Category Archives: Opinion

The first step in actually building my Bike Mountain Project was to acquire a stationary bike and figure out how to build a speedometer into it. Conveniently, there’s an ancient exercise bike that sits in the ITP pcomp lab — … Continue reading →

What happens if you make a machine that requires more than one draughtsman to make a drawing? Do you end up with conflict or collaboration? To what extent does each draughtsman retain his own aesthetic identity and agency? Collaborative drawing … Continue reading →

For our media controller project, Hana, Ania, and I decided to build a musical instrument that would control a series of unexpected sounds. We’d take a conventional instrument and augment its normal sound-creation mechanism so that it accompanied itself when … Continue reading →

Last year, a friend came to me to ask advice about plugging his exercise bike into his computer. He wanted to write a computer game that would be controlled by the rate of speed at which he biked. I pointed … Continue reading →

In Clay Shirky‘s Design for UNICEF class this semester, we’ve been trying to come up with ways of using the rapidly growing number of cell phones in sub-saharan Africa as a platform for projects that would improve the health, education, … Continue reading →

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve gone through intermittent periods of being obsessed with Etch-A-Sketches. The last such period was in 2005. There was an Etch-A-Sketch resident in the French pastry shop where I worked at the time and … Continue reading →

When I wrote my first update, the Metal Race Game was just getting started. I’d played around with multi-directional control of motors with an h-bridge and done some tests of construction methods for the race course itself with soldered paperclips. … Continue reading →

In this exercise you will attempt to comprehend the solidity of the model — its weight — the fact that it exists in space and moves in space in every direction… —Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw What makes a … Continue reading →

Take space. Take the whole of it. Imagine it as a solid form — undifferentiated, uniform. Now, carve out of space: things. Stars, planets, continents, cities, buildings, bowls of soup. What, of space, remains? The whole, but hole-y. Delicate lace-like … Continue reading →

A recent Friday talk by Frank Lantz from the NYU Game Center about the rise of mobile and casual gaming made me suddenly unearth a memory of middle school I’d almost completely lost: the culture of writing and playing games … Continue reading →