The Exhibition also marked the unveiling of new projects from several members of An Inconvenient Studio. Morpho Luminescence by Adam, Elizabeth, and Kyle was pictured but not quite into the prototype stage. Reflex by Eric Brockmeyer (prototype on the right) used Arduino Processing and muscle wire to translate stimuli from the observer into motion. The Exhibition was open for 3 weeks at the CAP Indy Center. On a personal note, I just made the move back to Indianapolis (from Boston after 5 great years!). I'm excited to be back, and I look forward to making my mark on the landscape here. |
At the end of my semester in An Inconvenient Studio (Spring 2009), we held an Exhibition of our work in Indianapolis. The opening was open to the public and orders could be placed for hard copies of The Publication we planned to complete the following summer. This is my last post for now about the work that I did with An Inconvenient Studio back in 2009 since I finally have a sufficient amount of material on the Projects Page to peruse. Coming up will be some more recent personal work.
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For me, the end of my semester with An Inconvenient Studio and the following summer was spent putting together the final draft of The Publication, a book we made available in hard copy for donors that outlined the progression of the studio and our exploration of responsive systems. Orders were taken at The Exhibition we held in Indianapolis. The work combined the use of Adobe Illustrator for creating unique infographics and Adobe InDesign for layout.
Chronologically, Arcus Animus would be the next and (for me at least) last project physically built by An Inconvenient Studio. After a grueling week of manning the laser cutters round the clock to cut the hundreds of plexiglass pieces, we were joined by Bradley Rothenberg from the Pratt Institute and Philip Beesley from the University of Waterloo. Starting on a Friday morning and continuing through the weekend, we assembled, programmed, and installed Arcus Animus on the first floor of the College of Architecture and Planning. A flexible acrylic mesh attached to the exposed ceiling structure of the space is mounted with a series of solenoids and air muscles. When an inhabitant is detected underneath, arduino processors dictate which solenoids fire to follow him around the space. Attached to the mesh layer above is an undulating layer of mylar feathers on the end of bamboo shafts. This layer magnifies the small movement made by the solenoids and effectively sends a ripple through the cloud of feathers.
Animus The basic impulses or instincts which govern one's actions; a feeling of enmity, animosity, or ill-will; the masculine aspect of the feminine psyche or personality. It was a grueling weekend, but at the end, Arcus Animus became an example for the community of how responsive systems can encourage curiosity and innovation. It was talked about by everyone moving through the building for the rest of the semester and drew a lot of attention to the work An Inconvenient Studio was doing in robotics.
The middle of the semester that I spent in An Inconvenient Studio was given over to more open-ended exploration. While I mostly concentrated on putting together The Publication, some of the other members continued their exploration into stronger robotic systems than those found in the Lego Mindstorms kits we started with. Here's a quick summary of each and links to more info.
Publication Sample up nextI'm working on splitting up the Publication that we worked on to exhibit An Inconvenient Studio's work over the semester. I'll be posting a couple samples here soon.
‘Lucid Food’, a cookbook focusing on seasonal dishes, by Louisa Shafia continues the themes of social responsibility and nutrition in a different way. Rather than focus on how we can distance ourselves from an over-consuming society, she offers tactics to decrease our ecological impact when making decisions at the market since so few of us have the means to completely remove ourselves from consumerism. As the title implies, simply being more aware of these choice can have a huge impact on the environment, your body, and your wallet. Buying organic has become a fix-all for many Americans wanting to do their part with as little work as possible, but the truth of the matter is that the Organic label only guarantees limited pesticide and fertilizer use. Instead, Shafia suggests that buying local and in season is a better way to promote a sustainable food cycle. When you buy in-season produce, less energy is used to transport it from its tropical growing place to your table and is always fresher (often cheaper) and higher quality.
Gorilla GardeningAs a designer, I strive to always keep environmental conditions at the forefront of my process, but it really can't stop there. If we want to outrun the impending environmental crisis, it will take a massive paradigm shift. Constant consciousness in our day-to-day life is incredibly important and one easy decision we can all make is to take the food we eat seriously. And I say not only that, but let's start taking the limited space we have on this planet (given population levels worldwide) more seriously as well. I say why not use the unwanted, discarded remnants of the urban fabric and make some real food.
It's certainly possible to achieve a moderate level of accuracy using only Sketchup since one is able to type in specific lengths, offset distances, and pull distances and Osnap is automatically configured for integration with the surface-based technology. Though speed and accuracy are possible, I found it harder and harder to go back to using it regularly as I got more experience with Rhino. A wider array of commands and a better system for manipulation make Rhino capable of anything Sketchup can do plus a lot you couldn't even imagine before picking it up. The real kicker is that I don't find Rhino slower or more cumbersome to use than Sketchup now that I've developed a defined process for building a model and learned the hotkeys for all of my go-to commands. Navigating 3-dimensional space in Sketchup is fairly easy with a mouse as you can use the wheel zoom in and out and move your view origin along 2-dimensions. The Orbit command is mapped to 'O' on the keyboard. When selected, you can manipulate the position of the view around your model with the left button or pan with the right. Maybe it's only personal preference but Rhino's approach feels a lot more intuitive to me. The Orbit function is always accessible using the right mouse button (right click is the same as repeating the last command) and holding the shift key at the same time enable Panning. Not to mention, allowing multiple Viewports in a single window is far simpler that interrupting a command to enable Orbit.
