3D Printing: Sketch to SketchUp, 30 minutes

This evening, I bumped into a guy I know, who talked to me about a project he’s working on. Turns out that he could use a template for this project. Basically, he needs a jig.  A jig is a three-dimensional object that serves as a template:  Slide the unaltered main part into the jig, use the guides on the jig to attach the relevant bits in exactly the right place, slide the newly altered part out of the jig, and boom! Done!

But describing the jig — a template for a part that requires repeated steps to assemble in exactly the same way every time — this bit of tape here, that cut there, and so on.  It’s a very difficult task.  He was trying to describe it in words, and not doing very well.

So, I whipped out my iPad, and started up Paper by fiftythree.com, and in a few minutes we’d worked up a passable sketch.  I left him, and walked home, and used the remaining thirty-five minutes of battery power to design the jig for his project.  A short while later, I’ve gotten an e-mail back from him, and he’s seen the .JPGs of his rough idea, rendered in SketchUp, and approved the design.

I’ll try doing a rough printout for him tomorrow on our cupcake printer, Moira.  And he’ll be able to try out his design, and talk to his project partners, on Friday or Monday.

Think about the power of that for the future of manufacturing:  A rough design of a part, from sketch to SketchUp or other 3D Modeling software, in 35 minutes. Another hour or two to print the design — twenty minutes of that time spent calibrating the Frankenstein’s Monster of a cupcake printer (Love you, “Moira!”) and warming her up to 220° C for printing, instead of waiting six to twenty days for the part to be designed, mis-manufactured, shipped, corrected, shipped back, re-manufactured, and then be useful.  Wow.

And now, add in the potential that your kid in third grade is doing that work.

A kid in third grade doesn’t even know what the X-Y-Z axis means, let alone how to measure precisely along those axes.  He doesn’t know what a cam or a jig or a template or a gauge is, or how to put calibration markers into his design, so he can compare the first print with the model, and determine how much of a margin of error is created between the digital model and the final product.

But he could.  And he will, with enough practice.

In the meantime, there are going to be two prints of this object — one for my friend, and one to show the new teachers who are coming to my school to attend a class on how to teach Design Thinking.

Because, as Scott says, “A picture is worth a thousand words. But a part is worth a thousand pictures.”  And so it proved.  I took my friend’s words, about a thousand of them, and I structured them into a rough sketch, and then into a SketchUp model.  And tomorrow, I’m going to take two hours of time I could be writing, to dedicate my computer to the task of printing two copies of this model, to make a part.

A hundred thousand words — a hundred thousand x-y-z axis calibrations and a semi-precise amount of melted plastic later — and my friend will have his part.

It’s hard to believe I’ve done the equivalent amount of thinking, as if I’d just written a third of a Stephen King novel, but I have.  We should do a better job of teaching kids that drawing is thinking.  We should do better than that, really: We teachers should believe it ourselves.

Know the Power of Image

How to make Google your allied spirit….

Chances are pretty good that somewhere on your hard drive is an image whose provenance you don’t know. Maybe it’s a picture of a Greek ostraka with a name that looks suspiciously like “Pericles” but you don’t remember where you downloaded the picture.  Or maybe, there’s an unattributed statue picture in one of your slideshows for class.  Or maybe one of your students doesn’t know the bibliographic data for a picture in her slideshow.

You should know how to find that information.  Here’s how.

First, go to Google’s homepage, Google.com.  Then find the button that takes you to Google Image.  Go there.  In the search bar, notice the little icon of the camera.  Click on that.  Upload the image with the missing provenance data, and search for the photo.  My friend Craig was looking for the identification of this goddess — surrounded by crooked Sunwheels, and dogs, and gees, and bullheads. Who was she?

Potnia Theon — mistress of animals. SOrry about the crooked crosses: does it help that they date to 680 BC? probably not.

My almost-thirty-year old memory of such things is that this was Geometric ware from ancient Greece, but older than the Parthenon, although younger than the Trojan War. That gave me a window, of call it 900 BC to 700 BC. Turns out that this is from Boeotia, near the ancient city of Thebes (of the seven gates, and the Sphinx riddling to Oedipus on the road). It dates from 680 BC, and she’s a Potnia Theron — a Mistress of Animals, akin to Artemis.  The original is in the Archaeological Museum in Athens.

We wouldn’t have known any of this without Google Reverse Image search, a Flickr user named Julianna (thank you!) , and my curious friend Craig.

But now we do.

