THANK YOU ALL
Amazing guest lecturers. from Entrepreneurial Design Class. School of Visual Arts.
Many thanks to our heroes, Gary & Christina!
Click here for bigger picture
Source: minseungsong
How much is one hour of human intelligence worth?
I spent one hour as a worker at Mechanical Turk a few weeks ago. The service is named after an 18th century mechanical chess-playing device housed in a wooden mannequin decked out in Turkish garb, built by a Hungarian nobleman. Naive spectators were told that the machine made decisions using artificial intelligence, when in actuality a chess master hidden inside actually did the thinking.
Amazon outsources work that computers aren’t able to do themselves, like writing blog posts and tag them afterwords or categorizing images. Some of the tasks pay only a few cents per minute, and I already felt that my qualities as a worker was highly overlooked. I decided to look for a task that could learn me something new instead of making me rich. One post by last.fm stood out because it would give you music recommendations based on a artist you claimed to like, and I thought this would be a good way to get to know new music. However, for some unknown reason I was rejected to do this work. Being disapproved to perform work worthy 50 cents didn’t feel great.
But, I didn’t give up because a computer insulted me. I came across a multiple choice test about how people use music to relax or energize themselves. The test was interesting to begin with because it asked about things I was looking into myself at that point for a school assignment. But the further I got into the 100 questions, I started to realize that the same questions repeated themselves but with slight changes to the syntax. I figured that this was so that they could test the consistency of the performer to see if the results were reliable or not. Realizing this made me so conscious about what I had answered earlier, and I don’t think I always responded my with a unbiased first reaction. Since so many of the questions lacked any context or room for explanation, I wasn’t able to communicate the insights I think would have been valuable. I ended up feeling that my answers became more and more random, and that they might as well save the 60 cents and use a robot for the task…
Connecting the cheese
Wonderful things have happened since the word about The Cheese Map came out. I’ve gotten in touch with cheese enthusiasts from all over the world, and already learned a lot more about strange and exotic cheeses I hadn’t heard of before. Doing a Kickstarter turns out to be a great way to reach out to other people with your ideas. Cheese schools have contacted me and asked me if I want to collaborate with them or teach classes on the overlap between food and art. I’ve gotten the feedback I needed to take this work further.
Through Twitter I’ve gotten in touch with enthusiastic cheese bloggers. We’ve shared jokes and cheese facts, and one of them even got back to me after a couple of days with a map of New Zealand he had made out of electron microscope photos of a local blue cheese. He told me I had inspired him to make it, so now I even have a NZ ambassador that inspires me back.
I also reached out to Mike Geno, a talented artist that paints portraits of cheese. He was recently featured in The New York Times for his work, and this is how I got to know him. We obviously share the passion for cheese, but we also realized that we have the same mission about discovering cultures through food, even if the modes of expression are different. As he was heads down with new commissions lately and I am wrapping up my spring semester, we agreed to meet sometime over the summer to talk more about each others work. Looking forward to it.
Oh, and I also have to mention the awesome cheese hat I got from one of my backers. That made my day!
These are countries constructed out of the cheeses that have originated from them. This is The Cheese Map project, where you can get one of these maps for your very own. It just launched — go and say hello!
Thanks for blogging about my project, but here is the correct link:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thecheesemap/the-cheese-map
Source: kickstarter
A tribute to cheese
I’ve had a fascination for cheese for as long as I can remember. When I grew up, there was pretty much two types of cheese on my table: “the brown cheese” and “the yellow cheese”. The first one was sweet and the latter a mild, but salty kind of cheese. For a couple of years, my perception of cheese was therefore divided into these two directions.
As I grew older and started to explore what other things I could put on my bread, I discovered the fascinating world of blue cheese and sharper cheese made of goat’s milk. My tastebuds got excited, and ever since I’ve been curious to try out the local cheeses whenever I travel to a new place.
Which brings me to The Cheese Map.
