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Creative Redemption

January 6, 10 //
1

There are times when a design con­cept of mine fails to boil over in awe­some­ness and at that point I throw a sheet over it, shove it in a cor­ner next to the mutated Chihuahua-Goat™ and ask myself why I even attempted it.

It hap­pens so often, in fact, that I begin to doubt my instincts as a designer. It bog­gles the mind that a Design­ers Anony­mous group doesn’t exist for this very rea­son, but I digress.

This way of think­ing is ludi­crous because every­thing we cre­ate is vital to the design process, no mat­ter the context.

For exam­ple: That movie poster that you spent sev­eral hours on, the one that was even­tu­ally canned because the hero’s (or heroin’s) face ended up being badly con­torted at a spe­cific view­ing angle would prob­a­bly seem like a failed cre­ation. You might even be tempted to trash it from your hard drive, never to speak of it again.

But guess what? Hor­ri­bly man­gled facial crufties aside, you might end up recy­cling the type­face or that speck­led tex­ture for a future poster or project.

Make it a habit, if you haven’t already, to file away your delight­ful cre­ations for future use and avoid curs­ing your design work with voodoo.

It just never works, I mean what am I sup­posed to do with this Chihuahua-Goat™?

Just remem­ber the three R’s: Redeem, Reuse and Rejoice.

High-rise Evacuation Methods

January 25, 07 //
5

There was an A&E doc­u­men­tary on the World Trade Cen­ter the other night, dis­cussing – as well as crit­i­ciz­ing – the early plan­ning phases and con­struc­tion of the WTC.

It also focused some­what on the short­com­ings of the WTC, such as stair­wells hug­ging the core of the build­ing pro­vid­ing what they thought was extra sta­bil­ity, that led to so many civil­ian casu­al­ties dur­ing the 2001 attacks.

There was obvi­ous con­cern over the meth­ods used for high-rise build­ing evac­u­a­tion. In most cases stair­ways are used, pro­vided that they are in work­ing con­di­tion. The planes that struck the WTC build­ings destroyed a large por­tion of the stairs which in turn con­tributed to the lack of proper evacuation.

As I watch­ing this, I was think­ing about bet­ter ways for effi­cient and safe evac­u­a­tion dur­ing high-rise build­ing emer­gen­cies. One solu­tion (not nec­es­sary fail­safe) that occurred to me was an enclosed slide that essen­tially loops around the build­ing. The slide itself would be oiled so that when groups of indi­vid­u­als are prepar­ing to evac­u­ate, they descend in such a man­ner where clog­ging of the slide would be prevented.

Again, not a fail­safe method of course, but I believe one that doesn’t rely on the short­com­ings that occur with stair­ways. If you’ve ever used the stairs in a high-rise build­ing you know that this isn’t an effi­cient means of get­ting peo­ple out of the build­ing in a timely fash­ion, espe­cially dur­ing an emer­gency when peo­ple typ­i­cally lose the abil­ity to think sensibly.

Yet, when I was think­ing about this I real­ized that using a slide could also lead to over­sights in the process of evac­u­a­tion. It’s pos­si­ble that like the stairs in the WTC build­ing, a por­tion of the slide could also be destroyed. That said, it’s dif­fi­cult to try and come up with var­i­ous ways to effi­ciently trans­port peo­ple out of a build­ing and at the same time mak­ing sure the means of doing so are safe and expedient.

There are other meth­ods such as zip lines (think James Bond or the mil­i­tary), extend­able slides and chute sys­tems that could work but again, which of these would actu­ally work when the real thing occurs, as opposed to just test­ing them in labs.

I per­son­ally don’t think we’ve found a per­fect sys­tem yet, despite how much tech­nol­ogy has improved in the past 20 years, and I don’t feel like we ever will.

What should be stressed how­ever is that we need to have alter­nate ways of evac­u­at­ing peo­ple from struc­tures to pre­vent mas­sive casu­al­ties when an emer­gency occurs.

How I came to tolerate MySpace

June 20, 06 //
11

For years I’ve held off open­ing up, or rather cre­at­ing a MySpace account:“kartooner on Myspace(View my pro­file on MySpace)”:http://www.myspace.com/kartooner purely for rea­sons to pre­vent exploit­ing myself or others.

How­ever, I came to the real­iza­tion that when you look past the neg­a­tive aspects and focus instead on the pos­i­tive out­come of recon­nect­ing with peo­ple that you might have lost touch with, well then it doesn’t seem so bad.

In fact, it’s safe to say that despite the count­less amount of good and bad press, which any good jour­nal­ist or sane per­son would tell you is just effort­less adver­tis­ing, there are a lot of inter­est­ing out­comes that occur when you set up your own space on the web.

To me, MySpace is a messy com­bi­na­tion of per­sonal jour­nal and media, mixed together with self expres­sion and some­times self reflec­tion. If one were to attempt to map Myspace it would prob­a­bly be nei­ther here nor there.

