Category Archives: design

Postcard A Day for March 2018

creativity, design, Media,

A couple creative threads are coming together this month:

First: I am doing a keynote for a couple librarian groups in Virginia and want to spend some time introducing them to the Digital Public Library of America. It is a portal to digital library collections and a wonderful way into primary sources. Plus, because the media comes from many organizations, it is also an opportunity to talk about copyright. But I also want to give the participants some creative ideas for what to do with the media.

Second: I participate sporadically in the work of ds106’s The Daily Create and CLMOOC and love the way they spark my creativity. March is CLMOOC’s Postcard Remix month. Pretty simple idea: Create postcards and mail them to those who sign up.

Put them together and you get my plan for creating a postcard every day of March. I haven’t picked a theme, but it is Women’s History Month so that’s a good starting point.

Postcard #1:

Woman on Bike

 

 

Missing the Point

design, technology, tinkering,

I missed the point of today’s Google Doodle because I was so busy looking at the gears and never saw the monster’s head above water. One of my current making projects is to build an automaton. I want to use it to make my Strawbees amusement park ride turn around:

Amuse Yourself

I have two prototypes but neither one works very well. I started with this post from Makezine and then checked out the Exploratorium site as well. I think my main issue is with using kabob skewers that are hard to attach to the cam and cam follower. I’m on the hunt for bamboo skewers and will also dig out the glue gun to just make everything a bit sturdier.

happy birthday, tdc

creativity, design, Photography, Video,

I started with tdc6: Create an audio of two sounds not normally heard together. I created Chicken TV.

In honor of the first year, I made the gift I pictured: a short slide show of photos taken as part of the daily create along with one of my other audio projects. The prompt was to make an audio recording of using an everyday object as a musical instrument. I chose chickens and made the chicken drum circle.

Thanks to the people who work hard to make the daily create exist. You helped me be just a little bit more creative…to stop and listen and look at my world and create from the materials around me.

tobias

art, design

tobias

Tobias Wong’s website

The artist/designer was featured in an NPR story recently:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5548745

In the blurb about the audio story, he is referred to as an “industrial designer” and an “artist” and the short description of him at his website suggests that he is blurring the lines between design and art.  One press clipping suggests he is using design as his medium.  But Dewey would say that we need to look at the complete package rather than trying to separate out elements.

I think there’s a bit of culture jamming going on here, too, particularly the piece called this is a lamp, which turns a Phillipe Starke Bubble Club Chair into a lamp.  He invokes the name of Marcel Duchamp, who famously signed a urinal, hung it upside down on a gallery wall and called it a fountain.  Wong calls the chair READYDESIGNED because it is the famous chair that makes the piece work.

His piece called stoop is a redesigned entry step into a doorway with pebbles that cause shifting, particularly–as he points out–for those with high heels: http://www.brokenoff.com/stoop.html