Behind this rich variety of cheese, there are fascinating stories about where each one of them originate from. I started to make graphic illustrations of this, and I got immersed in how the cheese textures take the place of a country’s topography. Deep blue rivers occur and new mountain ranges rise.
The Cheese Map project has just hatched. I really want to explore more cheeses and try to create a world map to see the interesting similarities between cheese traditions in different cultures. My Kickstarter campaign will eventually help me realize this.
-The Brown Cheese of Norway-
Manhattan’s spring mood-board.
So poetic! I love seeing how other people choose to capture the same sights
(via entrepreneurdesigners)
Source: sanarao
Beautiful video on silent letters in a language made by Manas Karambelkar, Momo Miyazaki and Kenneth A. Robertsen at CIID, Copenhagen.
How much of a language is silent? What does it look like when you take the silence out? Can we use code as a tool to answer these questions?
silenc is a tangible visualization of an interpretation of silent letters within Danish, English and French.
One of the hardest parts about language learning is pronunciation; the less phonetic the alphabet, the harder it is to correctly say the words. A common peculiarity amongst many Western languages is the silent letter. A silent letter is a letter that appears in a particular word, but does not correspond to any sound in the word’s pronunciation.
A selection of works by Hans Christian Andersen is used as a common denominator for these “translations”. All silent letters are set in red text. When viewed with a red light filter, these letters disappear, leaving only the pronounced text.
Source: vimeo.com
Why is everyone making physical products?
Lauren Leto, co-founder of Texts from Last Night and Banters raised this question in last week’s class of Entrepreneurial Design. Our final assignment is to make $1,000, and it became evident that all 14 of us seem to go in the direction of projects involving physical products.
I think the main reason is that the value of objects with a weight and feel is still much more apparent to most of us, which makes it easier to deal with. The way you earn money off of digital products is different. Reading a blog or using social networks is free, and we are moving in a direction where most content is open and people can participate on levels of an experience without being charged. Whereas the value of digital products is measured in currencies like clicks and time spent looking at something, you rarely use a physical object before you have paid for it. To figure out how much money you can make of a digital product, you need a strategy for how to monetize and convert these metric into potential revenue.
I’ve realized that there are other ways to make money than putting up banner ads on your website, as long as you have a big enough number of people using your product. But given the limited time frame, this road seems to be a more unpredictable one to reach the $1,000 goal, than the more traditional sale of physical products. It’s easier to sell umbrellas for one hour and estimate how many you have to sell in order to earn enough money.
But, a higher risk also means higher rewards if you succeed. And the organic way that digital products are spread, has advantages over products that require a cumbersome manufacturing process or hours of hand crafting. Of course there’s a lot of prosperous businesses where physical and digital products overlap. But the biggest takeaway I’ve gotten from entrepreneurs like Lauren Leto and swissmiss, is that building a sustainable framework for a digital product can sustain other side projects. This insight has made me rethink business models, and will become valuable for my further work.
My super creative engineer friend Ragnar recently introduced me to one of his latest projects - the Drawer Bot. Some algorithms on a computer tell the device where to scribble (coordinates) and at what intensity (number of pixels) based on a digital file. The pen moves diagonally and the effect resembles the style of an old school letterpress. You can simply insert any pen and have it draw any picture or piece of text you want. With basic code, you can set it up so that tweets and photos can be sent directly to the Drawer Bot. I love it!
Time travelling
About a year ago, I spent both days and nights making the 18 pairs of shoes for Fam Irvoll’s fashion collection. I had so much fun doing this, and it was a really good break from the work I was doing at that time. While I was sanding what was to become the heels, I was wondering where I would find myself the following year. I knew that I really wanted to go to New York, and I was anticipating letters from the schools I had applied to. One year later, I’m a part of this amazing city and I can look back at the younger me and tell myself that I made the right choice.