Frankly, it’s a phe­nom­e­non that would sound won­der­ful on paper or pitched to in front of a group of investors, but in it of itself it’s like a swap meet of indi­vid­u­als com­ing from var­i­ous social, eth­nic, reli­gious and cul­tural back­grounds on dis­play for the world to see, a messy one at that.

It’s also a poten­tially dan­ger­ous breed­ing ground for stalk­ers, but that light has already been shone many times by the media and it’s not worth revis­it­ing that haz­ard since it steers the pur­pose of this arti­cle in another direction.

Back on topic, it’s worth not­ing that within 3 days of acti­vat­ing an account on MySpace — as well as mak­ing it pretty thanks to Mike Davidson’s Hack­ing a More Taste­ful Myspace — I’ve recon­nected with peo­ple that I lost touch with 4 to 5 years ago and that alone is remark­able con­sid­er­ing I felt it’d be dif­fi­cult to do so otherwise.

The thought of con­tact­ing and recon­nect­ing with peo­ple from my past, the major­ity of them from high school, has always been in the back of my mind, but the con­ver­sa­tion starter, for exam­ple; “How I’d approach the per­son or begin the con­ver­sa­tion” always seemed a bit dif­fi­cult. Also, there never really seems like a good moment to do so and the notion that it might be awk­ward as such can make what would oth­er­wise seem appro­pri­ate and good willed turn into some­thing con­trived or put on.

Sad to say, but Myspace has allowed me to jump right in and test the waters. To show friends from my past that I really do care despite the lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. For that, I can for­give the site for being a mess from a func­tion­al­ity stand­point and instead remained focused on sift­ing through the vast resource of indi­vid­u­als and egnited friend­ships from yesteryear.

Teachers, Wii and Spore

May 18, 06 //
8

Here are a few ran­dom thoughts that I’ve had through­out this week, that on their own could poten­tially be expanded, but for the time being will remain in crys­tal­lized form:

Ele­men­tary Schools and Teachers

ChalkboardEver since I accepted a posi­tion work­ing as a cleaner (jan­i­tor, cus­to­dian, slop mop guy) at an ele­men­tary school I’ve gained a new per­spec­tive and greater appre­ci­a­tion in regards to every­thing that occurs behind the scenes.

Prior to work­ing at an ele­men­tary school, I had a very one-dimensional view of how schools actu­ally ran, see­ing as though my last encounter with a pee­wee edu­ca­tional fortress was many years ago.

Yet, when you pull back the cur­tain and real­ize that teach­ers have flaws, library shelves do in fact get dusty and there’s a bit­ter­sweet human ele­ment to it all that’s hard to describe, only then do you real­ize why schools con­tin­u­osly run themselves.

All of this boils down to the teach­ers them­selves, who in turn are modi­vated by their student’s achieve­ments, which fuels their inner pas­sion to edu­cate, look­ing past the spit­balls and dirty looks, know­ing full well at the other end there will be a result.

On that note, since we live in the era of Google, I was think­ing how much smarter a teacher can seem if he or she has access to a com­puter in their room. With Wikipedia and Google at their fin­ger­tips, said teacher can instan­ta­neously look up unlim­ited sub­ject mat­ter, print or project, and con­tribute end­less amounts of infor­ma­tion to the edu­ca­tion process.

It’s really fas­ci­nat­ing, con­sid­er­ing when I was younger all we had is an Apple II and maybe, depend­ing on if you were good or not, Ore­gon Trail with buf­falo shoot­ing action all at a gru­el­ing pace.

Wii!

For weeks on end I’ve been think­ing about Nintendo’s recently unvieled and renamed con­sole, Wii. I’ll admit that at first I was a bit taken back by the name (shocked even), see­ing as though the con­sole and it’s premise sounds kind of silly.

How­ever, after think­ing about it some I’ve grown to actu­ally love “Wii” and all it has to offer. Espe­cially after see­ing the slew of E3 demos that have popped up on sites like YouTube and Gamespot.

There’s just no deny­ing the fact that you’re no longer just play­ing, but par­tic­i­pat­ing in a game using their Wii-mote, which looks like your aver­age TV remote but rec­og­nizes 3D space and move­ment. How cool is that? Way cool!

Spore

With sites like Total Spore appear­ing out of thin air, there’s some­thing intrigu­ing and unde­ni­ably mouth water­ing about Will Wright’s newest sim cre­ation, Spore, that has the media and blo­gos­phere and maybe your neigh­bors in a gam­ing frenzy.

Spore isn’t just going to change the way peo­ple look at sim­u­la­tion games, it’s going to turn the gam­ing realm upside down. From the pre­views to demo footage and demon­stra­tions given by Wright him­self, it appears to be a mish mash of evo­lu­tion, cre­ation, old school gam­ing, clay mod­el­ing, strat­egy and sci-fi (amongst other things) all rolled into one.

I haven’t been this excited about a video game in years, not since I first laid eyes on Sim­c­ity and Populous.

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