Encyclopedia of Life

This morning I received notification that the Encyclopaedia of Life has gone live. If you are not familiar with this it is a service that hopes to have documentation and classification of all life on earth. The service has opened with more than 1 million species, which I guess is quite a lot. I think there is still a ways to come and at the moment their site is running pretty slowly. 

We will see. 

In other news, I am really excited about the conferences this weekend. 

Using what's there

Recently I started thinking about the prospect of establishing developing relationships with various native species to utilise them as tools for common chores. I thought firs about dirt of floors and how it is likely that there is some little creature that would really like to eat my dirt, but, that I have locked out or banished from my vision. In line with this I started thinking about the design of houses that capitalise on the services that the local native plants animals and insects could provide. Not having much of a background in the area I just brainstormed lightly with the hope of getting into it more scientifically further down the line.



Today, I was looking though the recent TED talks I had not seen and found one which seems to be talking about a similar prospect. Realising what nature is for and letting us and it work together advantageously. I think, the way the idea is presented in this talk, makes it seems so simple and so advantageous that people have forgotten the reason of being. I think that addressing the question of motivation is something which will happen but only slowly, and when it happens, most things will be fixed.

If you have good ideas about this, please comment.

Humble Domination

Take a look at this great TED talk by Ben Dunlap. Please click through to watch if you are on the feed.



I wish I were more humble. I think there seems to be an direct relationship between humbleness and holistic achievement. I don't think I live to achieve, but I would love to imagine I could provide some good on such a broad spectrum. 

Appropriation

I have been writing a personal statement of sorts to give to companies for employment prospects. During this process I have tried to understand what I really love in design and in the thing we call the future. I think, after some time, I have come to the conclusion that I really like the idea of simply making things better by making them more appropriate. This process is not uncommon, of course there are things like the appropriate technology school of thought however I think they are only getting half the picture. I think the other half is outside of the technology and the outcome but in the methodology and the sources of decision making context. 

I also really like the idea of the future as being an achievable end, as is demonstrated considering an effort to bring the future sooner. I think this is the role of design and will be the result of appropriation. 

Perhaps I am not saying anything new here, just reiterating what most designer know, but I think the lexical difference is enough to provoke a new approach to the same information. 

Trucks and Cars and Things

So recently I started working a little on an automobile system looking at most aspects of transport and mechanical design from a new perspective. For the time being I am just kind of concept storming and using Google SketchUp to model some ideas but eventually I think it would be really interesting to take the project a bit further. In any case, today I was reading Dark Roasted Belnd where they were discussing truck trains. One of the companies highlighted by the article is a really innovative new company that is doing a few interesting things to create universally better trucks. The company is called ETF (Emirates Truck Factory) and as far as I can immediately tell they are not in production at the moment. I hope the do come soon and I hope they apply some of their interesting innovations to a wider range of mobility applications. 

Camping, Baring and Thinking About Apps

Today I read on TechCrunch about a conference in Miami on the future of web apps called FOWA.  It seems like a fun even and I am in FL at the moment so I am going to try to go. Also, BarCamp is being held the day before so I signed it too. 

This should be a lot of fun. I will blog about it if I live.

Lacquer Conduit

Today I read about a really awesome tool called Conduit. It is a lot like Shake though it is a fair bit more responsive and also a bit less hard core. It seems it doesn't quite meet shake on flexibility though the fresh design is quite nice. The toolkit is based on GPU calculations which makes it a lot faster and more capable of doing realtime adjustments. In the interface there is even a dashboard like pane that lets one pipe realtime variables from though any node while looking at a given output. I imagine this could be quite convenient for client sessions.

I would still love to see a program as flexible as Shake built with core image so it can run a bit faster. For the time being i prefer the shake interface a bit.

Conduit seems to be made by Lacquer and distributed by GarageDV. I hate DV. Also, I heard about it all from ProLost. Also, there are some videos introducing features and techniques and so forth. 

How do you Ask Answerable Questions

I think it is so easy to make design problems that are esentially impossible to act upon. I mean, problems that have requirements that do not take into consideration reality, the issue of course is that it is hard to tell how far something is from reality when it is conceived. I guess sometimes instances like this are considered over ambitious however I think it is actually an issue in many situations where evaluating the complexity of a problem is difficult. For instance in operating systems, the complexity of the systems involved is so high that working out what effect a requirement will have on the rest of the system is really not easy. In some cases, I would say problems like this can be considered wicked however in many cases I think it is not the problem that its self is complex it is the evaluation method that returns data on the problem that is too complicated. For example. The problem of going to the moon is not really that wicked. I mean it involves a lot of complexity and a lot of very high rigour decision making but it is really not a problem that continuously changes and in which any answer is only a very temporary answer. The issue of difficulty in deciding weather the question is answerable is really high. 

Q: Let's go to the moon (can we go to the moon)? 

A: Yes lets, yay (we have no idea if we can or not).

 I wonder, is there a good way to work out early on that a design problem is like this. I think it wastes a lot of time and energy when people persue unsolvable problems. And I really mean is there a way that humans can look on the problem level, not on the implementation level, and establish an informed point of view either way. 

If anybody knows anything about methods for this I would be quite interested. Please comment.

Website Blogs

Many companies these days have blogs and so forth and most of them even have links to their blogs from their home pages, what I find annoying however is that so many of these companies' blogs do not then link back to their main site. Of course this is usually not a huge problem, you can adjust the url or go back in history. I think it is really awefull when they blog has a logo in the header that is similar to the main page, on the main page clicking on the header would take you to the homepage, however on many such blogs it does not, it just returns you to the top of the blog.

Anyway. I really love the fact that more groups are blogging now. I am currently trying to get my company to start their own such thing.

1.5 Wall Cup

Recently I started a project looking at alternatives to the double walled SS cups that are used to insulate cups of coffee. One interesting alternative, made by Bodum for their Bistro line, are glass double walled cups. My interest currently is in laser-cutting the outer wall with patterns or useful shapes. 

Here is my first trial render. Currently i have not physically realistically modelled the cup and both the physical design and the graphics used are likely to change. This is just to show the idea.