I’m going to be running a Rhinoscripting workshop at the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts in Portland on the 29th and 30th, with the illustrious Kenfield Griffiths as my copilot. My understanding is that most of the attendees will be design faculty from the school who wish to brush up their digital chops. (Although, I’ve been away from the Rhino so long, they might be teaching me instead.)
It should be a lot of fun. I’m still working out the lesson plans. Since there’s only two days, things will be very compressed. I guess I should toss this out there: for anyone who’s ever taken a workshop with me (or is an architect), what would be a valuable lesson that you could learn in two days about Rhinoscripting?
More recycling! Two old pieces of work are going to be shown.
First a drawing from my thesis will be in Visionary Drawing Building, a collection of architectural drawings edited by Max Goldfarb. The book will be on display at Mass Moca, on March 21 as part of Matt Bua’s installation at Kidspace Gallery.
Secondly, a poster I worked on with Shirley Shen for Volume Magazine will be shown at Colophon2009. It’s a mad lib for architects to get them thinking about all the activities they could be doing. I wrote a simple script in flash to layout verbs and nouns from an xml file.
I feel really honored to have my work still out there. Thanks to both Max and Volume Magazine.
Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, showed the video at a conference at the Wharton School of Business. His speech, and the video, can be viewed here:
Our team also built the pan and zoom software for his presentation. Soon there will be a hi-res public version of the video. Eventually, I expect a version of the presentation software available too. Although in the meantime, Office Labs has built pan and zoom plug-ins for PowerPoint and OneNote, which you can download for free. (At some point, I’d like to post some images of the designs and rough renders I made for the hardware props in the video.)
Like many things, there’s a lag time between when things happen inside Microsoft and when they’re released to the public. Of course, the issues of productization and IP are complicated and some betas are too ugly to release into the wild. There’s also the intense criticism MS projects receive from the public. Reading the comments on the last Envisioning video on YouTube (which nobody should do) is intimidating. I guess it’s no worse than an architecture crit.
Microsoft, however, is getting better and better at opening its doors. The latency on the video was only a couple months.
There were a couple of projects that Stephen Elop mentioned in his speech that are public, but haven’t been made into products. I thought I’d call out two of them, both from Microsoft Research. Even though these videos are kind of old and the technology simple, there are some really smart ideas in there: the interactive applications/implications are (imho) pretty exciting.
Here’s NanoTouch (I played Unreal Tournament on this device and it was sweet.) :
And Secondlight:
These projects represent a very small part of the many, many projects at Microsoft. Part of what I do is try and find connections between things, ask how our daily life might be affected by certain technological shifts, and listen to how people are already creating their own ways of working. It’s a fallible process, certainly, but there’s a lot of value in the questions themselves.
Hello! I am recent graduate of the Masters of Architecture program at MIT, now a UX Designer at Microsoft. I write about design, architecture, technology and whatever else strikes my fancy.
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