Reflecting on this, I realized that if I’d wanted to answer Craig’s question fifteen years ago, I’d have had to find an art history library, and slog through books of Mycenaean and early Greek pottery for several hours. Instead, I had an answer in fifteen minutes… and that answer was not dependent AT ALL on what I’d previously known.  In college (actually, in grad school) I spent several hundred dollars on books, and probably a few thousand dollars on tuition, in order to learn the basic framework of Hellenic pottery patterns… and in the clutch, twenty years on, I was wrong.

Google was right, and able to construct the knowledge path from the visual image alone, to the etherial data of the photographer, to the more etherial data of the physical location of the object photographed, and to the even more etherial data of where and when the original potter had worked.  That’s a bizarre and alien sort of efficiency.

And yet, it’s the core efficiency of the Palace of Memory technique, for example.  Your brain is much better at remembering pictures than words, and better at remembering places than abstract information.  And it turns out that Google Images is capable of helping you construct those lines of connection between place and image quite rapidly.

And suddenly, the power of images becomes quite clear.

Pretty girl, all made of geometric patterns with inappropriate crooked crosses, geese, a bull’s head and a shaggy dog or two?  Boeotian, 680 BC ± 10 years?  Potnia Theron, or Mistress of Animals. Sure, I know her. She’s in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens… Why do you ask?

Well, sure I know that.  You have to know these things if you’re a magician…

Only, you don’t need to know that.  You need to be able to construct the path to that knowledge, but not necessarily what the knowledge is.  There may come a time when there will be no Google to call upon.  In the meantime, use it. Trace your imagery back to its sources. Learn what the external brain has to say about the images you treasured enough to keep, but not enough to keep the bibliographic data solidified.

You might surprise yourself.

John Keats, Cultural Appropriation, and Drawing

Chapman’s Homer: a poster
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
The eighth grade was writing poems and creating illuminations or illustrations of them, after having read a number of poems by Rumi in a book called The Illuminated Rumi. The idea was that by asking them to think about the visual images in the Rumi poems, and comparing them to the illustrations, they would see how important visual imagery is to the development of poetic language.

Then, of course, they wrote and illuminated their own poems. It was a great little design thinking project — how does a set of word provoke a set of images? How does a set of images provoke a set of words? How can words and images together provoke new feelings?

I didn’t wish to make a poster for one of my own poems, but I figured I’d illustrate one of the poems that I have memorized, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” by John Keats who died in 1827. My deal with the English teacher in question was that I would leave in the pencil guidelines and planning marks, so that students could see my design process to some degree, and have a sense of my construction process. As I described it to her and to her class, the poem is about a book, so the illustration includes a book. On the pages of the book itself are two illustrations which are themselves illustrating the second half of poem. Both of the images are about the astonishment and amazement of discovery of unexpected sights in the natural world, so someone — the current reader, perhaps? — has illustrated the margins of the book with examples of local plants and a dragonfly. The cycle of discovery continues and grows richer and deeper. Thus, Keats’s words inspire SEVERAL layers of discovery: the possibility of delving into the writings of an ancient Greek poet; the willingness to investigate history (the “Cortez” image) and astronomy (“Watcher of the skies”); and finally the natural world and the skill of drawing (the plants in the margin notes of the book, and the poster itself).

I recently said something dumb on Balthasar’s blog which I shouldn’t have said, and I apologize here, publicly… For as I made this poster, I was uncomfortably aware of the degree to which this poem — which I’ve always liked — can be read in another way as part and parcel of a bit of cultural appropriation. Keats’s poem comments on an English translation of an ancient Greek epic, and in the process of describing that work… Keats claims both Homer, and several islands dedicated to Apollo, for the English language and the English-speaking peoples. The astronomer is in one sense gazing upon the sky in wonder, but in another he’s laying claim to the heavens. And Cortez — well. It was actually Balboa who stood at Darien in Panama, and gazed at the Pacific — but the cultural -appropriation (and -destruction) of the power- and wealth-hungry captain of the Aztec conquest should be self-evident.

But I’m not sure I would have read this poem that way without drawing it out first. I needed the opportunity to create the poster before I would have seen the cultural complexities the poem raises. And in good design fashion — the solution to one problem also raises several new problems on its own. As my friend Josh says, “There’s no better or faster way to generate problems than to create a solution.”

We discover things about the world through the thought processes we use to investigate it, and any means that we use to do that — writing, or reading, or drawing, or visualizing, or ritualizing, or glamorizing — will help us make new and deeper discoveries. It’s remarkable the things that we uncover as we go through these processes. As the poet said, “pull a thread, and find the whole world attached to it.”

