July 2010
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New leadership →
Architectural Record caught wind of the many changes in leadership for architecture schools, including our own MIT as Yung Ho hands over the reins to Nader. I’ve heard that NT has already been advertising to alumni the change in a monumental fashion, including a postcard with his face imprinted on it. I guess…that’s a way to show who’s boss?
June 2010
8 posts
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Developing a different type of architect →
The Architecture for Change summit will be held this fall at the University of Illinois at Chicago. MIT’s own Lawrence Vale, along with other names like Brian Bell and Teddie Cruz will be speaking.
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WatchA scientific approach to alleviating poverty, according to Esther Duflo (founder of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, 2009 MacArthur fellow).
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Busy elsewhere →
Sorry for the long neglect - have been busy on my other blog, but hope to keep this site as a bed for design inspiration. And now that I’m in Hong Kong, there’s a lot out here to pull from.
December 2009
4 posts
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final project : the iScarf Thermo
As previously blogged on Yushiro’s site:
yuchan:
harnessing heat from computer onto your body and cooling it down.
If each individuals were to be able to gain warmth from wasted heat,
it could largely reduce the excessive heating in institutional buildings.
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November 2009
4 posts
Carry your house on your back →
In our quest to make an inflatable wearable, this is an idea adopted from Michael Webb’s Suitaloon - a jacket that transforms into a tent, or clothing morphing into inhabitation.
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I don't need you, baby, to keep warm
Yushiro and I put our heads together for this wearable assignment. We bounced back and forth a few different ideas - how the product should relate to the body, how it should enhance or what “added value” it would have - and in the end, settled on integrating technology into everyday clothing. We wanted to take advantage of motions that we go through on a regular basis and...
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October 2009
6 posts
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Thought-provoking pasta
So as I alluded to in the previous post, detechnologizing a product can entail taking the leftovers from a product, such as the packaging, and making it into something new with value. (Or, at least you hope it has further worth.) Why? Well, given an area such as our food industry, the amount of waste created from these seemingly-unusable food containers fills our landfills. There have been...
Repurposing architecture? →
For our next assignment, we’re detechnologizing a product: either giving it another life through recycling or repurposing, giving waste products a purpose for themselves, or upcycling - giving increased value to an object through some sort of design interventions.
Architecture’s one of those creative “products” that hadn’t been considered for “recycling”...
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Anatomy of an old school timekeeper
For this source mapping assignment, I ended up going with disassembling an old GE clock radio that’s been in my family probably since my parents were young. I couldn’t find exactly the date of manufacture (despite having the date code: does 3536K mean anything to anyone?), but essentially it is old and has reached the last leg of its life. Instead of tossing it into the landfill, I...
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Pondering where it comes from
The next assignment for Future Craft is to take apart a product and do a source map of all its elements to track the true carbon footprint of an object. There are a couple approaches to this problem:
physically disassembling an object and investigating its parts
taking a product and virtually breaking it down to where it might have come from
Part of me finds the appeal in taking a seemingly...
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tumblr customization
People have been asking me how I like Tumblr. I like its designs and its intentions, but I find it incredibly annoying that very simple things like alignment are missing, and just now I had a friend vent her frustration at not being able to comment. Isn’t that the point of blogs, that you give not just the blogger venues for self-expression, but also the readers?
Anyways, Tumblr’s...
September 2009
6 posts
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have you found my utopia?
u-to’-pi-a : a perfect place without problems coined by Sir Thomas More (1518)
Creating utopias is, in some ways, like shooting yourself in the foot. Because the world and the people who live in it are imperfect, utopian visions either never leave the drawing board (Corbu’s Radiant City as he envisioned it) or fail in some capacity when actually acted on (Communism, as some...
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10,000 steps, or why urban density is knocking at... →
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“Radical, disruptive innovation (as opposed to incremental, gradual innovation)...”
– The Green Leap Forward blog, on China’s necessary mentality and lifestyle changes on the way to sustainability
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a launching pad
Craft : the making of, DIY, precision and imprecision
Materials : reuse, recycle, or exploitation
Process : linear and nonlinear
Inter-under-over-through disciplines.
The macro-micro scale.
Relationships and connections, both concrete and virtual.
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These are some of the ideas that the Future Craft course proposes as launch pads for thought on how design and production...