October 17: IxDA Design Workshops

Received Sept 9, 2009

SAVE THE DATE: OCTOBER DESIGN WORKSHOPS
While you’re marking your calendar, don’t forget to save the date for our annual fall Design Workshop: Saturday, October 17. We’re holding this ever-popular event on a Saturday this year so participants will have more time to design and present. We’re pleased to announce two excellent workshops, both with interaction design rock-stars: one with Todd Zaki Warfel and Will Evans, the other with Ted Booth and Michelle Tepper. Full details and registration coming soon!

I hope it’s free or has a serious student rate (i.e., free).

Talk by Clay Shirky: Forking, Failing, and Open Source

Upgrade! New York presents: Talk by Clay Shirky: Forking, Failing, and Open Source

As an introduction to our Upgrade New York year theme we are excited to announce this month’s speaker, Clay Shirky. Clay will discuss the concepts of fork and failure in the open source process and will open them to discussion in the context of activism and the creative process.

Read about it here.

June 18, 2009
6:30 pm to 8:00 pm
The Change You Want To See Gallery @ 84 Havemeyer Street, Brooklyn

If you can’t make it live, the live stream is here.

Sadly, I can’t go or watch the live stream, but you can do either, tell me all about it.

On the the New York City Dance and Technology Meetup

I was reading the feeds on my iGoogle page, and I came across this post on Danciti. The author seems to have taken offense at the new “DanceTech” Meetup group by Doug Fox of Great Dance.

In this particular post, the Danciti author comments on of the suggested meetup topics, ‘How dancers can create professional websites without any technical training or background, and do this very inexpensively’: “It’s just the hight of conceit to believe that you can create professional results in my field [web design] without training.” After I read that, I was offended. However, the owner of Danciti does not have a comment section, so I’ll write it here.


To the Danciti author:

I do not think that the topic “How dancers can create professional websites without any technical training or background, and do this very inexpensively” is implying that an individual with no technical or web design training can create “professional” quality web designs that are on par with what an actual web developer could provide.

In my opinion, that is such an extremely obvious point, I do not see how anyone could be offended. I think Doug’s mission with this workshop is to help dance companies generate more income using internet marketing techniques, by lowering the barrier of entry to the web. Perhaps if professional web development firm offered to design slick websites, pro bono, for dance companies with limited budgets and outdated technology he wouldn’t feel the need to do this workshop. You and I know that building good websites is not that easy and takes plenty of resources which, as far as I know, is  probably why that is not the current situation.

In fact, I think that the Danciti author should go ahead and create a workshop for fat web developers who want to put on a full-length ballet. Dance is for everyone. Why deny them the opportunity to perform? If there was such a workshop, I would seriously doubt the professionalism of any dancer that was actually offended by such a workshop. Why? Because it’s OBVIOUS that web developers would not be as good as ballet as someone who spent 8 hours dancing everyday, nor would the performance be as good as what you would get if you paid $100+ for a ticket to a see a professional dance company perform.

Sorry, Doug. Apparently, it is true that no good deed goes unpunished.

Using a gesture control interface to get a (fake?) job

Turbulence@PaceDigitalGallery is presenting 3 performances this month. One of them, School of Perpetual Training is an “edutainment” website that uses your web cam and an avatar to guide you through training exercises, so that you can get a new job.

I don’t have a web cam so I wasn’t able to try it out. However, I do live in NYC, so I’ll try to make it over to the opening tomorrow. If you have a web cam, try it out and let me know how it goes.

Event Details:

Pace Digital Gallery is pleased to present Turbulence@ PaceDigitalGallery, an exhibition premiering 3 works commissioned by Turbulence.org :: April 7 – May 1, 2009 :: Reception: April 7, 5:00 – 7:00 pm :: 163 William Street, New York City.

perpetual-training

What’s important

Last Sunday our graphic design homework was to create some type of visual representation of our possessions, splitting them into things we care about and things we don’t care about. When I imagined this homework, I could not think of excluding the things that I used to own, very recently, in Houston. I actually didn’t want to do the assignment, because I felt that I had recently lost so much, in terms of property, friends, salary, change of lifestyle…etc. So when I approached this assignment, I could not imagine doing it in some type of sentimental fashion. I could only see the final outcome as something cold or clinical.

What I came up with is essentially a mock computer screen, representing a MySQL database dump of 3 lists. The lists fade in terms of importance (or non-importance), and the most faded list is the list of stuff that I no longer have. I decided to use a green screen, like DOS(?), like a command-line interface because it’s basic and the least comforting way to use a computer.

Moving.pdf

Thoughts about being a SharePoint Administrator

In addition to being the new WordPress administrator, I’m also the new SharePoint admin for our project. I recently just got “Full Access” control over the current team site, but before I did I’ve been creating a demo site using my My Site. (And, actually, even if I did have access to the other site, I probably would have created my demo site using my My Site anyway – there’s just less risk of someone stumbling across it and/or me doing something screwy to someone else’s documents.)

The funny part is, I actually kind of like all this SharePoint stuff. At my last job, we were implementing SharePoint as an enterprise document management and collaboration system, for a very large company. Well, I’m only implementing an instance of a SharePoint site for a specific project, but once the word gets out that I know what I’m doing I’ll probably end up redesigning the SharePoint sites for the rest of the company. I guess the difference is that “enterprise” for my old job meant a 50,000+ employee base, not including contractors. At my new job, and for this instance of SharePoint, it’s for about 60 people. Big difference.

I think some of the reasons why I don’t mind it so much are: a) I do know what I’m doing and; b) I get to design it all my way. SharePoint can really get out of hand if you don’t have a clue about what to do, and it’s easy to get caught up in the endless maze of subsites and submenus. However, I’m finding that having a grip on the SharePoint, admin back-end makes getting a clear picture of what needs to be done and knowing how best to take care of it, a fulfilling task.