Go

WEEK9- DAY7

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Astana Cemetery, China

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

A woman playing Go

The world of Go. “Go uses the most elemental materials and concepts: line and
circle, wood and stone, black and white, combining them with simple rules to generate subtle strategies and complex tactics that stagger the imagination”, Iwamoto Kaoru

“While the Baroque rules of Chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go”,
Edward Lasker

“Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting”, Trevanian

“Whether you win a game or lose it is a matter of fate at the time. What really counts is whether or not you played good moves”, Kajiwara Takeo

Computer/Man and Go - Man wins

“The master of Go”. It was written the Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata - Nobel Prize for Literature) 

Vivre sa vie - the cafe scene

Confucious - “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”

In the design world of the XXth Century, there were two stunning and absolute breakthroughs:Henry Ford coming up with the Ford T, and Coco Chanel pulling out the Little Black Dress. It was about putting together technology, production, style, mass-production and democracy. 

The little black dress

As the Duchess of Windsor said: “When a little black dress is right, there is nothing else to wear in its place.”

Audrey Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s opening scenes. A special design
by Hubert de Givenchy...

 

Home is where the heart is

WEEK9- DAY6

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Pataliputra is the modern Patna, India

The snake train

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Tent works - site

Tipis 

A beduin tent - More examples

Modern tent design

Military tents

the yurt tent’s structure! 

More about the design of yurt

Unusual summer camping tents

If you were to design your own tent, what would you do? Why? How? Using what?

Chess - All in all, to design is like playing a game. You have a goal, a number of rules/constraints, external forces to fight against (in order to achieve your goal), a moment where you understand if you made it or not. Playing is a very appropriate metaphor for our design activities. 

Johan Huizinga - “Homo Ludens”, - a lot of interesting explanations on how we think, behave and process things in our lives.

Computers beat humans in chess?

From a design point of view, chess can be used as a conceptual tool to understand a lot of things related to people who played them. Some people played chess using the Lewis Chessmen.

Other people played chess with Deep Blue...

Alice was in a world of chess

Iepe Rubing with his chessboxing invention.

Some people play traditional chess.

Some prefer chess variations

“Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility”, Richard Dawkins

“I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position”, Marcel Duchamp

“Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make”, David Hockney

A fable -  the rice and chessboard problem...

Got sprouts!

This photo was taken on December 24th...nasty weather! 

I just pointed th camera at my window.

These two other photos were taken today. Fortunately we have sun. 

But rain is coming back...

I now have parsley sprouts in my balcony! Yeah!!

Memory games

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Springfield, Massachusetts

Tornado in Massachusetts 2011, June 1st

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

A bone ring? I love you Together forever Til death do us part

Did you know that some 2000 years ago, Romans wore “key-rings”on their fingers? Those who wore them were in charge of keeping the family “treasure” locked and safe.

Solomon’s ring - it is a magic signet ring that gave Solomon the power to command demons, genies, or to speak with animals...

A bone ring grown from bone cells taken from each of the Design
101’s team members’ jawbones. A special circular band fitting his left hand’s fourth digit finger. A way to connect to his heart via his vein of love, or vena amoris.

Bio jewellery - link

Memory-  it is a classic game, it’s quite universal...In fact, the game is known as Concentration, Pelmanism,Shinkei-suijaku, Pexeso or simply Pairs. A
matching game that appears in many different shapes and forms.

Here it is on Sesame Street - Cookie matching

The game can be played with any deck of cards, alone or with friends. It starts with all cards facing down on a table (or any horizontal plane). Then, players take turns flipping two cards one after the other. Once a pair of matching cards is found, the player picks up the pair and can play again. The game ends when all cards have been picked up. The winner is the player with the most pairs.
The goal is to remember the cards that have already been flipped.

Here you can play all sorts of brain games allowing you to “achieve your full potential.” Quite a big claim to live up to.

6. EXTRAS

I was looking forward to play some game brains but the page can not be found! As for those bio jewellery ideas, thanks, but no thanks. It suddenly reminded me that I need to go to the dentist. Dentist meaning double pain as it hurts also on my pocket. That bone thing has a certain tribal appeal that I can understand but in my idea bones must remain inside the body. There. Traditional woman here. OMG. What else are you going to create to indulge our desire for uniqueness?!! As for memory I have a bad memory and that's why I take a lot of photos and notes...I think I have a lazy brain also. Lazy but hungry. Oh, another thing. I collect these Not found pages! Some are very funny!

3D printer mode

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Guangzhou, China

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Lorenzo received his present, a special 3D printer...Lorenzo opened a very nice art gallery some years ago in Bologna (his hometown). 

A 3D printer? What can it print?

Chocolate printing

Bikini printing
Shoes printing

Xmas decorations

Guns, OMG!

Ms. Neri Oxman? A video  about her

Ms. Neri also collaborates with fashion designer Iris Van Herpen. 

It's Alien fashion indeed!

i.materialize: To turn your ideas into 3D printed reality (+ share / sell your designs with the i.materialise community).

Shapeways: very similar to i.materialise...

