket, get the doctors to look at you… I admire that ability, not because it’s about getting things done your way or being obnoxious, but because it’s about imposing your will on a situation. It’s about getting things done.

There’s definitely a philosophical side to this education for me, because it’s forcing me to confront and define what exactly I believe in, and, more importantly, how to express and communicate those beliefs and values. It’s not easy, but it’s very rewarding.

It’s sort of hard to express my state of mind right now, partly because it’s rushing around at a thousand miles an hour. Anything I try to write doesn’t really capture the essence of what I’m thinking. But here’s a shot, courtesy of Torolab: Propose rather than protest.

Here’s what my studio desk has been looking like for the last couple of days:

On a completely different note…

This mysterious green beverage recently appeared in the vending machine at school. It says Green Tea, but I have my doubts:

Now that I’ve poured some of the Green Tea into a water bottle, you can see that most of the liquid’s green-ness is from the bottle. It’s such an ugly green, too much like a cough syrup green for my tastes. And yes, it’s REALLY sweet.

It’s been raining on and off for the past couple of days, but today the sky was finally clear. And what did I see way up on the mountain peaks? Snow!

Unfortunately, I have no photos of the snow just yet. I was stuck inside a classroom all day, working on project stuff. We’re at the end of the first week of a two-week project, and it’s been pretty tough. This time I’m working by myself, and it’s a different experience. I prefer to work with people because I tend to solve problems by talking about them, but luckily we still have a venue for feedback in the form of in-class crits, and we’ve been helping each other brainstorm when needed.

This two-week sequence is called Applied Dreams, because we get outside companies to work with the school on certain projects. This year we’ve got two companies: Alcatel (mobile phones) and ClickAClip (MMS). There are two other project groups: a group designing installation proposals for the Future Center in Venice, and a group known as the calendar group.

I’m in the calendar group, which is really composed of two projects. One is to design a new calendaring system for the school. The other project is to create a “keyhole” viewer into the school, using the scheduling and events from the calendar as a jumping-off point. I am working on the keyhole project, as are two other individuals, and there are two three-person groups working on the calendar. There’s a certain amount of information architecture that I have to deal with on the exhibit, as well as concerns about furnishing content, but the main problem for me is figuring out how to make this installation. It’s something I haven’t dealt with before, and with the “physical computing” course the next four-week project we’re doing, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

It’s definitely been a long week. I went to aperitivo this evening, and then to a pizza place for dinner because I have no food in my room and I haven’t had time during the week to run to the market or supermarket. Over dinner we were talking about how Monday seems like it was two years ago. It’s been a really short week, but at the same time it’s been an incredibly long week. Even the professors are showing signs of wear. Two weeks is a very short amount of time.

Last night I came home, made the last of my pasta for dinner, sat down on my couch to do some work, and the next thing I remember is waking up at 4AM. So I walked over to bed and went back to sleep. So much for just resting my eyes… But I felt much better today. We’ve had two presentations (almost three) in the past three days, so there’s been the normal preparation of work for the presentation, along with the work for the project itself. And I’m going to be busy this weekend too…

So, just for the record, I’m still enjoying it here; I’m just tired and there’s a lot of work. But it’s a good experience, and I’m learning a lot, and it’s really pushing me, and that’s just what I wanted. All the same, I’m going to enjoy having some time off over Christmas vacation!

I’m writing this while on the train coming back from a weekend in Switzerland spent visiting my cousin and her husband in Geneva. Right now we’re at Brig, one of the many stations on the way to Milan. It just started raining, and the view is slowly disappearing behind the clouds.
It was gloomy for the whole week leading up to our final presentations (another story entirely), and it was only once I left Italy on the way to Switzerland on Friday that some of the gray disappeared. As the fog outside gradually cleared up, so did my head.

I was completely exhausted from the late nights and stress leading up to the presentations, and I kept falling asleep on the train ride to Geneva—it’s only on the way back that I’m now seeing the sights.

When I arrived in Geneva on Friday, my cousin picked me up at the train station. By the time we got to her house in Lignon (which is a really interesting building and I’m sure an architectural landmark), I was starting to crash. I managed to stay awake until around 11, and then I was out like a light.

Saturday I woke up late, feeling much more human after ten or eleven hours of sleep. After a quick breakfast, we took a walk across the Rhône, which is right next to Lignon, and through some of the countryside. It was a beautiful day: bright and sunny and the complete opposite of what I’d been suffering through in Italy. The turning leaves made for some spectacular colors, the air was crisp, and the paths were a little muddy in places from the recent rains—on the way back, I had to roll my jeans up so they wouldn’t get soaked.

It’s strange seeing the trees turn colors. In the Bay Area it seems like the leaves turn brown one day and the next day fall off. And it’s annoying how I forget my umbrella at the worst times. Driving a car everywhere like I did in California tends to lessen the impact a deluge can have on your wardrobe, and with rain limited to a couple months out of the year, I have a short memory when it comes to grabbing the umbrella when I leave the apartment. If I weren’t in Italy, there are days where I’d have been more than happy to whip out the Gore-Tex pants and wade to school. Especially after the road to school flooded one afternoon after a particularly hard downpour.

