Draft Field Guide

Building on my reworked taxonomy and field guide entries I created a draft version of my field guide. I'm pleased that this is coming together in a way that makes sense and that I'm comfortable with.

Visual System

We need to use some kind of visual system to employ metaphor or metonymy to organize and communicate information. A visual system will provide context to help people process and remember information.

My field guide title is "Homeownership: Powering a Community." I would like to relate a home to energy. My vision to achieve that is to start with a silhouette of a typical house, shaped like the green monopoly houses most people are used to. Then I will add a power cord coming out the side of it to relate it to energy and power. I then reuse this in images for each entry in my field guide.

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White Balance

Our first assignment is to explore the camera's ability to properly set the white balance.

The camera I'm using is an old Canon PowerShot SD1300 IS 12.1 MP Digital Camera. I've had this camera for years but I stopped using it for the most part when I got a phone that could take decent pictures. I used it for this assignment because Eric Rosenthal got me to believe that I could take great pictures with this if I learned how to properly take control of the camera.

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Taxonomy and Field Guide Entries: Take 2

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.

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Taxonomy and Field Guide Entries

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.

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System Map

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."

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Temporary Expert

Temporary Expert, taught by Marina Zurkow.

Class blog posts:

Rebuilt Final Project

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.

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