creating 6 separate planes and corresponding edges rather than an object. From a selection standpoint, what's going to be easier to handle, clicking on a single polysurface or selecting each individual surface? I won't even get into the customization options for Rhino as they are nearly endless and incredibly powerful. It was this last bit that really got to me when I heard from the client that a major design issue had surfaced. In researching sites, they found a great option with only one giant setback: it's only 2/3 the width of the original design. With a dwelling that's already so small, it would be impossible to simply scale it onto the site. Instead, I had to rearrange the spaces a bit. The bedrooms and full bath are now located down a short hall from the living area, allowing for a bit more quiet and privacy, and a half-bath was placed just off the living space for convenience. The new shape required creative use of the floor-to-ceiling windows found throughout the original design. More on Rhino 3DThe first isn't quite done yet but keep checking the Tutorials page for more details on using Rhinoceros 3D modelling software.
It might be hard to believe, but there are limits to the work that can be accomplished using training-level robotic components. The LEGO Mindstorms kits worked well at a small scale as a test for creating emergent behavior in robotics, but the next project undertaken by An Inconvenient Studio aimed to ramp it up and create a prototype installation based on the sensing technology including in our kits. Emoting into Architecture
Exhibition and The PublicationI'll add some new pics and videos of Shout soon and share a bit about the exploits of the other members of An Inconvenient Studio during our prototyping phase. I'm also in the process of putting together a post on both the exhibition held in Indianapolis at the end of the semester and the book that we designed over the following summer.
It's really tough for me to go back through the old files on my hard-drive from school without getting hung up on everything I could have done better looking back with more experience. In the infuriatingly obvious words of one professor: 'everything could be better'. That's really true for everything created by any discipline or the world would come to a grinding halt. I don't want that for myself, so I've been slowly working through older projects, posting images, and working on some brand new assets for each.
Already having each drawing accurate to a tee and at the same scale, there's no reason not to just open them in Rhino and get my modeling fix for the day. Tutorials Coming Soon
The thing that makes it so amazing (and revolutionary in the '60s) is that those cells are acting completely independently from one another and not taking cues from a few specialized cells which is how it works throughout the rest of Biology. Instead, these 'mindless' entities are identical to one another, merely sensing the conditions of their immediate surroundings and producing more or less AMP as a result with no knowledge that doing so will create something greater. Put simply, Emergence is any case of high level organization coming out of an aggregation of lower level actions. The Slime Mold case study was really the first recognition of Self-Organization outside of the study of Physics. No longer confined to the realms of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, the study of Self-Organization began to look at other systems, like neighborhood formation and politics. I would argue that evidence of Emergent Behavior can be found in Architecture at all scales and is even more prevalent in less than formal settlements like those found outside of Nairobi Kenya. Typically referred to as a slum, Kibera emerged out of a need for homes and infrastructure as urban population growth exploded in Nairobi.
Emergence into the FutureIt didn't take long for those studying Emergent Behavior to realize computer science would be the future for their discipline. They began to see programming as a way to encourage and manipulate self-organization, and they were successful in replicating the Slime Mold phenomenon very early on. In the past couple decades, digital systems have become more and more entwined in our everyday lives and most of those systems rely on the concept of assigning simple rules to simple agents in order to produce a more complex end. It's important to remember that aggregation is not necessarily the same as complexity. In the case of the omnipresent Google (see also: any search engine, internet radio, shopping site, etc.) algorithm, simply bringing all the information on the internet together isn't enough. The ability to adapt to new inputs and consistently make accurate suggestions is what mark it is a fantastic example of engineering Self-Organization.
An Inconvenient Studio's attempt to create Self-Organization within itself was ambitious but almost without precedent. When we start to look at politics at any scale, we often see that even in the most democratic societies, a few leaders will prevail and consciously affect the community on a much higher level than the average citizen. That's more akin to 'pacemaker' cells in the body that regulate organ formation than to the Slime Mold cells discussed earlier. What we created cannot be truly called Self-Organization but the amount of freedom to play within the large boundaries of our syllabus was a great way to encourage Emergence. After working with the LEGO Mindstorms sets for a week or two, we held a 'Triathlon' of sorts for each to Robot (or duo) to put its talents on display. See the last post for more on my group's design: Dancer. Here's an introduction to the other participants.
We saw a lot of variety in the designs and concepts behind the robotic participants, but all were successful in light of the initial task: create a mobile robot that responds to multiple stimuli to accomplish a task. Even more interesting to me is that each participant could theoretically run forever using outside stimuli and adapting to it rather than simply repeating set patterns. We had all in some way or another come up with a proof of concept for Emergent Behavior in programming.
More on that and parametric design next. |
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