Vesta and Graphic Design

I’m not sure that I’ll be able to present these two images in exactly the way that I intend, but I hope this will work out.  If you’re seeing this on the website, at left (in theory) are two aligned pages which should have an appearance rather like a modernist-medieval hybrid of a Book of Hours — that is, a page of Latin-medieval/modern text, and a line-art image of a woman poking at a fire in a pillared hall, with a city’s roofs arrayed around and above the arched roof.

You’ll also notice that there’s quite a lot of white space around the image, with a ‘gloss’ on the Latin text scribbled in one of the margins (apparently by a Goliard who had to skip town in a hurry).  And this is not the work of a competent Latinist, apparently, because the Latin is only so-so; it’s a description of a pagan goddess, for one, and for another the scribe has terrible uncials, and for still another he’s only got black ink to work with.  Poor scribe!

And yet the scribe is me.  The pages are laid out using the medieval geometrical formula, and the lines were hand-ruled using a measuring tool of dubious accuracy, in conjunction with the use of a warped t-square and a cheap triangle.  Other tools were similarly compromised, as befits a poor poet on the run from the ecclesiastical authorities in the early 13th century.  The image of the goddess, the open hall, the empty chair, and its paved floor, and its chest, and its city, and the awkwardly-framed fire, with all of the horrors inflicted on the ‘normal rules of perspective‘, is me.  The work of these two pages, including the authoring of the text on the left-hand page, took about two hours.  And the author of all this, text and image alike, as well as the “kakagraphy” (if calligraphy is “beautiful writing”, then wouldn’t kakagraphy be ugly writing?) as busy and as rapid as it is, is me.

Tie and Jeans has this really excellent post about modeling projects or process, where he talks about how he’s starting a new group of kids on makery, and he is building a carousel model at home with his daughter.  And he’s planning on showing them his model when his students exceed his current capacity (which he admits is not going to be hard).

Potentially, I have the opposite problem. My Latin students in sixth grade are currently working on designing their own pages for a Latin codex-bound book. Each student is designing a pair of pages, a left-and-right pair, using the medieval geometric formula, and trying to learn the basics of a medieval lettering system — we’re not exactly imitating Christian monastics, but there are parallels.  And they’re encountering all sorts of problems with illustration and design along the way:

• When do you erase?
• How should you arrange your vocabulary on the page?
• Is my text long enough?
• How do I scale my illustration sketches to fill the space?
• How can I use this sketch on lined paper to fill this window on blank paper?
• Is collage allowed?
• The tape ripped my paper. Now what?
• The paper got ripped because I used my pencil too hard. Now what?
• The color on my illustration made it too dark for the copier.
• The pen I was using yesterday is gone.  Now the lines don’t match. Now what?

What’s taken them eight class periods and a couple of homework times has taken me… two hours? Two and a half?  Ok, I’m way more practiced at this than them.  I had Dave Gray teach me his Semigram/”Forms Fields and Flows” personally in August 2009, so I’ve been drawing and illustrating and practicing those skills off and on for four years now.  My Latin here is terrible — but I’m also not hugely concerned about mistakes. I wanted hard copy to put in front of students tomorrow, and that meant putting in two hours on the project today. Banging out a text in 20 minutes was the least of my worries… do you know how long it took to lay down that pavement of small and large flagstones under and around the chest, the woman, the throne and the fire pit?

Meanwhile I’ve watched kids agonize over small things and large.  They don’t always know how to work carefully… and there are times when they work with such hesitancy and such terror of their efforts that it’s like they have no idea how to move forward.  They’re so rooted in fear about making mistakes that they do not know how to move past the terror and get stuff done.

And I’m starting to feel like this is a big part of my job: learning to help kids get excited about these sorts of projects — graphic design or building carousels, writing Scratch programs or drawing and building architectural models — and then helping them develop the authentic skills necessary to do that job well.  It’s about recreating a whole set of skills of hand and eye and mind that computers often do for us today — but that when we let computers do them for us, we put ourselves at risk of obsolescing ourselves.

In laying out these pages, it turns out that gripping a pencil the right way to draw a guide-line (as opposed to writing a sentence) is a mission-critical skill.  Using a glue gun to build an architectural model (or a Kavad) is a mission-critical skill.  Learning to use a T-square and triangle in conjunction with one another is a mission-critical skill for kids.

