James Ensor Meet James Ensor Belgium’s famous painter Dig him up and shake his hand Appreciate the man Before there were junk stores Before there was junk He lived with his mother and the torments of Christ They Might Be Giants, 1994 In the song “Meet James Ensor”, the band They Might Be Giants (1994) discuss one aspect of the late 19th Century that we see in Barkin’s essay “The Crisis of Modernity”. Until this time of industrialization, purchased belongings were precious. Textiles and materials were purchased, fabricated into something, and disassembled then re-used when their usefulness was finished…there was no junk. This move towards the inevitable “junk stores” is an excellent framework for some of the themes present in the essay that go beyond a nostalgia for the past: industrialization, urbanization, and the affect on humans. ...

I have had to take art and art history classes in each stage of my educational journey: my general educational requirements and first degree major (mass communications), as general education in my new pursuit of studying fashion design, and a source material for that degree. In all of those years, I’ve never really seen the delineation of craftsman and artist that the Invention of the 19th-Century French Avant-Garde illuminated. In this essay, I see a clear marker when those Renaissance craftsmen doing technical work we now consider art were replaced with artists whose vision and message came before the technical achievement. ...

In order to maintain a blog for 19 years, one has to be flexible. My first blog used Radio UserLand followed by Blogger on my UMBC account and then Blogger on blogger.com, hosted Wordpress and then maybe Wordpress on my site that got hacked. I eventually rewrote something like Radio UserLand in Python to blog from the command line and then rewrote the interface to those tools in C# in order to practice making a MacOS app. While I learned a lot, I’ve settled on the Open Source Publii to write my blog now. It creates flat files, sitemaps, tag lists but keeps it database free on the site. ...

Over the summer, I became more familiar with the socio-political structures that heavily influenced the work of the Italian Renaissance artists. In particular, the outsized influence of the Medici in the Republic of Florence. The Medici family came into their fortunes through banking and used those fortunes to “control” the area. Lavin (“David’s Sling and Michelangelo’s Bow”) writes that David, besides being an abstract autobiography of Michaelangelo overcoming the difficulties of working with that piece of marble, is actually a commentary on the “Medici-Goliath” (Lavin, 1990 p.140). This Goliath was a threat to the Republican nature of Florence that Michelangelo supported. With all of this political meaning overflowing from the statue, I’m not sure that most contemporary Florentines would have understood the message of David beyond the basic biblical reference. ...

I have come to believe that art is a patina on deliberate, creative craft. Not all art begins as art and works that are intended to be art may not turn out as such. I also believe that craft becomes art within and outside of the context of the artifact; in order to understand the artifact, it is important to understand its context. I was fascinated by Baxandall’s (1972) chapter “Conditions of trade” for two reasons: the early Renaissance artists’ almost mundane experiences with contracts and deliverables, and the relationship of patrons to artists (I am using the word “artists”, but my interpretation of the reading is they were more like higher-end, celebrity craftspeople in their time). I had not really thought of Renaissance painters as working for hire in the same way that a Web developer or graphic designer might work today. As someone who has been hired and hired others, the idea that the clients regularly provided the higher end items, such as the gold leaf and the ultramarine, was completely foreign to me. In fact, the idea of the artist not having complete control of the artifact from concept to execution but having to rectify the client’s ideas with innovative techniques, is the first reason why I think art is a patina on creative craftsmanship. ...

I have a hunch design as a profession would go a lot farther if more designers embraced ambiguous constraints. — Raphael Arar (@rarar) February 16, 2021 I saw this tweet yesterday and it has been in my head ever since. This is a major problem I see in both new and mid-level designers. In new designers, I understand how ambiguous constraints and ambiguous goals could be problematic for them as they don’t have the experience to break a problem down or, more difficult, begin to see what the real problem is. ...

15-Minute City Could Be Coming to an Urban Area Near You - Bloomberg

I have been using a Monoprice MPSelect Mini for four years as my main 3D printer. It is a great printer but has a very small print bed. One of the things I’d like to do is print larger objects to mix fashion design and interaction design, so, I’d like a 1m cube printer. However, those don’t exist and I knew I’d have to build it myself. Having no experience with “building” 3d printers, I decided to follow an online tutorial and create one from scratch. ...

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The University of Baltimore’s Digital Whimsy Lab is proud to announce the release of our KidsTeam Co-Design Toolkit. This toolkit can aid design teams in the creation of co-design activities that enable children and adults to work together. Even though the original target audience was libaries and librarians, we think the content is a valuable resource for any team that wants to design with kids and aren’t sure where to start. ...