Claudia Aguilar

FAB ACADEMY 2015

As a first assignment I had to construct this web page and as being an architect I knew nothing about HTML so I studied and followed a few advices from my tutors and finally got it! The best tool I got in the process was getting to know the”Codecademy” web page which I found pretty useful and also as friendly as someone like me could understand and work with the beginner knowledge they transfer you with their tutorials.

To share this experience I create the following video tutorial:“How to create a Web Page in a day”.

You can download this Website Templete in here.

This next 19 week are going to be full of activities and why not using them as a preview or test of what you want to create at the end of the course? Thinking of this I’ll allow myself making a small review of why and how I got to be in this course. As you can see in my home page I’m from El Salvador and I’m trying to become the first Central American woman by getting this certification and having this intention and thanks to the Salvadoran Fab Lab association support I got the necessary resources to make it. All of this parts from the necessity of having a formal education to promote digital fabrication in El Salvador and Central America. Until now we’ve been promoting FABLAB for two years now but the results are showing slowly despite our efforts.

Having this in mind my principal purpose is to generate a product which any central american person can feel identified no matter what social level they are and not necessarily creating the next space station but using cultural elements which they can feel identified and in that way making it easier to explain what digital fabrication is all about.

Analyzing our immediate environment with Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua traditions, I came to the conclusion that the Bull or “Torito” is an element present in all of their traditions as also in salvadoran culture, even here in Perú there is a “Toro Loco” tradition which is pretty similar to ours. Next you can see some Torito Pinto's pictures:

In the next Youtube playlist you can hear Torito Pinto's Song and some other Latinamericans Torito's songs":

Working as a photographer I got to meet a lot of places and communities of my small country and because of this I'm pretty sure that the mobility of this project is very important, it should be able to go travel around different towns and communities. I took the next picture at a urban community in San Salvador in 2011.

Once I found out the conceptualisation and purpose of the project subject I started drawing and writing the ideas around it:

This image was generated with Murally's web application.

This image was generated with Murally's web application and the drawings were made in SketchBook Pro for iPad.

To decide a convenient shape I studied different Kids Toys to see what already exist in the market and then search for a cultural element to combine it with: Salvadorian "Dog in weels" from the maya culture (right corner down image).

For a volume design and concept I studied some basic terms and methodologies of creativity and innovation. The next scheme is a result of a convergence and divergence model of how I'll be takin my design decisions. Basically defining at first the volume and then taking advantage of it to improve with electronics or modifying it to adapt the electronics.

To make Project Management Scheduls I've always used Project from Office but for this task I downloaded and instaled GranttProject for being a free project scheduling and management app.

After working with GanttProject I noticed it's pretty easy to use on a positive side but in an other side it lacks of automated correction or calculation as I had to do lots of changes by hand than are made automatically with other software like Project. I Would recommend this software for short time and less complex projects so as I have already made it for the hole course I'll try taking at least and our every week to program again depending upon the weekly assignment.

Software and apps used in this week:Dropbox, Dreamweaber, Photoshop, Murally App, Sketchbook Pro App, Camtasia Studio 8, Sublime Text, Camtasia Recorder.

The first step is to verify that the local repository is updated to do this you must run the - hg pull - command then update it with the - hg update - command after that copy the files you want to upload inside the folder in the Archive repository, I can add or remove files with the -hg addremove - command.

Then run - hg commit -m "tag" - command inside the quotes enter any name that would function as a label for the upload.

After that - hg push - command send the files to the server where the repository is hosted.

This is the final command uploading into the repository server.

Here is a video of the image uploaded

Bonus: What is Fab Lab El Salvador? (spanish)