This semester has been a busy one, and the weeks are getting away from me! There’s a lot to talk about, so I’m going to break it up into a few posts. Here, I’d like to catch up on the first couple of drafts of my soil poster for my research methods class. The point…
Tag: design process
ResearchMethods: Defining narrative and scope
I think it’s time to start narrowing down my narrative flow for the Research Methods project to help reduce the amount of reading and data processing necessary for the project. At this point, the dominant points seem to be: Soil is a complex system, and critically important for both food security and climate change. Soil has…
ResearchMethods: Experimenting with R Markdown
This is a cut-and-paste of a post created in R Markdown for my Research Methods class with Dietmar Offenhuber. It appears that there is no simple way to load an R Markdown file into a WordPress post, so I’m porting it over manually instead. The original post is here. This is a continuation of the…
DesignTheory: Concept map in progress
The weekly assignment for our Design Theory class is to make a series of concept maps that summarize the readings. I’m almost afraid to admit how much fun I’m having on homework, but I love watching the concept maps evolve from a messy collection of concepts to a more coherent, structured narrative. I’m going to indulge…
DesignTheory: Concept of design
We’re only a week into classes, and already the semester is off and running. My design theory class this semester is taught by Hugh Dubberly, who lives in San Francisco, so we will meet via Skype once a week, and in person for a weekend intensive workshop a couple of times a semester. The first…
LED Grid: First hardware tests
This is a guest post by Branden Gunn, about building the LED Grid for our collaborative design project. In the last post, the boards had just arrived, and the rest of the parts were on order. A few days later, everything was here! Because resistors are so cheap when you get 100 or 500, it…
VisComm: Monarch butterfly poster
My VisComm class was assigned the task of making a poster on an environmental topic this semester. We chose a general sub-topic (water, land use, etc.) from a list of options, and then researched and created an informational poster to summarize that particular aspect of the environment. I chose to work on biodiversity, and then decided…
Grids and boxes
Every once in a while you catch yourself using the same approach to solve different problems. Sometimes that’s a good thing, and the insight gives you another tool in your repertoire. And sometimes, you realize that you’re applying the wrong solution, and a different approach might work better. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve come…
History ID: Genealogy project
We were assigned a genealogy project in my History of Information Design class, where we were to choose a topic and create an infographic to show a lineage. While I was pondering my choice of topics, I was also studying from A Type Primer by John Kane for VisComm. As I puzzled my way through…
VisComm: Rights of Man typesetting crit 1
The first assignment for my Visual Communications class was to typeset 10 versions of Article 4 from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The first 5 versions were to be kept simple: one size of font, and formatted as simple paragraphs. The second set of compositions could be more elaborate: multiple typefaces,…