beansprouts – (pl. n.) tiny thoughts from the brain of a Tinabeans
One way or another, this summer I ended up writing a bunch of code. Along the way, I learned a lot about learning to code (Meta-learning? Douglas Hofstadter would be proud). Should you also choose to wander down the dao of if statements and breakpoints, here are some tips for the journey. (Warning: May be…
What do you do when, three weeks into your internship, you are given the task of redesigning a dropdown menu for a site that’s about to be launched? My knee-jerk reaction was to simply “jump on it.” “Jumping on it” was a term used copiously at my last job. What it meant was to dispatch…
It’s been a week since my first year of grad school has ended, and I’m still trying to make sense of what just happened. It’s definitely been a roller coaster ride, and probably the hardest I’ve worked in my entire life. (This is saying something, because there was a time not so long ago when…
I want to do this. My favorite parts: morning question “put things in their places” evening question I also want to take this as an opportunity to work in some habits I want to develop, e.g. exercise, writing and reflection on the day’s events. What would my old man schedule look like? Here is a provisional,…
Last week, we began our Thesis Preparation seminar with Liz Danzico. After a great lecture on the merits of improvisation and keen observation skills, among other things, we were given our first assignment: to prepare a framework, or “pseudo-structure” (as Frank Chimero calls it), for a creative endeavor. (The assignment itself, in fact every assignment,…
Today, I woke up confused. Something I had read the previous night had been bothering me. It wasn’t clear what it was until I had fully transitioned into wakefulness; then I realized that while I lay there trying my hardest to start the day, a man in Oregon was patiently waiting to end his life….
Last week in BERG’s workshop, we brainstormed ideas for ways to redesign thermostats. Here’s what my teammates, Kristin Breivik and Carrie Stiens, and I came up with. It’s a quick-n-dirty paper prototype for a thermostat concept that encourages you to keep your energy consumption lower than that of your neighbors: Check out the complete post…
This week we had an amazing workshop at school with Matt Jones and Jack Schulze from BERG, a design partnership in London. What made this workshop so amazing was that, for the first time in months, I felt like we were given license to actually go crazy and have fun. (Do not underestimate the import of these…
I’ve been thinking a lot about these two guys lately, as I’ve been rather busy in the past months trying to acquire a lot of them both. I’ve come to the conclusion that, in order to be happy, I must have an equal balance of both. In school, and this school in particular, we are…
The Serial Lab will go down in SVA IxD Physical Computing history as the easiest/shortest lab ever! Because I worked on it with Chris who has so done a great job of documenting it, there is no need to rehash how it went here. Instead, I’ll tell you all about the exciting fantastic adventures of…