Principals and Practices Class
1st Worldwide gathering for Fab Academy 2015 feat. prof. Neil Gershenfeld
28 January
18 weeks to Final project
1. Principals and practices
First world web conference and class with Professor Niel Gershenfeld, and a great number of students participating in this amazing distributed campus around the globe.
A lot was talked about, a series of interesting ideas and matters were explored. Some topics like the following were of great importance and need to be given more time to research during Fab Academy:
- Notion of Digitizing Fabrication
- Production of self building structures - LEGO-like
- Machines that Make
- From multi assembly parts construct personalizable products
- New definitions and boundaries between individual scale and community scale
- Distributed education - local/global
- Live, Work, Play concepts and how they are shifting.
- Learn new concepts, acquire new skills, give it further research - The Approach
- The key to evolution is to promote the reinvention of society - Allow full concept of Playgrounds to be implemented
1.1 Project Management
project management principles
- demand- vs supply-side time management
- serial vs parallel development
- spiral development
- bottom-up vs top-down debugging
- hierarchy, modularity
Other related principles
- Resilience over strength
- Risk over safety
- Compass over maps
- systems over objects
- Practice over theory
1st Assignment:
Plan and sketch a potential semester project
A few ideas where already in mind before the beginning of Fab Academy non of them very defined yet but I was certain of the one subject I always wanted to dedicate further research too. That is how we relate to space, how do we use our bodies to navigate it, how does senses and memory work together to identify and define spaces beyond our sight recognition. These were some of the questions that I have been always interested about and that will follow as guidelines to the research for my final project.
To the right you can see one pen-sketch made by hand mixed with digital graphics from my Paint.
This sketch represented a rough idea of a wearable gadget that is applied to the areas of more concentrated nervous endings for augmented haptics using surrounding spaces as inputs. Further readings HERE.
As for project planing after reviewing some of the options for Linux I ended up with Plan for Project Management.
Project management is key to this kind of fast paced learning and for the success of an intricate project, as the Final Project can be. Time is precious and a well coordinated task-list can save a lot.
Build a web and present yourself
Despite of being a natural curious being I knew not much more than the basic language of HTML before starting this website. So I took some codecademy tutorials in order to gather more information about HTML, CSS. Its learning curve is very smooth which makes learning easy. And then in a short time I began to use Brakets as main code/text editor and I was able to do it with no apparent difficulties.
So for the structure of this website I used HTML files associated with a cascading style sheet and connected it to a bootstrap basic grid that is is very helpfull in the div's contruction when used for organizing pictures and text colums and rows.
For editing images I am using Gimp had as a former user of Photoshop I have to say that its workflow is not as fluid as Photoshop. For just resizing images I've been using Converseen which is a quick solution for getting web resolution images.
When the first part was done I did my first push into the Archive everything went ok with the Mercurial pushing besides the change i had made to the index file name - "index_temporary". So for the first time i pushed besides being safe, my page wasn't showing uppon selection in student list. After realizing my mistake I had to fix that by reseting the name to just "index.html" as it should be. And its now working fine.
To get to know more about my self please follow this link.
Mercurial upload into Archive workflow
first check folder size - shouldn't be bigger than 1Gb a week!
while in Terminal navigate to the folder where your copy will be saved, example:
cd Documents/fabacademy2015/europe
hg pull
hg update
hg addremove
hg commit -m "example title"
hg push
Be aware of warnings and errors - if you have any start the procedure again from hg pull
To check your file was correctely logged, finnaly type:
hg log -G
Your Log should appear on the tip of the list and your web page should be uptodate online, check that too.