My Swiss friend in school says that we should hope the weather soon gets cold, as this will turn all the rain into snow and keep the weather in the mountains. Which means more snow for skiing, and I’m OK with that!

One interesting thing about the Geneva train station that I noticed immediately is that it’s not a scary place. Most train stations in Europe that I’ve been to have been sketchy at best. The station in Cologne, Germany is definitely not a place to wander around while gawking at the Dom with an expensive camera in hand. But the area around the station in Geneva is alive with normal activity. The underground parking garage in front of the station serves not only the station but the nearby church and shopping malls as well. There are a variety of stores and hotels across the street, and the station itself is hooked into an underground shopping mall of sorts.

Another interesting thing about Geneva (and indeed the whole southern area of Switzerland) is that the main language is French. As I mentioned earlier, when I was on the train to Geneva on Thursday, I kept falling asleep, and at one point I woke up to find a text message on my phone from Vodafone telling me to dial a certain number while in France, and when I looked out the window at the next station, it sure looked like France to me. My only assurance that I was on the right train was that it terminated in Geneva. But waking up to find what looked like the completely wrong country was a bit of a surprise.

It was a bit of a challenge switching my brain from Italian to what limited French I know. In Italian, you tend to pronounce every letter in a word. But French is the complete opposite, where you have all kinds of useless, unspoken letters that are included just to confuse non-French speaking people. So of course I mangled almost every French word I spoke—it’s humbling when every item you order from the menu sounds completely different when the waiter repeats it back to you. And of course now that I’m on my way back to Italy, I’m forgetting all my Italian.

Case in point: when our passports were checked at the Italian border, I noticed that the girl across from me had a passport from Ecuador. I was curious what she was doing in Italy, so I attempted to talk with her in broken Italian and English. I deduced that she’s starting to study fashion in Milan for three years, but the rest was lost somewhere amidst my misfiring neurons. Conversation is definitely the hardest part of learning a language, and I haven’t had the opportunity to practice that much while at school. Everyone at school speaks English, which is great for working on projects (at least for me, since it’s my native tongue), but it’s a definite disincentive to practice the conversational side of Italian. This conversation on the train was the first pseudo-conversation I’ve had in Italian in Italy so far, and it definitely shows that I need practice! (Note: vocabulary used to order groceries doesn’t really play a part in normal conversation.)

All of this disorientation was something I experienced my first couple of days in Italy, so I wasn’t thrown by it. However, it was hard relying on someone else, namely my cousin, to translate in certain circumstances.

After our walk, we had lunch and then a nap…which I extended from half an hour or so to about 2 hours. I felt really bad upon waking up, but I suppose my body needed the rest. We headed out to Old Town, and along the way passed a bike store. I’ve been hankering for a bike ever since I left the US, but I wasn’t able to get a used one and the new ones in Italy are on the expensive side. This bike store was having a sale, and the prices were in Swiss Francs…

We went inside and took a look at what they had to offer. The new models weren’t discounted, but last year’s models, in specific sizes, were on sale. To make a long, long story short, I ended up not getting a bike, partly because of logistical reasons; partly because the price, after factoring in the train ticket and exchange rates, wasn’t that much better; and partly because it’s almost winter and I didn’t want it to just sit around in my room for the next couple of months. I’m appreciative of my cousin and her husband for their patience while I made this decision, because it spanned a couple of days and included a trip to the train station to enquire about a partial refund on my return train ticket.

After this detour, we headed to Old Town and walked around, visiting the church and the roman square before heading back to the car. We checked out the lake and watched the sun set, and then headed to a great restaurant on the outskirts of Geneva that serves authentic Swiss cuisine. The waiter spoke French (of course), and I felt like I was personally insulting him ever time I tried to pronounce a dish, but the food was amazing.

On Sunday we had no plans until the afternoon, when we took a day-trip out to Lausanne, home to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This town is also on the shores of Lake Geneva, and I’m sure it has some spectacular scenery during the summer months. Today, however, it was overcast and dreary. In other words, a perfect museum day.

The IOC museum has several sections, which cover such topics as the medal designs used in each Olympics, the evolution of the Olympics from ancient times to the present, and information about past Olympic venues. One of the sections has a selection of sports equipment used to set Olympic records, which I thought was pretty cool.

After the museum, we stopped for some crepes. They held us over until dinner, which we spent with some of my cousin’s friends who are from Beijing. They made dumplings, and I was informed that it’s rude to eat less than ten. The dumplings were very good, and I didn’t need much more encouragement than that to eat more than ten.

Monday morning I went with my cousin to take a look around the UN headquarters in Geneva. I wanted to take some photos, but I felt a little uncomfortable. Security is really tight—to get my visitor pass, I had to leave my passport behind, and there were numerous guards walking around and scrutinizing the cars.

And this afternoon I caught the train back to Ivrea. Well, trains, really. Apparently it’s only about a 2.5 hour drive to Ivrea from Geneva, but on the trains it takes about seven hours and three trains. I’m on the last one right now…it’s supposed to get into Ivrea around 7:30PM. And to think I left around noon from Geneva….