Over the summer, I became more familiar with the socio-political structures that heavily influenced the work of the Italian Renaissance artists. In particular, the outsized influence of the Medici in the Republic of Florence. The Medici family came into their fortunes through banking and used those fortunes to “control” the area. Lavin (“David’s Sling and Michelangelo’s Bow”) writes that David, besides being an abstract autobiography of Michaelangelo overcoming the difficulties of working with that piece of marble, is actually a commentary on the “Medici-Goliath” (Lavin, 1990 p.140). This Goliath was a threat to the Republican nature of Florence that Michelangelo supported. With all of this political meaning overflowing from the statue, I’m not sure that most contemporary Florentines would have understood the message of David beyond the basic biblical reference. ...

I have come to believe that art is a patina on deliberate, creative craft. Not all art begins as art and works that are intended to be art may not turn out as such. I also believe that craft becomes art within and outside of the context of the artifact; in order to understand the artifact, it is important to understand its context. I was fascinated by Baxandall’s (1972) chapter “Conditions of trade” for two reasons: the early Renaissance artists’ almost mundane experiences with contracts and deliverables, and the relationship of patrons to artists (I am using the word “artists”, but my interpretation of the reading is they were more like higher-end, celebrity craftspeople in their time). I had not really thought of Renaissance painters as working for hire in the same way that a Web developer or graphic designer might work today. As someone who has been hired and hired others, the idea that the clients regularly provided the higher end items, such as the gold leaf and the ultramarine, was completely foreign to me. In fact, the idea of the artist not having complete control of the artifact from concept to execution but having to rectify the client’s ideas with innovative techniques, is the first reason why I think art is a patina on creative craftsmanship. ...

I have a hunch design as a profession would go a lot farther if more designers embraced ambiguous constraints. — Raphael Arar (@rarar) February 16, 2021 I saw this tweet yesterday and it has been in my head ever since. This is a major problem I see in both new and mid-level designers. In new designers, I understand how ambiguous constraints and ambiguous goals could be problematic for them as they don’t have the experience to break a problem down or, more difficult, begin to see what the real problem is. ...

15-Minute City Could Be Coming to an Urban Area Near You - Bloomberg

I have been using a Monoprice MPSelect Mini for four years as my main 3D printer. It is a great printer but has a very small print bed. One of the things I’d like to do is print larger objects to mix fashion design and interaction design, so, I’d like a 1m cube printer. However, those don’t exist and I knew I’d have to build it myself. Having no experience with “building” 3d printers, I decided to follow an online tutorial and create one from scratch. ...

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The University of Baltimore’s Digital Whimsy Lab is proud to announce the release of our KidsTeam Co-Design Toolkit. This toolkit can aid design teams in the creation of co-design activities that enable children and adults to work together. Even though the original target audience was libaries and librarians, we think the content is a valuable resource for any team that wants to design with kids and aren’t sure where to start. ...

I’ve been reconfiguring my desk to accomodate my research, design, and teaching work. One of the favorite features of my home office is the two giant walls with whiteboard “paint”. Of course, the big downside to walls of white boards instead of framed white boards is the lack of a tray for the markers. I’ve tried to keep them on my desk but I kept losing them. I decided to build a marker holder to help. I plan on sticking it to the wall with command strips. ...

As of January 21st, Flash is dead. I made my career creating Flash (and Director!) interactions. I remember in Spring semester of 1998 staying up through the night to learn how to mimic the look of GaboCorp’s all Flash site. Fast forward ten years and I had moved from agency work to being an internal designer at Black & Decker. I was generating dozens and dozens of instructional videos that got placed in online learning courses for the sales force. I was deep into learning AppleScript to automate different parts of work flows (mostly resizing graphics, converting audio, etc) and wondered if I could drop the videos I was making in Final Cut Pro and Compressor into a script that would convert to (at the time) standard FLV files. I finally found a solution using the traditionally Linux-based tool FFmpeg, it’s OSX shareware-version, and some AppleScript shell scripts. I wrote what I came up with at Using Applescript and FFmpeg (through ffmpegX) to create Flash Video Files (FLV). ...

This set of wings is really a harness for outdoor adventure. I really like this example of design because it not only functions, but, it makes the target audience (children) interested in what it does (safety). Kids want to wear it because it is cool.