asides, news

ITP Show-a-go-go

04.12.07 | Permalink

There's a lot going on here, but mostly, I'm knee-deep in the ITP Spring Show. I've got two projects in the show: The sustainable-energy-powered Door Secure, and the blogged-by-CNET and Gizmodo (g'head, click on games, do it -- and picture here), and MAKE -- Social ...

projects

Concrete Crickets

04.10.07 | Permalink

Graffiti is one of the most powerful and most personal displays in the urban experience, and can be used to make statements, tag territory, spread messages -- urban markup language in practice. However, the output is nearly always visual in nature, making this experience one-dimensional. Furthermore, rarely does the work ...

projects

Door Secure

03.19.07 | Permalink

This was something I'd worked on with my fellow ITPer Matt Burton, where we had spent three weeks working on this idea we'd had for harvesting the kinetic energy used to slide the doors on the ITP floor back and forth. As nearly all the classrooms on our ...

projects

Oven Prototype

02.03.07 | Permalink

This started as an assignment for Designing for Constraints, where we were tasked to examine a digital appliance that we deal with, analyze its usability, and suggest improvements. The example we looked at in class was an alarm clock, but as I don't have one (I'm the cellphone alarm type), I started looking around at other things in my apartment that confound me on a daily basis. The one that stuck out, and for very similar reasons to the clock, was my oven. This sounds like a stupid idea: it's an oven, it just heats stuff, right? No. This is an oven with a digital interface (complete with clock) and it annoys the hell out of me. I can never figure out how to get it to time and cook and such. I work with technology all day. I'm getting a master's degree in technology. I should not be bested by a cooking appliance, but yet, here I am writing about my struggles with it. This is the beast in question:

projects

ArborOptics

12.24.06 | Permalink

Having spent the entire second half of the semester focused on one single project for Physical Computing, it's very difficult to take a few steps back and try to recap the entire experience. However, as that's pretty much the whole point of presenting to an audience, ...