"My credentials are in part a lingering amateurism; that is to say, a love that resists too much learning. I have always avoided acquiring more erudition than was necessary. A little learning is a good thing, but too large a learning begets a taste for more and more, and before you know it, the ambition to know overcomes the desire to do, first embarrassing it, then bullying it into hiding."
Excerpt from Notes On The Piano by Ernst Bacon
A few nights back I was thinking about how wonderful it is that individual notes can be made part of both major and minor chords. One of my first non-chess metaphors for life, thank you very much.
Throughout my life, I’ve known no greater joy than the joy of discovery. It’s my hypothesis that this intimate, self-rewarding process never gets old, and, in fact, only sweetens as the years go by.
To test this hypothesis, I’ve developed a series of wooden toys that reappropriate the classic waiting room “Rollercoaster” toy – a colorful, kinetic thing that has enraptured millions of youths waiting their turn at the doctor’s office.
Using graphs of open source data as my guide, I bent and painted metal wires so as to visualize trends in childhood obesity, the rise of electronics and (mis)conceptions of the universe.
I made a mock-up of my tangible graphs using armature wire which was easily warped by hand into the shape my data required. Using different radii, I then (slowly) bent thick gauge metal wire to mimick the turns of my armature wire, primed and painted the metal, and added beads.
What excites me most about this project is it's potential for customization. I plan to develop an online platform where customers can import their own data (i.e. the growth of their children over time, income over time, price of groceries, etc.) so that I may create unique data toys for living rooms, play rooms or waiting rooms of their own.
"Technology, if you haven’t noticed, has dramatically altered the way we conduct ourselves on a daily hourly minute to minute basis. We’ve arrived at our current situation thanks to three factors: Moore’s law, free markets and, perhaps most importantly, dreams.
In an effort to promote ideas as design (and after reviewing some cheesy concept videos made in the 80′s and 90′s), Bobby Genalo’s Graphic Design 1 class was asked to dream up a product / service that they wanted to exist in the future and to design a concept video so as to convey their idea to others."
http://micagraphicdesign.org/2011/11/concept-videos-from-gd1/
