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)

Merry Hedgehogs Everybody!

Zoom out was my favorite Design101 week so far!

Zoom out was my favorite Design101 week so far! 

I haven't make the pinhole camera yet. I am not sure what kind of pinhole to build if one for film or one for paper. With film I can shoot more photos at once. If I make one box/tin pinhole for paper I will have to return home every time I want to switch the paper! And then there's the developing part. If I use paper it will be easier for me to develop it. My idea is to use homemade chemicals. If I use film I'll have to buy a special tank and probably it will be expensive. The alternative is to skip the homemade developing experience and to send the filme to the lab...I will have to make a decision. Either way I don't have the time for it now. 

This was an amazing Design101 week filled with interesting links to research and exciting tasks to accomplish. We're half way course now! A new year is coming! Merry Christmas and a creative 2014!

I walk the line

WEEK8 - DAY 7

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

I walk the line - Johnny Cash

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Jerusalem, Isreal - a video doc

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Francesco Careri - (Roma, 1966) é arquiteto e, desde 2005, professor do departamento de estudos urbanos da Università degli Studi Roma Tre. Foi cofundador, em 1995, do Laboratorio d’Arte Urbana Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade e, desde 2006, é professor do laboratório de projetos e do curso de artes cívicas da faculdade de arquitetura da Università degli Studi Roma Tre, um curso totalmente peripatético em que se caminha interagindo in situ com os fenômenos urbanos emergentes; desde 2011, é diretor do programa de pós-graduação “Artes arquitetura cidades” da mesma universidade. É autor do livroConstant. New Babylon, una città nomade (Turim, Testo & Immagine, 2001).

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Mappa Mundi

Francesco Careri (aka Piccio, one of the founders of Stalker group in Rome)
Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice 

“Walkscapes deals with strolling as an architecture of landscape. Walking as anautonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory,an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the “negotiated”space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from Minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.”

John Brinck Jackson‘s quote says it pretty nicely,“Roads no longer merely lead to places, they are places.”
Ulysses

Luopan chinese compass.

Will Self - Obsessed with Walking - video

“The great perambulator muses on his walking obsession and the fascinating
concept of psychogeography.”

 “Brain Picking” - nice content

NYC subway maps

A nice historical map collection

Some magnificent maps

Radical Cartography’s website (nice stuff here)

A nice idea (to have a hand drawn map association...)

A classic: Visual Complexities

GOOD Transparencies’ Archive (maps and infographics sometimes go together...)

And finally, some bits of typography...The Ebstorf Map

6. Extras -

Walkig and reading group

Woman with a mission

WEEK8 - DAY 6

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Girl with a mission - Les hommes

(More from Les hommes)

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Mountain View, California!

Google’s headquarters in NY

Google's Headquarters in Mountain view, California

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Mr. Google - doc

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Google, is set forth to understand us, humans. Our way to put together words to form meaning. It constantly analyses and shapes our language. For better or worse.

Computer History Museum - Site

the first chess-playing automaton was created in 1770. The principle was very simple. A human chess player was hidden inside the machine.

Virtual exhibition on “Visible Storage”.

Seymour Cray’s supercomputers - Between the 1960s and the 1980s,he designed the world’s fastest computers. The “self-portrait”.

Google has introduced Sketchup, a free 3D modelling program that can be used by everyone. Google says about Sketchup : “Great tools are ones you look forward to using. They do one thing (or maybe two) really, really well. They let you do what you want without having to figure out how. They help withhard or boring tasks so that you can focus on being creative, or productive, or both. And they are, in their own way, beautiful.”

Each one of us should shape his personal set of missions and goals. The important thing is not about having extremely high goals. It is about setting up clear ones.

“We want Google to be the third half of your brain.” 

Sergey Brin

Nowadays there are a lot of powerful (and free) tool around. Tools to draw, to write, to plan, to do all kind of different things. Do you use them?

 Mural

 Paper

 Storify

 Medium

Art-Project

Lego
Supercomputer designer Seymour Cray -  “as long as we can make them smaller, we can make them faster.”

