A Retrospective - Paper Lantern

I haven't done it.

I tried, I almost cried...yet it's still not finished. Not even started, the first iteration got broken up into little bits to see the bottom of the bin. I've bought the materials together to give it another attempt and there still sitting in the corner, in the same place they have been for the past month.

There must be a reason for not doing the damn thing? Have I not 'got' this semester? Maybe I dont feel the need to prove myself? Just too busy doing other stuff?

It's been going over and over in the loaf and I now feel I need to do it, but not in a half arsed fashion as I manage to do most other stuff for uni in com and cad. This summer I will bond with the paper, I promise :-)

Doug Engelbart – Solving Complex world problems through the use of technology.

Excerpt from his 1995 article ‘Dreaming of the Future’

Despite the rapid progression of computing technology, the world faces incredible hazards as we enter a common economic-political vehicle, traveling at an ever-accelerating pace through increasingly complex terrain. Our headlights are much too dim and blurry, and we have totally inadequate steering and braking controls.

Many years ago, I dreamed that digital technology could greatly augment our collective human capabilities for dealing with complex, urgent problems. Computers, high-speed communications, displays, interfaces--it's as if suddenly, in an evolutionary sense, we're getting a super new nervous system to upgrade our collective social organ isms. I dreamed that people were talking seriously about the potential of harnessing that technological and social nervous system to improve the collective IQ of our various organizations.

Then I dreamed that we got strategic and began to form cooperative alliances of organizations, employing advanced networked computer tools and methods to develop and apply new collective knowledge. Call these alliances NICs (Networked Improvement Communities). This seemed eminently sensible. The new technologies could enable much more effective distributed collaboration, and the potential for shared risk and multiplied benefits seemed promising.

After hearing whisperings of an RMIT iD laptop program next year, I had to take action. Being through the final three years of schooling with a laptop program where the end result was hardly worth it, the computers just being used as pen and paper with complications.

I relised back then that things should be different, this semester with the blogs was a start along that different path. The ability to hyperlink throughout the blog was awesome and lent great flexibility to posting, and I never used it…because the blog was still to me a diary, and you don’t link pages of your diary.

I did abit of a search on the web over hyper linking and forming interrelations between discreet ideas/information. Some crazy stuff came up like a system to visualize the relationships between pages and different websites, written back in 1996 as a plugin for NSCA’S Mosaic (the very first web browser as we know it today). It seems to have gone nowhere since.

I managed to stumble across some bizarre project called ‘liquidinformation.org’ the aim of which was to hyperlink comprehensively every word on the page. And they weren’t just talking about static hyper linking to one destination, instead linking to multiple objects via a pull down menu.

And this lead to to Dr. Engelbart’s homepage ‘bootstrap.org’. I would love to explain some of Engelbarts concepts abit better, but is easiest for me and probably yourself if you actually go away and read them. Some of his stuff is paradigm shifting, you sort of need to make up words to explain concepts. It’s really bloody exiting. No joke :-)

Hours of reading there at the neglect of my cad and flash projects.

So to give this blog entry a point, apart from linking you up to Dr. Engelbart theories on problem solving and information in society…

Laptops in the iD department, yes but only if we take advantage of some of these concepts. The software isn’t out there but the basis of it is. The blogs are a good start, so are wiki pages and RSS feeds from blogs, searchable sites etc. These aps just need to be used together to start to be really useful. Maybe even contribute to some of these projects like liquid information, that could be cool. Almost as cool as building geodesic domes!

Thinking

I now have a meeting with a review panel next Monday. The premise is simple, prove what I have learnt over the last semester to five of my peers and a few invited guests. The aim is to substantiate the grade I selected at the start of the semester, the problem is how the hell do you show thinking?
Outcomes of thinking?, the paper lantern project perhaps...Which for various reasons I haven't completed yet. Blog entries?
This all seems to be a cop-out, presenting the product at the end. No...there must be a better way, I have five days to figure it out, with 24 credit points on the line.

It is the possibilities that exite

I came to this conclusion after overhearing people during the inspection of the house next to us that is for sale. It is not even finished. The potential buyers we talking about this that could be done not what was done.

Isn't that fantastic? I still have some hope.

In further news of hope, over the past week I have been involved with the international Round Square conference at my old school. It's an organisation that does service projects in third world contries etc. Anyway at first my cynical self viewed this as a expensive holiday for rich kids, but as the week wore on and I attended some of the discussions - it is clear that these kids do understand the issues and some of the are motiated enought to do something about it.

Apart from the motivations of the week, having 600 type A personalities from around the world back in my old school was mad fun!

Things are happening...

The magazine was discussed at length during class yesterday, I set up a blog were all the articles should be posted http://corporationmagazine.blogspot.com, the whole studio has been invited so check your emails.

Back to the Blog

It seemed the blog had outlived it's usefulness, I had every intention of signing off with the last post I made almost a month ago. But now after a hiatus and a push from Soumitri maybe it can contribute something again.

The end of the semester is near and aparantly it is time to look back over the past ten weeks to see what has happened. But it is still happening, this project that we have started in studio and studies this semester is one that will never finish. As soon as it does there will be nothing left.
The studies project is almost in the bag, but now studio is more of a problem. Ben's magazine idea is a fantastic way of having the conclusion (that some people desperately want) to the end of the semester.

At the moment I've got a few things of the boil for studio, An entry for the Japan Design Foundation competition, together with Andrew. It is still a concept witch hasn't even been discussed at length, so I may as well put it up for discussion here.

From the kinetic powered wok concept we worked out that to power the wok long enough to cook dinner, all the members of the family would have to contribute to the energy. Maybe by wearing kinetic bracelets or something that would charge during the day and could be plugged into a shared energy 'pool' at home. Powering out e-wok and whatever else is in the house.
This basic premise has now extended to lots of little discreet ways of capturing or generating energy that all get combined to power a household.

Other stuff that is on the mind is the reece bathroom competition, might bring this on mon next week to try and get some feedback - it's just an intergrated bathroom that can drop into an existing space, reducing labour cost, waste and time etc. Very small and compact unlike the Buckminster Fuller attempt 30 years ago.

Last sort of big thing that may or may not happen is an essay of fashion. Not only the wearable type but also the fashion of thinking, politics, ideologies, approaches.

I'm Back :-)

'the more I learn the less I know'

sunshine

Ahh, it's getting better. I think I have resolved my issue (see below). It seems to be coming together. The other night on SBS I saw a film by Marvo Ponti, Santa Maradona, now it's not a brilliant earth shattering piece of work - it's a comedy. It serves to illustrate just how shithouse Hollywood films are. This is a mainstream piece of Italian cinema, but it just seems so free compared to anything American.

The sun is also out, so I started some serious reading this morning. The Aspen Papers is a collections of papers from the Aspen design conferences held from 51' all the way through the 70's. It contains many different views on design, some utter crap and some really thought provoking.
What leaped out was a paper by Misha Black, The Designer and the Client - 1956. Which sort of further illustrates the point Soumitri was making the other week about design in corporations.