Week 17:
Applications and Implications ~ Final Project

Topics on this page

 1 - What's Fab Academy about? What's our Final Project process about?
 2 - The Final Project: A Pillow Alarm
  - inspirations & research
  - presentation of the idea
  - timeline
  - Sketches
 4 - Delineating: answering Neil's questions

The Pillow Alarm

What is the point of the final project of Fab Academy?

Final Project: the Pillow Alarm

Inspiration / research

Presentation of the Idea

Active workstation concept has transformed:
Shelf -> Seat -> cushion

Initial presentation on the cushion as a Google Slideshow

Timeline

Phase I:

Phase II:

Sketches

Dealing with ideas for how to form a shape for vibration, how the form will work, how to create a system to power and drive all the elements ...

Delineating

Table of Sources and Costs, see here.

Addressing Some Questions

Talks / Planetary Events

Mars' close approach: May 30, 2016

recitation: Sylvia Martinez

She talked about teaching. She affirmed what I've been thinking: the way I learned was all wrong, and it's high time to move on and get into a different style of pedagogy. It feels to me like the world is built from pedagogy, and pedagogy is design. It's an idea I encountered in a memorable article I read at Yale over twenty years ago, called Architecture as Pedagogy, by David W Orr (1993).

Given this, Ms Martinez's slide design was surprising.

Is the design style a reflection of Midwest aesthetics?

Nevertheless, this was a home run idea:

It's teaching history by getting a group to design a monument together. In needing to make decisions together to make something, kids need to discuss what it is meaningful to make.

Then, I was reading earlier this week about some things to help me contextualize what I am doing. I looked at a paper by Seymour Papert and Sherry Turkle (they were married! I didn't know). It was a 1990 paper encouraging computer culture to become more pluralistic ~ it's called "Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture." The fact that "the" computer culture sounds funny is an evident indication that the culture has expanded from the monoculture they describe. They talk about a top-down "planner" mentality being dominant, and instead encourage room for a "bricoleur" attitude that is in conversation with machines.
 "For planners, mistakes are missteps; for bricoleurs they are the essence of a navigation by mid-course corrections. For planners, a program is an instrument for premeditated control; bricoleurs have goals, but set out to realize them in the spirit of a collaborative venture with the machine. For planners, getting a program to work is like "saying one's piece"; for bricoleurs it is more like a conversation than a monologue."

Martinez offered some nice quotes from Papert:

IAAC lecture: Carlo Ratti

I love this guy. I have the feeling he is just curious and exploring ~ in an area where we normally attach a sense of fixity / permanence: architecture. He IS the expo expert, the paragon of the mind of "Expo."

While talking, Ratti showed a pic of big data used for taxi pick-ups. This research led to the creation of UberPool.
Next, they are looking into how to get people to pool with others they might like. It's blending Tinder and Grinder and Uber.