HowStuffisMade

What is HowStuffisMade? Who makes it?

“HowStuffisMade (HSIM) is a visual encyclopedia that documents manufacturing processes, labor conditions and environmental impacts involved in the production of contemporary products. Entries are summative photo essays produced by students who are guided by faculty responsible for ensuring appropriate citations and standards of evidence. Students engage the cooperation of manufacturers when possible. As an independent, academic, wiki-based publication, HSIM reconsiders engineering and design education as fundamentally connected to the social and political constraints, organizational innovations and global context that inform manufacturing decisions.”

Natalie Jeremijenko is the Principal Investigator for HSIM. She is a design engineer and technoartist.

HSIM is part of the Writing in the Information Age Curriculum at New York University.

What changes when an essay is a visual essay?

via xdesign

“That visual essays are potentially “read” by more people, more quickly, and contain “more” information, is a reasonable claim, moreover that we live in a visual culture. Why then, in this powerpoint age, don’t we learn the craft of “writing” visual essays at schools and universities in the cross disciplinary manner that we learn written essays? What is a visual essay; just some snaps in temporal order; your photos album up on flickr? What are the techniques used by visual culture production professionals, and how do these strategies adapt to the web; and to the analysis of how stuff is made.

Lana Bernberg, a commercial and documentary television cinematographer, photographer and director before her graduate degree in Environmental Education, and joining the HowStuffisMade project, provides an introduction to storyboarding and how to plan shots to capture critical aspects of production, manufacturing and the art of documentation.
How do you depict industrial contaminants that might be health and safety risks?
How do you “see” the weight of the materials someone lifts? What is the quality of the social relationships at work? How do you depict the materials that come from 6 different countries? Much of the story of production is hard to see, yet important to translate into visual form.”

see her movie on using solar powered energy in the jungle.

The Scriptless Society

Francisco van Jole describes the disappearance of the story in our society where scripts have been discarded for constant observation of experience… Reality TV stalks the ones who desire fame and unravels those who have already fallen from the spotlight (Osbournes). Or hyperlinking skips the contextualisation of plot, climax, introduction of character, instead we go straight to a punchline of facts “everything relies on the summary that refers to more”.

Was 1888 the beginning of this ‘experience culture’ with George Eastman’s marketing of the Kodak Camera?

read article

via xdesign

Our cell phones, ourselves

Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase talks at TED

His investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. Along the way, he’s made some unexpected discoveries: about the novel ways illiterate people interface with their cellphones, or the role the cellphone can sometimes play in commerce, or the deep emotional bonds we all seem to share with our phones. And watch for his surefire trick to keep you from misplacing your keys.

via TED

Zcam 3D Camera

ZCam 3D Camera is Like Wii without Wiimote and Minority Report Without Gloves.

via Gizmodo

The ZCam is the first low-cost, consumer videocamera that can capture video with depth information and probably the first real challenger to Nintendo’s Wiimote: with its 3D capture abilities it will allow you to play Wii-style without using any controls whatsoever. In fact, it is so precise that it will even recognize your finger gestures to fire a weapon or manipulate your computer like in Minority Report, but without gloves or any other external device:

Johnny Chung Lee

Johnny Chung Lee’s site features a range of projects using wii remote projects, $14 steadycam, giant paint balloon slingshot, projector calibration, brain-computer interaction, kinetic typography, electric cello,…

See also his thesis: Projector-Based Location Discovery and Tracking

“The primary use of projection technology today is for creating large flat displays that provide a shared viewing experience for presentations or entertainment…”

For productive distractions visit his blog procrastineering

Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote

Since the Wiimote can track sources of infrared (IR) light, you can track pens that have an IR led in the tip. By pointing a wiimote at a projection screen or LCD display, you can create very low-cost interactive whiteboards or tablet displays. Since the Wiimote can track upto 4 points, up to 4 pens can be used. It also works great with rear-projected displays.