Digital Imaging: Reset, taught by Eric Rosenthal.
Class blog posts:
In last week's post I tried to organize the information to be presented into a hierarchy of some kind. I explored several maps showing the relationships between the different components related to the life cycle costs of home ownership. Although I did a good job mapping the information, there were a few problems. The biggest problem is that I was moving this project in a direction I don't want to go. Specifically, I don't want this to result in a business-like presentation that somebody from an MBA program would produce. Not that there is anything wrong with such presentations; educating people about financial literacy and home ownership is a critical function that somebody needs to do. The problem is that doing that would be painfully boring for me. I worked in the finance industry for too long and I really wanted to do something else for this class.
Continuing my research on the "Life Cycle Costs of NYC Home Ownership," my next step is to create a taxonomy and draft field guide entries.
Before exploring the details of each I wanted to first discuss some higher level concepts to get them clear in my mind. First, in last week's post I was concerned that this project would become tedious and boring as I presented real estate financing details like ground leases and the mortgage tax. Rather than go in that direction I would rather bring these concepts to people's attention but then direct people to other sources for the detailed information.
Redefinition of Art, taught by Andrew Weiner.
Class blog posts:
Our first topic is to create a field guide on some subject to contribute to a collection of Energy Field Guides. The field guide will be small pamphlet or zine. My randomly selected topic to research is "Life Cycle Costs," which I understand to mean both the visible and hidden costs associated with some entity or thing.
It wasn't immediately clear to me how my topic relates to Energy. I would have preferred to have a topic like Nuclear Energy so I could research the various technologies humankind is using or could be using to generate electricity with nuclear fission or fusion. But Life Cycle Costs? What does that mean in this context? In class I inquired further and was told by Marina to think about the hidden costs of ownership of something.
After thinking and exploring I decided to research "Life Cycle Costs of NYC Home Ownership."
Temporary Expert, taught by Marina Zurkow.
Class blog posts:
As promised in my previous post I have added my first subdomain: quickdraw.ixora.io. This is a second iteration of my final project for my Networked Media class at ITP. Everything is built on AWS using Amazon's cloud services. You can read more about the architecture here. I definitely like AWS and will be using it again for future projects.
One of my goals for the summer was to rebuild my Networked Media final project on AWS. I am interested in learning more about AWS and rebuilding this did a lot to further that goal.
You can view the completed website at its new location: quickdraw.ixora.io. The functionality is exactly the same as before. The big difference is how the website works.
I haven't posted over here in a long time because all of my efforts have been going towards the ITP section of the website. School is demanding all of my time and attention. I love it, but now that the summer break is here I will put a few posts over here.
I'm happy to say that I finally changed the hosting of this website from GitHub pages to an AWS S3 bucket and AWS CloudFront. Also the domain registration is now through Route 53. The immediate problem I had to solve is that the size of this website and the git repository backing it started to exceed the maximum GitHub repo size (1 GB). Doing something was necessary. The new location will provide unlimited growth as well as solve some minor problems. In addition, by moving to AWS I will be able to easily utilize sub-domains for new projects that make use of various AWS services. I'm eager to try out AWS Lambda functions in particular. Stay tuned!
The Spring Show is over and it was a big success. If you are reading this and you attended the event, thank you for coming! I hope you were inspired by our hard work.
I enjoyed the show very much and am grateful for the people who stopped by to see what I am working on and ask questions. People seemed to like my project and had great feedback. I feel encouraged and even more motivated to continue working on this.
I'm going to keep developing these ideas over the summer and will continue posting to this blog. Check back often!