New York on Feb 13-15, 2014, there is the 3D print show 

From the Course Letter:

Tangram, the Chinese puzzle made from seven geometric pieces it is an open-ended generative game.

In chinese, this puzzle is called ch’i ch’iao t’u meaning an ‘ingenious-puzzle figure of seven pieces.’ The puzzle became a craze in the Western World with “The Eighth Book Of Tan” by Sam Loyd (1903). Recounting a fictitious
history of Tangram, the book put forth false claims that the game was invented 4,000 years ago by a god named Tan. But the book did provide over 600 new shapes, with some of them untruly posing as true tangrams (or simply still unsolved). Such a prankster, this Sam Lloyd is!

The origin of western name forthe game. One of them is that while trading with China, Western sailors were introduced to the game and named it “trangram,”
a now obsolete English word meaning puzzle or trinket. Or,perhaps, the name comes from tá ng (the Chinese dynasty) and gram, Greek for ‘writing’.

An excellent exercise in spatial coordination. The purpose of the game is to recognize a given silhouette, then its whole and to assemble it using its composing pieces.

These are the simple rules to recreating the outlines:

1. You must use all seven tans, the name given to the pieces.

2. They all must touch.

3. They must not overlap.

Tangram online

And here is the puzzle becoming a real 3D object, a modular table composed of seven smaller tables by Italian designer Massimo Morozzi.


6. EXTRAS

12 shoes...and Nervous System (Contribution of Alina Ene, student)

Operation Design101

WEEK9 - DAY3

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Chicago - Saturday in the park

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Chicago

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Spinello

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Pierluigi Anselmi

Here is his website and here is his vimeo page.

A sexy toy collection.

Modern Operation  game and kids playing it

Operation is a physical game that involves playing with friends and tests the players hand-eye coordination. It was invented by John Spinello while he was a student of industrial design at the University of Illinois. In 1962, he received an assignment to create a game. He did just that getting the highest grade of his class.

TV comercial for Operation

“I did my prototype of my magic box and everybody liked it,” says Spinello.

The goal of the game is to pick up the funny shaped objects that are placed in the patient’s, “Cavity Sam,” cavities. The objects, that refer to the humourous conditions - Broken heart, wrenched ankle (aka. sprained ankle), butterflies in stomach, funny bone, writer’s cramp, brain freeze (aka. ice-cream headache) and many more - are grabbed with metal-tipped tweezers that are connected to the box of the game. Once the player touches the metal outline of the cavity, the electric circuit is closed, a buzzing sound occurs and our poor patient’s nose lights up!

Isaac Asimov, master of hard science fiction

Golem

This is not a toaster

WEEK9 - DAY2

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Qufu, China

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Mr. Thomas Thwaites.

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

“I’m Thomas Thwaites and I’m trying to build a toaster, from scratch, beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster. “

Thomas explores the science behind technology and calls himself “a designer (of a more speculative sort).”Here’s a Ted Talk he gave about his toaster project.

Evolutionary Mythologies by Thomas Thwaites

It’s time to play Mahjong! A game of skill, strategy and calculation and involves a certain degree of chance.

Solitaire Mahjong also known as Shanghai Solitaire. 

The mahjong with Japanese rules - learn online

Mahjong is originated in China and usually is played in four. It is similar to the card game Rummy. Although there are regional variations, the game usually is played with a set of 144 tiles based on Chinese characters and symbols.

Snakes and Ladders

HOLIDAY GREETINGS - WEEK9 - DAY1

1. SOUNDATRACK

Nirvana -  All apologies

2. PEOPLE TO KNOW

Andrea ( From the Design 101 crew) = " I am not amateur"

3. PLACES TO VISIT

Bikaner, India!

4. INSPIRATION

Arduino - an open source microcontroller that was designed by Massimo Banzi 
Actually, it is one of the most important inventions of the past 10 years. It’s really all about inputs and outputs... Arduino is open-sourcing imagination.

TED talk on the Arduino Starter Kit 

Massimo Banzi: Physical Computing Guru

Ted talk on Arduino

Plants that talk

Wifi-Light Paiting

The Arduino Starter Kit 

Getting Started with Arduino.

Make, a website with lots of nice how-to’s on Arduino.
Snakes and Ladders is cool! It has simple rules. The point is to reach square “100”. Each player starts on square one, rolls the dice, and moves accordingly. If you land on a square where a ladders lays, you crawl up to a higher position on the board. If you land on a square where lays the head of a snake, you slide down his back to a previous position, and you just might go “back to square one.” It originated in India where it is called “Moksha Patam.” Based on Hindu concepts, it pushes forward the idea that if you are “good” and virtuous you will progress through reincarnation to a better form of life after this one has ended. On the other hand, if you are “bad” and evil it makes this journey very difficult. The goal is to reach Nirvana, here square 100. The game puts an emphasis on the power of karma. On the board the ladders represent virtues such as generosity, faith, and humility, while the snakes represent vices such as
lust, anger, murder, and theft. (From the Course letter)

5.Extras

Contribution of Chris Em (Student)