What? What’s that you say? Kids will grow up, and then they’ll doing this stuff on a computer forever, if they do it at all?  I don’t know, maybe school should be more like the experience of Wesley on the Dread Pirate Robert’s ship, REVENGE.  He was learning fencing, and how to sail a ship, and to be a valet, and take orders, and navigate, and do all that crazy range of skills that humans do.  Do we want computers to do all of that for us?

It strikes me as a great way to raise a generation of kids who have no idea how the world works, or how to make anything, or who become learners in spite of school, instead of because of it.

Meanwhile, it’s a very exciting time for me.  I’ve learned how to build pop-up books, write a medieval-ish manuscript, and lucid-dream in the last week.  Sooner or later I’ll figure out how to include all of this in my curriculum.  It will be irreplaceable, I suspect, even with a Creative Commons open-source curriculum, because I’ll have been the one to learn the skills and develop the life-path… and somewhere in the next couple of months I’m going to build a model factory, or a carousel, or something mechanical like TieandJeans….

Because curiously enough, I’m becoming a tinkerer and a dabbler and a jack-of-all-trades as a result of being in the Design Thinking business. One day it’s T-squares and X-Acto knives, the next it’s dowels and cardboard boxes and gear ratios.   It’s not my job description (yet) to teach kids to be engineers.  It’s my job to teach them to be dabblers and inventors, creators and imaginers and builders and makers.

I’d say it’s a very ancient line of work, this carrying of fire among the children of mortals.  Maybe it’s no accident that Vesta, that sly-eyed Lady at the Olympian Hearth, wound up on these pages… She turned a blind eye when Prometheus came into her hall to steal fire for men; perhaps for us all, She will do the same?

Ten Commandments to Carve in Stone

Ananael (Scott Stenwick) has an article up today about vigilance and paranoia.  How, if he had millions to spend and a safe place to put them, he’d put up some mysterious stone structures with ancient-sounding commandments carved in ten languages.  And he’s referencing the Georgia Guidestones.

It seems like a useful exercise, actually. If you could put up a monument that might last 50,000 years in eight languages, what would you write?  Scott claims that one needs two ridiculous ones, one completely unworkable, and seven platitudes.

And yet.  And yet, it turns out that any list carved into stone in so many languages, can help inspire movements in art and science, religion and imagination. They can have consequences far beyond the normal realm of events. So, here’s mine.  If I had millions to spend on such a project, and access to high quality stone from around the world, and could build such a thing, then this is what I’d inscribe in three-inch high letters 3/4″ deep, in eight living languages and three dead ones (Hebrew, Sanskrit and Sumerian):

1. Nature will have its way: work with it or be destroyed in the long run.
2. Humans sometimes mate for life, but it’s not a sure thing.
3. Reënchant the world with stories; make magic for the healing of the world.
4. Kill no one in the name of your idea of God.
5. A picture is worth a thousand words; a part is worth a thousand pictures; a machine is worth a thousand parts.
6. Teach children to read, write, draw, play outside, and make. Don’t be upset if not all lessons stick.
7. Constrained democracy is the best government, but it’s often disappointing.
8. The tools available determine all possible solutions.
9. Don’t be a party to villainy by government, religion or science.
10. Nothing lasts forever, not even this list.

I think it contains the right mix of ridiculousness, generalized platitudes, and important advice.  (I’ll leave it to my readers to decide which ones are unworkable, which are ridiculous, and which are platitudes). And the use of contractions would help add this feature of the English language to the realm of grammatical correctness in time.   I may come up with my own monument design in time, but I’m thinking a building in the shape of two cubes stacked on top of one another, with a half-sphere dome on top, and black and white marble pillars in the corners.  On top of a foundation shaped like a turtle with elephants on its back.

Would it help build a new society in the event of the apocalypse?  Possibly.  It might even be one in which I’d like living.

What’s on your list?

Need a New Grimoire?

Here’s one.  This is Version 2.0 of Design Thinking for Educators.  It’s yet another guide to the exercises and mindset necessary to be a designer-teacher, or a teacher-designer — a person who works and thinks like a designer in schools for the betterment of the experiences of the student, the teacher, the administrator, the parent.  And while I haven’t delved too deeply into this version of the book yet, its predecessor, version 1.0, is well-thumbed and pretty well dog-eared by now.

I wish I could say this work is mine.  It’s not, of course, but I have other fish to fry, and other work to do.

But if your school is all “fill in the bubbles” and “here’s this worksheet”, then this is one solution (among many).  It’s one of the ways that this generation is gunning for business-as-usual in schools around the world.  And here’s a grimoire, a grammar if you will — for understanding that new language.

