I’m going to begin a little exercise, which is to occasionally post things that I’ve created. They may be images from my archives, designs I’ve done, or little objects I’ve hacked together, but the hope is to slowly build a little portfolio that I look back on. I’d like to remind myself every so often that I know how to push things across the border from the dreamt to the real.

Let’s start off lightweight with an image I quickly Photoshopped. Below is my new-dad friend Amos with his little one, Emerson, Photoshopped as a submission to the blog Babies With Laser Eyes.

Okay, complete change of direction. Strangely enough, while looking at the above image, I realized it echoes a pencil drawing I made in high school:

This was made back in my comic-book-drawing days. I know this is a bit of a creepy juxtaposition with the laser eyes thing, but just so you know, the drawing was not meant to be morbid. The idea rattling around in my young mind at the time was that death is something that we learn to fear, and that there might be something joyful in unlearning that fear.

A few months ago, I helped my friend Erik Walker get his company’s portfolio site up and running: Binzen&Walker Photography. Binzen&Walker create beautiful panoramic photographs that, in contrast to mechanized techniques (e.g. GigaPan) are hand-shot and hand-stitched for artistic effect.

It’s a basic and relatively clean WordPress site, based on an existing theme. Aside from a bunch of CSS changes, my contribution was mashing up a couple WordPress plugins to create a nice interface for exploring examples of their panoramic photographs. Showcasing such huge images online is difficult because of very limited resolution of computer displays. In real life, a print of one of Binzen&Walker’s prints could easily cover twelve feet of a gallery wall. Online, a zooming and panning interface was needed.

To get this working, I did a simple combination of two existing plugins: Flexible Lightbox and YD-Zoomify. I’m calling it Flexible Zoomify. You can see a screenshot below or click on the images in this portfolio gallery to try it out.

Here’s a little sketch I made using Processing. It’s based on a standard flocking program that Benjamin and Mary F. were playing around with; I added a second flock, some randomness in their coloring, and the concept of “weight.” Heavier boids move slower, turn slower, beat their wings slower and are more pudgy in shape. I also gave them all trails, using a simple transparent rectangle placed between frames (a very computationally cheap way to do this.)

Below is a screenshot of the Processing sketch. Click to load the applet in your browser window and see it in motion. That link also has the source code for the sketch.

Note: Apologies for those who got spam in their RSS readers from this entry. After some WordPress upgrades and removal of some suspicious files and users, I’m hoping that I have the spam kicked.

I just saw Objectified at Yerba Buena, last week. I enjoyed getting a peek into the minds of the most respected industrial designers of the last few decades, but it disappointed me as commentary on the profession’s attempts to fill a larger societal role.

Good parts: the visuals were great. If you’re easily distracted by beautiful, manufactured objects (me == guilty), then you’ll enjoy all the nicely-shot closeups of everything from toothpicks to cars. There’s also a good amount of factory porn (CNC machines, injection molding, extrusions) which I particularly enjoy, since I love to see how things are made.

The interviews with the designers are also good. As with many documentaries I like, the filmmaker is silent, letting his subjects do all the talking. We get alternately profound and amusing glimpses into these designer’s minds, understanding how varied their design processes are (and how strange their obsessions.)

Where the documentary began to disappoint me was after an interview with Paola Antonelli (a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.) She provided an interesting voice for design, looking to a future where designer’s role has significantly expanded. Moving past the formal aspects of an object, it’s symbolic meaning, and even its immediate consumer context, she described a role for designers at the highest level of policy (politics, regulation, etc.) She believes that designers should be involved in any place where society’s behaviors are considered, where a system interacts with people.

As an aspirational voice, Antonelli’s point was well made. But that’s not where the profession is, right now, and the documentary doesn’t really provide a strong critique of that lofty aim. There is a well-justified angst these days in the design community over the role that designers have in fueling the endless and accelerating cycle of resource use that we have no hope of sustaining for more than a few generations. True, design is a valuable way to understand how people inhabit the world and to shape their experiences. But the vast majority of design occurring these days is simply a method of creating fashionable things that drive sales. Rob Walker (New York Times Magazine) takes aim at this, briefly, but then to address the point, the film shifts focus to IDEO headquarters where they are hard at work at minimizing the waste in… toothbrushes. The solution? A permanent handle with disposable heads. This Core77 review resonated with me:

