Archive for the ‘class’ Category

A month in graphic design bootcamp

October 9th, 2008 | class, risd | No Comments »

In my last post I promised to share some of what I’m working on for my coursework at RISD. So far that’s mostly been happening on Flickr, but here’s a quick summary of what you’ll find there.

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In Type I, we’ve been making a bunch of collages with found type, exploring how to place words on a page, and just this week started a project with the letter press! No pictures of the letter press project yet (I’m printing tomorrow) but these are a few of the collages I’ve made for the class.

Form and Communication is our big studio class. We have workshops once a week with the undergrads, where we work with a different design concept every three weeks. We also get a chance to meet a lot of the RISD faculty in Graphic Design because every workshop is taught by a different instructor. John Caserta teaches a special graduate student section of this class, where, among other things, we have weekly assignments taking photos to illustrate words.

More (images) to come.

New Beginnings

September 13th, 2008 | art, blogging, class | No Comments »

This week I started classes at RISD, my first studio classes in graphic design. I’m going to try to over-document all of my work this semester (either here, on Flickr, or both) so you can whimsically observe my transition from tech school to art school. It’s going to be one big adventure, for sure.

Tiny Printed Circuit Boards

October 20th, 2007 | class, mas863 | 1 Comment »

Made using the Modela in the Media Lab machine shop, and of course a soldering iron:

2 tiny printed circuit boards

They don’t do too much other than transmit "hello world" over a serial connection. Today I’ll be writing a little code to get the larger board to blink an LED and respond to button presses, exciting I know. We’re using an ATTiny45 processor which has a different instruction set than the chip we used in the microcontroller lab I took last year, but hopefully it won’t be too different.

Learning how to make (almost) anything

October 7th, 2007 | class, mas863 | No Comments »

One of the classes I’m taking this term is MAS.863, "How to Make (almost) Anything," where I’m learning how to use a lot of the fabrication machinery at the Media Lab. There’s a website for the class where all the students are keeping a record of their work (myself included), but I also want to write about my projects here. About every week or so we’re taught how to use a new tool, and then assigned to make something with it. A couple weeks ago the "tool" was the laser cutter and the "assignment" was a 3D Construction Kit.

My construction kit had 4 parts, seen below:

I used the laser cutter to make a bunch of these parts out of corrugated cardboard. The pieces "press fit" together, meaning they can be assembled using the slots cut into the pieces, without any adhesive (if you’re interested in the science of how this works, there is a paper you can read). I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to build with my curvy shapes, but I was pretty happy with the results. Here are some pictures of things I built:

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