party shout

dude! I met the people who own Engraveyard. In fact, i sold them carved pumpkins for Halloween . . .
Very nice couple. They made fun of cmu kids, said we always got serious things engraved, like awards and such. While the Pitt kids wanted fun things like shot glasses.

moving sign.

asian film festival next month... LETS GO! (i worked on some parts of the website)

I almost forgot...

Hey Eli! In the partymode living somewhere (next to the fishtank?) there should be a plastic bag with a hooka pipe. I left it there for you! Methinks there's even some tobacco in there.

also, you guys may have noticed that I left the mattress and a comforter and a pillow in my old room. I figured it can be a guestroom. Hope that's okay with you...I'll cart them away in July if you don't want them anymore.

a photodocumentary of my day:

http://www.theamazingrolo.net/april12/

CAUTION: may be boring as hell. but there's a page in there for you designer-techie folk.

Here's a long quote from an interview with the CMU CS dean in popcity (www.popcity.com). He talks about self-assembling nanobots, not really a new idea, but he talks about couches and chairs and so on being made from these bots. It struck me that in 30 years, ID may be more about programming nanobots into beautiful (etc.) shape.

Anyway here's the long quote:
The most out-of-the-box thinking, says Bryant, is nanotechnology dubbed Claytronics that could recreate a 3-D structure in a remote site--say, your home office--from teleoperations at the source--let's say corporate headquarters. “It has interesting teleconferencing capability; you could see a person’s head on a table (instead of a screen) in 3D,” Bryant offers although even he admits, “It would take getting used to.”

If you find that hard to envision, try this: that same glowing 3D whole-body replica of a person, with light-emitting diodes and photo cells on its electromagnet surface, that allows it to move, touch and see. In the ultimate conference call, these nanotech robots could be built for each person in an organization for meetings that are always, and perhaps eerily, face-to-face.

Or consider a space-age house call from your physician. The lifesize replica, controlled remotely by the doctor, would be right there with you, talking, probing and examining you. For this to work, a replica of you would be at the doctor's office so the actual doctor would be examining, in real time,the nanorobot recreation of you. How wild is that--and how is it (remotely) possible? Through catoms, or Claytronic atoms, billions of tiny computers in one robotic recreation. When the exam is over, you and the physician would "disassemble," leaving behind a pile of Claytronics.

This is, literally, out of the box thinking that takes modular robots to the extreme. Imagine video figures appearing--in action mode—right there in your great room instead of in a confining television. Or the ability to program shapes and designs with these catoms, and morph a chair, for instance, into a sofa. "The end result is very cool," says Carnegie Mellon assistant professor Seth Goldstein, "but the essence is trying to manage complexity management--a billion computers working together to do one task. And that's the science behind it."

I am straight-up rocking the Max/MSP so hard.

art based on survey results from different countries. In general, I like the least wanted paintings more than the most wanted paintings

the apple human interface guidelines are good reading.

Mike Jones from Smart Design posted an e-mail to the ixda list that I'll selectively quote from below. if you want the whole e-mail, let me know and I'll forward it.

"I work at a product design company filled with designers looking to develop products that are less damaging and more environmentally friendly, but for the most part, interaction designers are stuck on the sidelines developing interfaces and screens that don't have any of the material or manufacturing choices of industrial designers. This has been frustrating-- I hate feeling like I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Obviously, the most environmentally friendly product we can create is no product at all, and often interaction design is better at this than industrial design when we are able to turn a product into a
service. I'm going to go ahead and make a sweeping generalization
that interaction design is more sustainable than other forms of design, but I refuse to believe that our work is done and we simply need to keep doing what we're doing. "

Hmmmm... I don't buy it. Product may often use less power than their sevice counterparts due to the delivery channel of the service. Often, a product can enable an individual to do something that could only previously be performed by a service, reducing overall energy expendetures.

Anyway, he has a good part later on about how sustainability is not just about power consumption:

"Do we resist putting "print" buttons on websites? Do we aim for smaller applications because down the road this means less storage devices and less electricity used to transport all those bytes? Should our sustainable concerns focus on social issues, like the social benefits of community software, universal information access, and self-empowerment? Should we be building power consumption meters into every product's interface?

What are the best practices of sustainable interaction design?"

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