Now, I find myself in a new situation where I need to have a one-year perspective. Thesis is coming up. One year from now, I will be looking back at this time when I was standing on the edge of it, before anything was settled. It is a liberating, yet daunting feeling that I don’t know yet what will occupy most of my mind the next 12 months. This time I need to structure the path so that I know I will land my work in time and along the way be able to dive into the parts that is more interesting to me and should represent my work when I graduate. I am looking forward to the unexpected events that will come up and make choices that will take me places I don’t know about yet.
Back to the dusty workshop where I was molding and sanding shoes one year ago. The collection I worked on back then, was for the winter season 2012. Fam Irvoll’s collection was inspired by Madmen, which is blowing up again right now as the new season starts airing this week. A good way to round off the past year and look ahead at a new one.
This makes me wanna draw
When strangers become humans
It’s early morning and I’m on the subway. Everyone in the carriage is looking empty out in the air in front of them and trying to keep to themselves. Suddenly, a cup of coffee flies through the air and lands on my lap. The woman next to me looks just as surprised as I probably did, and we both start giggling at the same time as she excuses herself (or her coffee cup) and I am a little bothered because this is a big day for me. After a lot of “sorry”s and “dont worry”s, we both conclude that it was a good thing that my coat was black.
Later that evening as I get off the subway on my way home, I pull up my phone to respond to a text message. I pay more attention to my phone than the pavement underneath me and end up hitting the ground moments later. A girl runs over to me and ask me if I’m allright. She grabs my hand and helps me up while I point out how stupid it is to text while you’re walking. “It can happen to anyone” she says and gets me on my feet. I hope I remembered to thank her before we walked off our separate ways.
In between this, I had several interesting conversations with people I had not met before up until this day. But unlike the very random interactions that my day both started out and ended with, those conversations were anticipated. I find the moment when people pass the threshold from being complete strangers to show that they care about each other so fascinating. Even if I’m not a big fan of getting coffee spilled over me or bruising my knee, it is almost worth it.
I’ve always been curious about the small triggers that make people show empathy for each other. Identifying these is also something I’m working on for one of my projects at the time. Unexpected situations like the ones I just described, are also the best way to reveal people’s personality. Our immediate response says more about us than anything else.
There is an inverse relationship between control and trust — the more you give away, the more you get back in return
Making magic
I acknowledge the ideation stage of a project to be part magic, part hard work. Some of my former professors banned words like “idea” and “brain storming” in a design context because they don’t tell the story of all the hard work involved in the design process. An idea is only a starting point and hours of prototyping and iterations are what actually allows it to become a good design. But the concept development phase is fascinating to me because of its serendipities.
In my individual creative process I can feel blinded and too biased to judge the potential of my own ideas. That’s why I enjoy working in teams, because you get your ideas tested and you really need to fight for their right to get to the next stage before you get too attached to them. This of course relies on being on a solid team. Deficient group dynamics kills creativity while good dynamics fosters it. Too many compromises will not let an idea grow properly, at the same time as you don’t stretch the ideas far enough if everyone involved has the same opinion.
Having a good variety of point of views among people with the same engagement, is generally a good starting point for ideation. The moment when you recognize a great idea starting to emerge and everyone in the room adds something to it and the idea just keeps spinning until everyone just cries out “Yes! Let’s do this”, is pretty magical. It is also a big advantage for the further teamwork if everyone feels like they were a part of the creation.
It’s hard to identify what contributes to these magic breakthroughs. Even the dynamics between people are unpredictable because mood is a huge variable. My classmate Tom Harman mentioned a theory about how the height inside a room affects your mind. According to this theory, you should pick a room with high ceilings if you’re dealing with concepts on a higher level, and lower ceilings if your problem solving is supposed to take place on a more detailed level. This turned out to work pretty well the 1 out of 1 time we tested it.
All though I could really need to know the recipe for successful ideation in time constrained situations, I guess not knowing this is something I really appreciate. It allows magic to happen when you least expect it.