Confucius - “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”

The workshop of carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen -  Lego - Its name comes from the Danish phrase “leg godt,” which means “play well.”

SimCity - It’s about city-building: developing a city and seeing that its citizens are happy and have all the makings of a nice, comfortable life. There are different zones for different types of activity: residential, commercial and industrial. The zones are developed when the player provides adequate factors and conditions like sufficient power, transportation infrastructure and good tax levels.

“The Sims.”

 Railroad Tycoon: “empire building in the Golden Age of railroads.”

Homework - Think about your own personal plans or missions.

A pinhole

WEEK8- DAY5

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Songs from Manca Spik,  Sasa Lendero and a young guy called  Žan Serčič...and Jan Plestenjak. 

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Ljubljana, Slovenia

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Elvis Halilovic’s portable ondu pinhole cameras.

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

“In the digital age of photography and image processing, there is not much
room left for alternative photographing techniques. Some require a lot of time to master yet others are just not very practical and simple to obtain” says Halilovic.


About the pinhole camera on Wikipedia.

Makezine has some nice how-to’s...

And here’s an instructional video...

Miroslav Tichý - He was homeless, he built his own cameras from cardboard tubes and tin cans. He spent most of his time photographing girls around
his city (most of them unaware they were being photographed).

A movie about him. “First of all, you have to have a bad camera”

Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie “Blow Up” 

“I never discuss the plots of my film, I never release a synopsis before I begin shooting. How could I? Until the film is edited, I have no idea myself what it will be about.” (Antonioni)

Wayne Wang’s Smoke. One photo a day for eighteen years.

Franco Vaccari -  He believes in returning to the basics of photography… “Afterthe slow food, it’s indeed time for Slow Photo,” he says.

Francesco Capponi has nice examples for you (how to make a pinhole camera inside a pine-nut or an egg).

George Eastman

Polaroid SX70


6. Homework

Make a pinhole and, if possible, try keeping the same point of view for youra series of different pictures. Doing this exercise is nice because you will be able to better understand how the whole process really works (exposure, diaphragm, lighting conditions…

7. Extras

Measures to build a pinhole and more

How to make cardboard pinhole

Fotografia com lata

Fotografia com pinhole - tudo 

Pinhole com caixa de fósforo

Revelar Pinhole com café, mais fórmulas

A video about Cafenol

Develping B/W film

How to Pinhole

Pinhole Day website - Participate

Paper Pinhole download

More paper pinhole download

Comprar uma Ilford Pinhole

Or a  Zero Image Camera

Art is not design

WEEK8 - DAY 4

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Robert Smithson - projects

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Robert Smithson - He was an artist and not a designer. His The Spiral Jetty

Video Smithson made about it.

“At the time of Spiral Jetty’s construction, the water level of the lake was unusually low due to drought... Within a few years, the water level returned to normal, submerging the jetty for the next three decades... In 2002, the area experienced another drought, lowering the water level in the lake and revealing the jetty fora second time. The jetty remained completely exposed for almost a year.”

Three examples to learn from art:

Dan Flavin’s neons

Jean Dubuffet’s artificial garden

Tatsuo Miyajima’s leds

“Mirror, mirror, here I stand. Who is the fairest in the land?” Wilhelm Grimm

The Mirror Cage by Michelangelo Pistoletto.Jeppe Hein’s labyrinths? 

While in Mexico, Robert Smithson created the Yucatan Mirror Displacements by installing 12-inch-square mirrors on dispersed sites. The resulting series of nine color photographs was published in Artforum to accompany Smithson’s essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” The mirrors reflected and refracted the surrounding environments, displacing the solidity of the landscape and shattering its forms. (From the Course Letter)

"Part Earth work and part image, the displacements contemplate temporality; while the mirror records the passage of time, its photograph suspends time.”

