Today we presented ideas for our semester-long projects in Mainstreaming Information. The assignment, which apparently I was not the only person to be confused by, is over at Christian’s site (PDF, 36 KB).
Continue reading Lies, damn lies, and statistics
Category Archives: homework
Simplicity
I’ve decided to go with the less impossible, more amusing of my two Wearables project ideas: The Party Dress.
Assignment: Project description
Write a description of your project (one page minimum) – describe what your prototype will look like, what it will do, and how it will be used. List your influences, goals, intended users, and provide a use scenario. Continue reading Simplicity
Reinventing the wheel
This week’s A–Z assignment:
Create a program (using, e.g., the tools presented in class) that behaves like a UNIX text processing program (such as cat, grep, tr, etc.). Your program should take text as input (any text, or a particular text of your choosing) and output a version of the text that has been filtered and/or munged. Continue reading Reinventing the wheel
Trying wearables on for size
The first assignments for Zachary Eveland’s Wearables Studio class were as follows:
Assignment: Make a wearable
Come to class next week with a working wearable device or garment. This assignment is just a sketch to get the juices flowing – whatever you make should function, but rough edges are fine.
Continue reading Trying wearables on for size
Repaving the DMV
Our first homework assignment for Nick Bilton’s 1′, 2′, 10′ class was to redesign the front page on the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles site. Not a difficult thing to improve upon, but still hard to get right. For me the assignment was complicated by the fact that I don’t know shit about what people want from the DMV site, since I don’t drive (though I do have a license, to the astonishment of all and sundry; my ongoing act of service to humanity is to abstain from using it). So for inspiration, I looked at some DMV sites from other states, as well as few government sites from abroad:
- California
- Colorado
- Massachusetts
- Pennsylvania
- Texas
- United Kingdom: Directgov : Motoring | Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
- Amsterdam: Getting around – they don’t even have a DMV, as far as I could tell, since everybody rides bikes or uses public transport. Go, Holland!
- Denmark: Transport Ministry | Road Directorate | Institute for Transport | City of Copenhagen – none of these says anything about drivers’ licenses that I could find, but they all have pleasant design
And then, after working on my mockup for about four hours, I had the delightful experience of having Illustrator crash, taking my unsaved document with it. Joy! So then I got to do it again, this time in InDesign—which only took about thirty minutes, because I’m so much more ept with ID than I am with AI.
Whine, whine. The result is as follows (click to see a PDF at actual resolution):
I focused on getting rid of most of the graphic crap, moving some obviously unimportant information out of the way, and making the bulleted lists easier to read. There’s still way too much text on the page, but without knowing what people go there to find out, I didn’t think I was qualified to cut any of it.
Photo: ghia by Ryan Carver; some rights reserved.
PHP 101
My homework for the first week of Dynamic Web Development is over here: Hello, World. I reused the CSS from CommLab week 1 and made absolutely no modifications to the “hello, world” PHP from the instructions. So, sue me. Continue reading PHP 101
Sieve Our Ships
For our first homework assignment in Programming A–Z, we were asked to write a terminal command that would take some text in, do something to it, and spit the text out again.
Continue reading Sieve Our Ships
Digital Graffiti Glove: Documentation
Above is the PowerPoint slideshow that Diego made for our in-class presentation. There is also copious supporting material at the following locations: Continue reading Digital Graffiti Glove: Documentation
Hear No Evil: Behind the Scenes
We spent about four hours yesterday shooting for our CommLab video. Jason directed, Dimitris was cameraman, and Diego was the star. I documented and recorded a few chunks of sound. We all acted (sort of).
The final video is on YouTube.