If you’re a teacher, this will reinvigorate your practice if you can work past the challenges this book presents.  If you’re a magician or claim to be, this PDF — for a lot cheaper than Rufus Opus’s course, or Jason Miller’s (fine as both courses are), will show you spirits and mindsets that you probably don’t think about on a regular basis, but (within its limitations) will show you a slightly different set of priorities, and a slightly different way of looking at the world.

Well worth downloading.

Mysterious Visitors

A year ago tomorrow I wrote this poem about the Three Kings.  I thought at the time, it was pretty good, and I’m surprised that it’s gotten less attention than it has;  this time of year, people go looking for poetry for Epiphany, and they read this one… and they keep looking.  I find myself wondering if it’s getting read as part of a sermon or some symposium on the “meaning of Epiphany”, and no one’s bothering to tell the author.  Forty sets of eyes in the last couple of weeks, and no one bothers to send a note?

Oh, well. Welcome to the modern Internet, where if I violate your copyright protections, it’s the end of the world; but if you violate my copyright protections, it’s “well, it’s fair use and you shouldn’t have put it on the internet if you didn’t want it used.”

The thing is, I did want it used, and I do want it used.  Poets want their work out in the public eye. Not necessarily in the public domain, but in the public eye.  And they’re not the same thing at all.  Mysterious visitors, indeed.

Time was when I could only get my friends to read my writing.  I’d hand around paper manuscripts of things, or I’d go to coffee houses and stand on stage and read something aloud, and half the time someone would say a kind word or two, along the lines of “that was really deep, man,” and that would be the end of it. (Sometimes we applaud because the poem is good, and sometimes because it’s over.)  Now?

Now, only strangers read my writing.  I’ve met TieAndJeans, and Radioactive Art, and a couple of my other readers in person, but mostly they’re mysterious strangers.  I think one of my goals is to meet some of the bloggers that I read, both in teaching and in the occult spheres, and get a sense of their darshan.  I hope that we’ll have a chance to meet.

Link to rare points of view

My friend and former White Wolf writing colleague has written an article about his experience as the father of two of the children at Sandy Hook Elementary school yesterday. It is a great, but highly triggering, read.  If you are susceptible to despair at the description of high degrees of mental suffering and anguish at the unknown, I suggest skipping the read.  But he’s a great writer, and he’s worth checking out.

This piece, by Anarchistic Soccer Mom, is about mental illness in her thirteen year old son, Michael.  She urges us as a nation to do something about mental illness, serious mental illness, in this country.  It’s easy to talk about taking away access to guns, sure.  It’s harder to do something about the real problem, which is crazy people.

60,000/18,000

Sometime in the last half-hour, this blog passed 60,000 all-time views.  I usually get between 35 and 100 hits in a day, so sometime in the next 24 hours, I’ll also hit 18,000 views this year — a new record for me, and one which makes it very likely that I’ll break 20,000 views for the whole year. Which means that a third-ish of my readership has shown up in the last nine months.

None of this necessarily means much of anything, but now is as good a time to make a shout-out as any.  Thank you to you, the readers.  If you’ve thought about introducing yourself, or saying hi, or just wanted to say thanks, or even “Andrew, stop writing now,”… now’s your chance:  I’ve turned off the Like and share buttons for this entry, and you’ll have to show appreciation or criticism some other way, by actually writing something.

“I met the challenge and I succeeded”

As I was leaving the house tonight on an errand, I passed my neighbor on the porch.  He’s an older guy, late 50s or early 60s.  The years… hmm… have not been kind.  He looks hard-ridden and put away wet, as the old expression goes, and run down.  Normally he’s out on the front stoop of the building smoking a cigarette in a posture that suggests that it was a hard day, and he’s not going to have too many more like it before there’s a closed-casket ceremony at a funeral parlor with only one person attending.

Tonight he was more animated than I’ve ever seen him.  He had his cellphone out, and he had no cigarette in his hand, and he was overjoyed at whatever it was that he’d achieved, and he was shouting into the phone, almost, but joyously, “No, you don’t understand… I met the challenge, and against all odds, I succeeded.  I made it work.  Me.  I did it.”

I have no idea what he was doing or what he did to succeed — I was, as I say, on a somewhat urgent errand, and I didn’t have time to stop and talk to him.  But I think this is the essence of what we want kids to experience after a Design Thinking or a Makery experience: the indomitable joy and fierceness that comes from completing a project, even in the face of difficulty and indignity, and succeeding anyway.

My neighbor achieved that yesterday. What can I do to help my students achieve that sense of themselves tomorrow?