6. Homework

Today, you will reflect. Starting from Robert Smithson’s work. His works with mirrors. Get a mirror (or maybe more than one), to place somewhere in your city. You will create new spaces, combine fragments of matter reflect on illusions, duality or multiplicity. To show (something) in a very clear way.
Generating new relations between space(s)...Setting up links. Coming up with reasons for. Today is to analyze an artist’s work (in this case, Robert Smithson’s mirrors), and using it as a starting ingredient for a project of yours. Designers we need some real (or invented) function. Tell us a consistent story. Layering
up the city, the mirrors and some necessity. How can we transform ingredients
taken from other fields into something meaningful and valuable for our purposes?

 3D Movie Experience in my room

A movie in my city - Splendor in the grass

7.EXTRAS

http://www.climbtherainbow.blogspot.co.uk/

HREINN FRIDFINNSSON

seokminko

A city in a box

WEEK8 - DAY3

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Amy Winehouse - You know I'm no good

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Wuppertal, Germany.

Not only does this city have the oldest monorail system in the world, it is floating in the air! A suspended monorail...

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

George Maciunas’s box - Maciunas was the one who conceived + triggered Fluxus, the international network of artists from the 1960s (which is in some extent, still active today).

George Maciunas - The Foundation

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

John Cage? Fluxus was born mainly because of him, and the concepts he was developing with his experimental music...

Marcel Duchamp, known for his “readymades”, works based on objects found in the street.

Fluxus transformed the meaning of what art could be.

Piano Activities (1962)

Three special works from the Fluxus people:

- the Street Theatre

- the special white Chess Board

- Mapping Tokyo

Lots of things inside the box - here

Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works - book by Erik Spiekermann’s where you get to understand how type works, and why it is a language.

Some pages

“Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality, it is one and all.” George Maciunas

Total Art Matchbox, Fluxus

Fluxkit, assembled by George Maciunas, Fluxus

6. Homework
You will create a box with objects taken from the city. You’ll set up a walk: where to go, a specific neighborhood or a random promenade. How long, how short, alone or with someone, directions, this and that. And then, you’ll record your exploration collecting some objects.

Events in flux you will select to be fixed in time.

- How to organize the box? Using these:

Figure of speech

Schemes

Tropes

- How to collect objects?

Using the adnomination trick.

Or you can use synecdoche. Analogy or archaism... Choose one of these schemes or tropes as a general rule.

Making a map

WEEK8- DAY 2

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Raglan Road - Sinnead O'Connor

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Ireland - a brief history of Ireland

Anthony Bourdain in Ireland

Connemara sculpture - the Labyrinth

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Richard Long

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

What's a map?
A petroglyph?
Map symbols?

World maps...
The blog of maps...

Bucky Fuller Dymaxion map 
Thematic maps
Map creation tools

Sara Princivalle shared on the platform yesterday a wonderful book about maps: Where You Are: A Collection of Maps That Will Leave You Feeling Completely Lost.


“I seek balance between the patterns of nature and formalism of abstract ideas like lines and circles...Walking, leaving footprints, fingerprints, it all has to
do with my body...Types of energy, the force of gravity...sharing the nature of these natural forces...” Richard Long

“I was part of the generation that did things because they seemed like a good
idea at the time, which they were.” (Richard Long)

Richard Long - A line made by walking

Land Art - Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s work. 

The surrounded islands, 1983

Covering Christo - site

“All my projects are some kind of flirt with nature and really, no one knows how to do Surrounded Islands, I tell my crew to improvise and use their creative abilities to solve problems; it is part of the piece.” -  Christo.


6. Homework no. 51 - We're halfway Design101!

You will first search for references of maps related to your city. While doing this, concentrate your attention on one particular place. What’s your favourite map you found? Why? Share it with us, we would love to see it!

Ready to make your own? Go for a walk in your city, marking / indicating the places which are most meaningful to you (in the way you consider most appropriate).

But then, the true heart of this exercise has to do with your map’s legend (the relationship between the symbols you will use and their meanings). Which symbols will your map have? Why don’t you invent your own set of symbols?
Once you have found a way to transform a part of your city into some kind of informational visual representation, share a picture of it with us!

7. Extras

Map of Porto
Mapping Sterotypes - Alpha design
40 different maps that they don't show you at schools
On Looking - Eleven walks with eyes experts - book (suggestion by Thomas Pitre)