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. 

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.  

America Working Looking for Work

So I am actually back in America. And that is true.

I am back working at Adaptive Equipment which is ok fun. Right now I am doing web stuff for them but I have not put up their new site yet so it is still a quite old one.

Other than that I am trying to think about a more long term job. I am not sure what you do so I am applying at a lot of the larger companies. Also back to the problem of what software to use for a good portfolio. I think I may just do it in Blogger because I need to get one online sooner rather than later. It should be ok. I can always get the rss out. 

Portfolio Stagnancy

So I am still working on my portfolio website and I have come across some issues and I am not sure where to go from here. I have three options:

1. Work out a way to fix the problem
2. Change what I want to do
3. Change how I do what I want

The issue I am having is that I seem not to be able to do as much juggling of data as I think I need to. I would like to find out I don't need to do it this much or find a way to do things so it is not required at all. I need someone who really knows how to use the Google Mashups Editor because the help provided is not good enough.

Also I am starting to think that some external options seem good. I have been looking at a few other CMS's and a lot of them are quite nice. Of course I would have to turn in that AJAX web feel but it there may be some serious advantages. One in particular is Google search friendliness which my current data model is not great on.

I have also been looking at using Google Base as my back end storage system because it is so ingrained into Google's results. We will see if that works how I expect it may not.

RSS is So Good But Slow

Over the weekend I have been working on my portfolio site quite a lot and it has been going very well. I have started working up a visual styling and I have come to understand the layout tools in Google mashups editor (GME) much better. My next task is to deal with some of the information model issues and then I might start putting together the final code. Then of course I have to make my content.

As my content is all RSS from blogs I have been looking at various tools. One that I have been familiar with for some time however never used in a serious way is Yahoo Pipes. It is a great little tool which is a lot like Shake (node based editing) however it differers in one way that I think is quite bad. Shake lets you "fileOut" many things in one render however Yahoo Pipes is limited to only one output feed at a time. For instance I could make many versions of a file in Shake, different sizes, different keys, different anything and then export them all at the same time and have it create a clip of image files where each fileOut node points. In Yahoo Pipes on the other hand I have to either nest a pipe in many other pipes to get similar functionality or remake it in each case. All this said I think there may be one possible solution which is using a dynamic url for the RSS address. I have only recently been introduced to this technique and not yet tested it, which brings me to Dapper.

Dapper is a cool little too that I found while looking at other peoples GME sites. It seems to be a little like Yahoo Pipes crossed with OSX 10.5's implementation of dashboard widgets (as in widgets as clips). Essentially what Dapper lets you do is extract an RSS feed from a normal website and build it around your preferences. It also lets you use dynamic URLs to include things like searches into your Dapper feed. For instance you could, as they show in this example, extract a feed which is dependent on a search on a site. You reference that search by including the search term into the URL of the feed that you are rendering. This is really great I think and I hope to be able to use it soon. For the time being I do not have a use in mind but I think I may need a feature like this for one of the things I wanted to put in my portfolio site. We will see.

Does anyone have any good ideas?

Starting to Code

Work on my personal portfolio website has started. I am doing it using the Google Mashups Editor and, if everything I think is true is actually true, it will be able to compile a number of RSS feeds in a way that allows me to have a portfolio a lot like the one I described a few posts back.

It is not even close to finished and at the moment I do not even have a publicly viewable prototype but hopefully it will keep rolling along.

Portfolios with no pictures

Today discussion of my future and a portfolio for my work came up again. It seems evident that graphical assets are not my most valuable and that non graphical things will need special treatment of sorts. The discussion lead to creating a body of content that can act as a portfolio for me that most well represents me in the context of what I want to do.

Discussion also covered dealing with images well on the internet. Intellectual property is a problem that is going to have to be dealt with. It is starting to seem that now is a good time to begin drafting and thinking about this issue.

Thinking about the format

So...

I think a few things.

I have decided I think it would be nice if everything that is work was considered work. That is to say. If I have made a rendering that should exist as something that could be separately looked at or as part of the greater project it was actually made for. On that note, I think everything should have a few core properties, including date and others.

Properties: Notes

1. Title: A unique name for a specific element
2. Date: This would probably be start to finish date and things would generally be ordered by finish date unless a separate ordering date property was mentioned.
3. Content: This would be images or movies or other files. Just core content.
4. Description: This would be a quick description about the project and perhaps broken up.
   
1. Client
2. Context
   
3. Role
   
4. Goals
5. Issues
5. Containing projects: Projects that contain this work such as classes, or larger projects.
6. Contained projects: Projects that lie within this work. Such as a render, within the larger project of an automotive concept pitch.
7. Tools used: just a listing of the tools used. Both ideologically and technically.

I am sure there are a lot more interesting data classes I could have but those are the immediately obvious ones to me. Please add comments to the post if you have anything to say about this.

After an information model is built I need to be able to access the data online through pages using XML as my data language and CSS to store the layout preferences. Visually I will need the folio to be quite nice and I will need it to be able to deal with a wide selection of asset types without breaking.

Lastly I need to be able to generate smart groups based on all sorts of pre-definable and viewer definable constraints. For instance, someone would like to be able to view all the projects where I used a certain tool in the last year. Another example would be when I want to create special subset folios for a specific client. I want to be able to make selection groups that I can put links to without a problem and without any changes to the visual format.

It does not sound like something that is hard but it might need a specialized piece of software. At the moment I know of a package that can do the data modeling but it can not store my images and I am not sure how well it deals with being accessed by other websites online.
The software is called Dabble and it has free to use component.

Please leave any suggestions or comments you may have.

The real portfolio

As part of my application for jobs as I come close to graduating from university I want to create a complete portfolio of my work to date. However, being someone who is quite concerned with keeping things theoretically neat I want to start by working out a good way to make a portfolio who's format I can adjust in the future without any costs and who's content can be added to without reprinting. I also think it is important to be able to control access and create versions that cater specially to different viewers. For example there are certain projects that pertain more directly to certain companies or interested parties that I may show my folio to so I would like a good way to filter things without generating a new special edition of the data set.

I would also like to do it all online so that it's state is independent of the state of my current computer and it is more easy to access for a greater number of people.

The first solution that comes to mind is one like my recent project summarising my work and experience in China, My China Reflections, however I am not sure that this is the ideal approach. This project was held on a blog and subsequently suffers from the lack of depth that the blog information model seems designed to handle. I am interested in creating my own information model but I am not familiar enough with any software to do that at the time being. For this reason my first step is to look into various possible ways to deal with the information and attributes of the information model that I eventually use that would be useful.

Please comment if you have anything at all to add. Thanks.