Posts

Over the summer, a former student “interviewed” me over e-mail about placebo buttons. If you’re unaware, placebo buttons are buttons that don’t actually do anything and are instead used to make a person feel in control of the situation. The most commonly referenced buttons are elevator close buttons (they just close on their own) and pedestrian press-to-cross buttons at intersections. Patrick did a small, informal study that he wrote about at EXBERLINER entitled Idiot buttons: The brutal truth about Berlin’s pedestrian crossings. He found this: ...

One of the lost papers that never got published was our work on a co-design technique we called “Story Walk”. After tweeting about it, we were contacted by a very angry librarian who said she owned the name “Story Walk” and we either owed her money or we needed to change our name…hence, Saga Walk. If I remember correctly, this was Craig Donanhue’s idea and I’m so glad he came up with it. We were having some problems with overly excited kids “WE LOVE DESIGN!!!” who needed to move. By having the kids walk around and make notes and ideas, we kept their bodies and brains moving. ...

The future of fashion looks green…not like the emerald, but in environmental sustainability. The use of reclaimed materials, reduction in seasonality, the adoption of a slower cycle will all contribute to the fashion trends over the next five years. According to the article “Trend forecasters predict a more trendless future”, consumers have adopted the concept as a core component of their fashion interests at a quicker rate during the pandemic. Sustainability can be measured in multiple ways: impact on the environment, treatment of workers, or generation of waste material. Some manufacturers, such as H&M, have begun to focus on utilizing waste material in the production process to reduce environmental impact. Their new line, H&M Edition by John Boyega, focuses on clothes made of organic materials, materials discarded in other productions, or recycled artificial fibers. The line also focuses on the ability of clothing to be repaired as a way to be more sustainable as highlighted in the fact that “it’s estimated that the average garment is worn only ten times before being disposed of, according to a leading clothes waste charity.” ...

ARTH201: Summer 2021 Final Group Project from Greg Walsh on Vimeo. Our final project for ARTH201 done in the style of/parodying SmartHistory.

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. ...