Introduction to 3D Printing, taught by Xuedi Chen.
Class blog posts:
Behold! The completed custom keyboard:
I am very happy to have finished and delivered the completed keyboard. It took over a year.
Our first assignment is to choose a design we like and analyze its adherence to the principles of design. We needed to look at the grid system, color system, and the fonts.
I picked the movie poster for the movie The Grey. I find the imagery to be visually striking in a way that is consistent with Liam Neeson's character in this movie.
The most primary feature of this poster are Neeson's eyes. His eyes are the most noticeable and are the only blue thing illustrated on the poster. After his eyes, the prominent features are the movie's title and the redness of his mouth and the cut on his face.
Visual Language, taught by Katherine Dillon.
Class blog posts:
A Soundwalk is a directed walk with a focus on listening to sounds instead of viewing sights. I went on The Gaits Soundwalk, a soundwalk commissioned by the High Line park in NYC. This is an above-ground park built on raised railway tracks abandoned years ago.
The Gaits Soundwalk is experienced with a phone app that only functions when the user's phone is actually on the High Line. I actually thought the app was broken when I arrived at the beginning of the High Line on Gansevoort St. It began making bell noises when I started to ascend the stairs.
For the first five minutes or so the Soundwalk consisted of only intermittent bell noises that would slow down or stop when I stopped walking. As I moved along, the walk got more interesting. The bells sped up, and then an organ was added. I heard water churning at several locations, and while at sections of the walk with seating for viewing parades or other city activity, I heard applause. There were also birds chirping in the section of the walk with a lot of trees. Unfortunately there was construction and scaffolding covering everything so there were no actual birds to be seen. Still, I do appreciate the synchronicity to the environment.
In Chris Crawford’s book, The Art of Interactive Design, Crawford defines interactivity in terms of a conversation. Specifically, interactivity is a cyclical process of two actors taking turns listening, thinking, and speaking.
Unfortunately, the word "Interactive" is often explained or defined poorly, and as a result is poorly understood by our culture. The term gets added to products as a buzzword to make them sound better, but often the objects don’t really "interact" in a way as described by Crawford’s definition. There is no "conversation" or cyclical process.
A literal conversation between two people fits this definition literally, but when the interaction is between a human and an electronic device, the steps become input, process, and output. Key point though is that there are two actors, not one. Each actor is some kind of "purposeful creature," so a wall or a rug cannot be interactive.
It isn’t always clear if something is interactive or not. Rather than being a boolean thing, there are different degrees of interactivity. We can evaluate high or low levels of interactivity by evaluating the quality of the listening, thinking, and speaking steps. Excelling in one area does not compensate for failures in another. A common design error when building interactive products is to fail to appreciate this idea.
Physical Computing, taught by Tom Igoe.
Class blog posts:
Video & Sound, taught by Gabe Barcia-Colombo.
Class blog posts:
Here's a somewhat clumsy rendition of Erik Satie's Nocturne #1. I botched one measure towards the end but besides that I hit all the right notes.
I put together my own version of the sheet music in MuseScore because I couldn't find a version I liked without notation errors. Also, I wanted to learn MuseScore.
The goal is to see how well this feature works. I'd like to be able to post Python code to my blog. Happily, Nikola supports that seamlessly.
Normally Nikola preserves the width of each notebook cell. It makes sense that it does this but that doesn't work so well with this template because of the navigation bar on the left side of the screen. That's OK, I can override it by changing the notebook styling with this if I need to:
#notebook-container {
width: 800px;
}
And here is some Python code:
def square(x):
return x**2
for i in range(10):
print(square(i))
And a plot:
%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib
import pandas as pd
import pandas.util.testing as pd_testing
df = pd_testing.makeTimeDataFrame(20)
df.index = pd.date_range(start=pd.Timestamp.now().floor('D'), periods=df.shape[0])
df.plot(figsize=(10, 5))
Magnificent!