At around the three-quarter mark in the film I started to squirm in my seat. The movie’s exploration of the relationship between human and object was all very interesting, but I started to wonder, Is this film going to be critical at all? And wouldn’t you know it, the very next scene cut to footage of e-waste processing centers, with CRT housings being disassembled, parts crashing, tumbling into massive steel bins, and (finally) some mention of what the impacts of all these objects that these venerated designers dream up might be. (Funny that I was relieved to see the dark side rearing its head! Like in all good narratives, no conflict no story.) Again, some good commentary by Rawsthorn, and then some follow up at IDEO, but I couldn’t help feeling that this essential part of the story of stuff was getting severely, almost negligently, shortchanged. I’ve been banging the “designers aren’t in the artifact business, they’re in the consequence business” drum for a long time now, so I wanted Gary to hold this foot closer to the fire.

This is a failing of the entire capitalist system as we’ve structured it so far, so you may say that it’s unfair to put too much blame at the feet of the lowly designer. But if designers are attempting to elevate their profession to the level of policy, I think it’s fair to point out how often they have failed to take the larger effects of their work into consideration.

MoviePainter is a quick Processing app I wrote last weekend. It gives you a little window to paint using… you guessed it: movies. Basically, a movie is played and whenever you click and drag with the mouse, those frames of the movie are laid down onto the canvas, like a continuously-animated well of ink. This is somewhat like the painting programs that are out there, but in this case the “brush” is the combination of a movie file and an opacity mask.

I’ve recorded a screencast to show you how it works and what it does.

Read the rest of this entry »

More about it, and the artist, on my instructables slideshow.

This new 3D sketching technology is basically magic, as far as I can tell:

ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

I’m partially color-blind. I’m not sure precisely how, but my current guess is that it’s a red-green hue discrimination deficiency commonly called Deuteranomaly. It affects 5%-6% of all men.

I was interested to see how I would do on this color test, which involves sorting four randomly-mixed bands of color into smooth gradients. Given a person’s mistakes, a histogram can be drawn, showing where along the spectrum one’s ability to discriminate between colors is weakest. Here are two of my results:

Clearly, I’m bad at distinguishing hues in the red-green range, but I was surprised to find that I’m absolutely terrible at distinguishing hues in the blue-red range, as well. My score actually puts me behind 99% of the population. I imagine that an expert could look at these histograms and pinpoint the specific color deficiency that I have; something to keep in mind in case I ever find one.

Despite this deficiency, every so often there are colors and contrasts I see that pry my brain open. The artist Yves Klein developed a special shade of ultramarine blue (actually, both a pigment and a special medium) in the late 1940′s called International Klein Blue. One of his paintings (“Blue Monochrome”) uses IKB, and it remains one of my favorites to this day:

Blue Monochrome

…
Something about the color just floods my retina. It’s vivid in a way that nothing else seems to be. Perhaps this is how people with normal color vision (I have slight red-green colorblindness) see everything?

Uploaded by Nargopolis on 5 Oct 07, 8.04AM PDT.

I have a macro photo of this painting that I use as a desktop background. It’s amazing to look at, even though monitors aren’t actually capable of reproducing the IKB faithfully.

So, I was excited to read today that IKB is actually available to the consumer. Samples are available for non-exorbitant amounts; I’m going to have get myself a small bottle.

NOTE: This color deficiency may have its benefits, as well. This 2005 study in University of Cambridge and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne lent some evidence that men with deuteranomaly have ranges of the spectrum where their hue discrimination is superior to that of normal (i.e. lesser) humans:

Simmons hypothesizes that because deuteranomaly is quite common in human populations, the gene responsible may have once provided an evolutionary benefit. For example, it may have helped them spot potential food items in complicated environments such as grass or foliage, he suggests.

This also gives some explanation for many anecdotal reports that partially color-”deficient” soldiers are much more able to see past camouflage than their normally-sighted squad mates.

One sees me as an angel. The other as a demon. I’m not sure which I prefer, given that the demon gets a hovercraft.

For some time, now, my friends Axel Albin and Josh Kamler have been documenting “message graffiti” (as opposed to what they call “aesthetic graffiti” and the ever-prevalent “ego graffiti”) on the site Written on the City. They’ve now released a book with the same name, collecting and arranging some of the best photographs of the site in a well-designed volume.

Here’s one that I liked a lot: