George Showman’s Blog

The Long Now foundation blows my mind yet again, this time with a long talk by Craig Venter that shows me several things:

1. It *is* possible to do something very productive while sailing around the world. I can’t quite tell to what (undoubtedly large) degree the sailing ship was just a vanity project — by which I mean, he just did it because he loves sailing — and to what degree the mode of transportation actually helped with the science. Obviously it’s easier to get pristine water samples if you aren’t emitting exhaust, etc., but there would be many other easier ways to do the sampling he did. As a publicity stunt it must be fairly effective, however.

2. Craig shares my belief that the global environmental problem has reached such a point that only radical technological change will get us out of it. This radical change will also, inevitably, result in radical social change — a complete re-making of everything, including ourselves. I would normally write off his apparent optimism about the final result of such re-making as stupidity, but he’s clearly so far ahead in his technological achievements that I think I have to take his perspective as being considerably more likely to be the right one than, say, mine.  In a way, this gives me a huge surge of optimism — technology such as he is aiming for would actually be able to solve a lot of our global environmental problems.  Just to see a potential technological solution is already a huge step forward.  It almost makes me feel that it’s okay to buy new things again, to take airplanes, to stop worrying so much.

3. But, how not to be left behind? Craig has one of the best seats in the house for watching global change, since he’s pushing a lot of it forward. I envy him hugely — never have I felt the lurking irrelevance of the profession of architect and educator more than while watching his talk. I used to get this feeling when talking to my friends in software, but the technological gap Venter is opening seems to be much larger. To actually be there at the blistering edge of the technological shockwave must be incredibly thrilling and empowering. Meanwhile, those of us in the design professions (well, and almost everybody else) are left to clean up, constantly adjusting our thinking to the technological changes raining down from on high.

This makes me feel very low. I think I need to find the right large project to devote myself to, and I”m afraid even the broadest reach of architecture does not engage with such projects.  But I’m very impressionable at the moment.

Hi.  Just some notes on where things are at with me:

1. Just finished up another semester of teaching at Pratt.  The classes were Arch 114 and Arch 213, which teach, respectively, 2D computer representation and 3D computer representation.  You can browse some rather raw student work by going through the contacts of my flickr teaching persona (note especially these three).

2. RSVP Architecture Studio, where I work, has moved to DUMBO in Brooklyn.  This is a great development for a number of reasons, one of which is that now we have windows again.  We are also going to have a real website within a month or two!

3. This summer, I will be working full time at RSVP, as well as planning for my fall classes.  I am hoping to teach again at the MediaSCAPES program at sci-arc in L.A., but this is still up in the air.  I also need to refine the curricula I taught this year at Pratt.  I think I’m honing in on a great sequence of assignments and themes for Arch 213 in particular.

4. It sounds like RSVP will also do one or more competitions this summer, which will be a new adventure for us.  First up is a bike rack design competition in NYC.

5. Lastly, some things that have excited me recently:

• Nels Cline, a guitarist — I saw him live recently, and now have four of his albums.  Four may be too many — Nels’ song-writing doesn’t quite live up to his talents — but I’ve enjoyed his dark 70s jazz/rock fusion very much in the two months since I discovered him.
• I’m now a 14 kyu player on the International Go Servers.  This is still totally piddling.
• I’ve started running and biking again, as one does in the spring.
• I was diagnosed with glaucoma recently so am now a major eye-drop taker.
• Paul Virilio — I need to read more of him, since he’s basically channeling exactly what I think about the world.  Unfortunately he paints a fairly depressing picture of how things are.
• The New Yorker — for some reason a whole string of recent articles (on Chinese birders, elevators, folk music recording, etc.) have really resonated with me.

Through one of Al Gore’s “We” campaign emails I stumbled upon the good old NREL today, and it got me thinking. I almost did an internship there in my junior year of college; my choice NOT to do it is still one of my big regrets. But anyway, the NREL would seem to be one of the federal “good guys” in the war on global warming (how about “War on Warmth?”, or, just “WARmth?”).

Among other things (e.g. technical research of various kinds*), NREL maintains data about publicly available energy sources like wind. This leads me to the topic of the post; it seems to me that NREL could really benefit from some good, ambitious information design. They have all this data which could, if properly handled, actually inspire and influence the public, instead of just sitting in a database waiting for the right query from an individual with a specific need. Or even just sitting in a beautiful-but-static map which was clearly intended for print — and actually scanned from print for the web.

I feel similarly about the weather. In fact I think there’s a HUGE private opportunity for a really good weather site. It’s a big drawing and information design challenge, of course.

But anyway, I imagine other federal agencies besides the NREL could benefit from a FOID. In some ways, I really like federal webpages because they tend to be ‘ugly’ but full of information. I think the web probably should be ugly, but at the same time some information needs to be given its due articulation, or people will never engage with it.

Without having looked into which information designers actually do work for the federal government, I would like to call for the formation of a Federal Office of Information Design or something similar. Rather than contracting info-design out to the lowest bidders, federal agencies could call on the support of a dedicated team of publicly-minded (since, presumably, underfunded) information designers. In return, these people would, of course, have a major influence on American political (as in, action among citizens) life, shaping the overall interface between citizens and their government, and between citizens and the physical sciences/world that their government strives to model and understand. And if the FOID were to hire contractors to do some of its work, at least they would be under the oversight of federal information designers who had already thought through the issues from a public service point of view.

Of course we do have the GPO:

The U.S. Government Printing Office’s core mission, Keeping America Informed, dates to 1813 when Congress determined the need to make information regarding the work of the three branches of Government available to all Americans.

But they have a lot of other things on their hands, and they do a ton of grunt work. The FOID would be called in on projects, rather than be given an all-embracing mission.

These are but the wanderings of an ignorant mind. If anybody out there actually knows how the feds contract their information design, or can think of examples of good federal information design, please pipe up!

* My internship in ‘98 would have been to work on modeling heat flow through houses. They do this to set industry standards, I suppose. Basically I decided not to go because it sounded like I would just be working with depressing (at the time I found all computer work depressing) finite element analysis software, and because I would have had to live and DRIVE in Boulder, CO. I guess if I *had* gone I would now be some uber-connected energy guru.

Okay, because my previous post was turning into a multi-headed rant, I thought I would try again to extract useful knowledge from any clever readers. So, questions:

1. theory/content: If you had 45 minutes to give an introductory lecture on scripting to students who mostly have never tried it but have seen some fruits of scripted work (i.e. “think it’s cool”), what would you say? Keep in mind that this is a lecture in a drawing class (”2D Representation”) where the students have learned AutoCAD and how to construct perspectives, cut sections, etc. using projective geometry.

2. technical: If you had 15 minutes for a quick demo as part of your lecture, and then the students probably had half-an-hour on their own to fiddle with something, what kind of sample scripts would you feed them? What tool would you use (though I’ve basically already settled on Processing)?

3. Script precedents: What examples of work that relates somehow to the drawing/scripting relationship (be it “divide”, “transition”, “singularity”, etc.) would you want to show these students?  I’m interested, I think, in scripts that are extremely clear in their workings, and that highlight fundamental concepts.

4. Drawing precedents: What examples of systematic (e.g. projective) drawing would you show as a way to highlight drawing’s parametric potential and the richness of the information it can manipulate?

5. tone: How would you prevent the lecture turning into a “gee-whiz” fest? How to leave the students with the notion that scripting is to be taken very seriously as a mode of thought, not just as pipeline for ‘finding form’ or ‘growing answers’, etc….

What questions am I not asking? See my last post for more background information and some silly brainstorming.  Yes, I realize I’m using my blog as a forum post.  Sorry.

I need to give a lecture this coming Friday on scripting and drawing, for our ARCH 114 “2D Representation” class at Pratt.

It’s a very exciting topic to me.

My first instinct is to approach this thematically. E.g. projective drawing as an essentially parallel system and way of structuring design, and scripting as an essentially serial or linear way of doing so. BUT of course as soon as we parametrize a script we are setting up parallelisms. So this distinction is only valid or even interesting as a way in to each discipline… since, fundamentally, lines operate in parallel with one another, and code is executed seriatum by the needle of the computer.

There is also the technical concern — how to get the students’ hands dirty with scripting? At first I thought Scriptographer would be great, because they are learning Illustrator anyway, but at this point I unfortunately don’t have time to get into it. So I turn to Processing, gladly enough, since in addition to being fairly easy to install and kick-start something with, it is also a tool that is seeing more and more use (Marc Fornes having expressed disgust a few months ago at the notion that I would show the students any scripting tool they wouldn’t actually use in their coming practice… this in response to my idly mentioning AUTOLisp as a tempting option, since the class is primarily an AutoCAD class, after all). Right, so, P5 all the way. I intend to send an email tomorrow night prompting all students to install it before the lecture.

Next up is the necessity of finding good examples, not just of current scripted work (of which there is a lot, though not necessarily a lot that is clear for this kind of example), but also of historical examples of work executed with drawings that exhibited some script-like thinking. And here I hit on the real nut and challenge of the lecture: what is this transition from drawing to scripting? Is it a transition? Most scripts draw, in the practices I’ve seen, so in some ways scripting is just the Taylorization of drawing.

But turn the mirror, and we see that most computer drawings contain scripts, or, at least, the hidden connections that characterize digital parametric models. E.g. I change something in the “front” view in Rhino, and of course that change is reflected in the top view (where appropriate). If I myself were responsible for the projection, then I myself would have to propagate the change. Aha, here I’m hitting on one of the things that troubles me about computer production in general. Was there any important design thinking in the propagation of change, in the updating of models, which we used to do ‘by hand’ (even in CAD, for years)?

Well, certainly by tracing out the changes from an elevation to a plan, one thinks them over, one is able to ponder the implications for detailed features as well as the overall formal changes. Much of this is simply the reflection that comes from taking a bit of time. You might say that, if one is a professional draftsman, one doesn’t think all that much at all, but I REJECT that notion, since I’ve been spending about 10 hours a day in CAD for the past two years and I find I am only *more* sensitive to details, *more* sensitive to the implications of every change in plan or section, *more* able to internalize the model of the building based on the drawings I have executed. Maybe after twenty years this would be different, but I doubt it. Drawing, even point-and-click (CAD) drawing, is a deep craft.
“Taking a bit of time”, of course, is the target of many of the advocates of BIM (essentially a heavily parametrized — scripted — drawing system). I am actually still in doubt that we can do good work much faster than a firm from the 40s, though. Maybe twice as fast? In any drawing system where the designer propagates the changes, sure more time is spent on that propagation, but as a percentage of project time this actual propagation is not so great. I can draw in CAD much faster than I can think, much of the time, so of course my drawing is limited by my thought. The opportunity cost of propagating changes manually is therefore small.

Risk of error is a whole other rationalization for BIM, natch.

But parametrics, and their systematization into things like BIM, is only one aspect of scripting. Another deep power of scripting is its capacity for repetition, and the incrementalization of any change. This has led to what I consider to be the surprisingly dry well of “emergent form”, through various structures, such as “agent-based” code (the interaction of little automata to produce qualitatively alien effects at larger scales), and ……. huh, is all emergence actually based on automata of some kind or another? There are huge varieties in types of automata systems, natch.

Now, agent-based systems do produce incredible effects, but for some reason not inspiring architecture. This may just be a question of time… what are the challenges facing them?

- scale — scale (weight, speed, depth, volume, etc.) is hard to register in a script, whereas the human eye can make an incredible number of scalar decisions (and assumptions) in an instant. This is what gives drawing a lot of its power. At any point the gesture is roughly the same to draw a line that makes a radical change, vs. a line that makes a subtle change. I suppose scripting has some of this power in its implementation of global vs. local variables and functions, but the control points in a script are rarely as refined, in terms of scale, as the control one has in a drawing.

- hmmmmmm … I’m going to sketch a bit.

In attendance: Mark, Caleb, Frank, and yours truly. Also a lot of left-over baklava, ginger cookies, and a stained tea cozy.
Topics:

• Mathematica. Frank has been exporting meshes from Mathematica to Rhino, turning them into point clouds, and going from there. Another link worth checking out: Wolfram’s bestiary. Personally I find this connection from the world of pure math to the world of geometric massage to be a very exciting one. The provocation of Mathematica is the disturbing compactness of the code — a single function generates so much form as it plays out along its axes. I am only just realizing the degree to which geometry, like drawing, is one of those beautiful thought-bridges which connect almost all human disciplines.
• Matrix transformations in Processing — Frank has written and published a library. This is intended to help people who are interested in using matrix transformations but who don’t want/need to use OpenGL and who don’t want to bother with the Processing camera and 3D viewing in general. I.e. if you are just planning on generating geometry in Processing and then exporting it, this seems like a great library to use.
• Projecting stuff onto Google Earth — Mark and Toru have developed a nice, one-step process for this for the ‘Slumlab’ students at Columbia (also see this), once again showing that they are among the most web-savvy of the coding architects.
• The lack of really investigative design thinking in current ‘virtual worlds’ (in quotes because they’re not). Mark or Caleb mentioned the Half-life mod Portal, a fascinating example of somebody starting to hack the spatial assumptions of such worlds (irrelevantly, I had this exact idea myself several years ago). This whole discussion about games and virtual worlds also reminded me what interesting reading there is to be had on Gamasutra. Mark seemed particularly keen on the value of current independent game development. I would like to find more examples like Portal.

Long time no bloggy!  To begin with, here’s a link that’s sure to thrill the materialists out there:

http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/

A team of cameramen and remote cameras devoted to documenting changes in ice caps and glaciers.  Check out the movie clips under “Evidence” at the top.  I think their footage is too focused on cool effects, but nonetheless the shot of the iceberg calving is pretty sweet; it’s incredible how thick the sheet of ice is, when it finally flips out and you see the bottom.  I just wish they had controlled time a little more maturely in their time-lapses and live footage — I have to believe that the clips shown are faster than real time (an admittedly arbitrary but immensely useful standard for film play-back).

What am I doing with myself this month?

1. Working on construction documents (i.e. detailed drawings) for our condo building in Long Island City, which is fun, educational, but quite tiring.

2. Teaching drawing in various forms at Pratt, which includes trying to write a script to export cameras cleanly from Rhino to 3ds Max (McNeel has mysteriously removed the script they used to offer on their site…).  Eventually I would like to define a file format, a kind of ‘rendering harness’ format that could hold camera and perhaps lighting information for use in multiple programs (e.g. also Maya, maybe Sketchup).

3. Organizing the occasional ’scripting salon’.  Last week we had #4 which was fairly quiet due to low attendance.  I did learn some very interesting things about Flash as a development tool, and we discussed how to export cameras effectively from Rhino.  I will check my notes tonight and if there is anything interesting I will post them here.
4. Reading Horatio Hornblower and the Aubrey/Maturin series in parallel.  Now at #6 in Horblower, #8 in Aubrey.  They are both gripping and deeply inspiring for any technical work, I believe.  They present the British navy of the Napoleonic era (c. 1810) in a way that celebrates the courage behind logistics.

For a break, though, I’ve just cracked open Sentimental Education by Flaubert.

We met at Doma, a coffee shop in the West Village. Very pretty place, crowded but manageable (secured a table fairly easily), but alas it provided no wireless connection and there were no neighboring open networks! So I think we will push for Brooklyn next time.

In attendance: Adam, Che-wei, Marc, and myself.

Discussion was wide-ranging, touching lightly on all kinds of interesting ideas and people. I’ve made a list of whatever I remember (which is most of it, since I took notes). The only in-depth discussion, I would say, concerned the curriculum for Adam’s and my arch 213 class at Pratt. Che-wei and Adam both think Maxwell is probably the best renderer for the students to use, because of its ease-of-use, particularly the light mixing (variable lighting is baked in to the rendered file, so that you can play with it *after the fact*). We discussed trying a “field-effect”-based project for the middle of the semester, leaving the detailed interior rendering assignment for the final. We also discussed the importance of using interiors/thresholds that the students can really document well themselves. I.e. perhaps we will allow only real spaces in the city, rather than architectural gems they can only access through published drawings and images.

On working with agents to generate geometry: C-W suggests I check out Roland’s “KAgent“, which I had meant to do before (when Roland mentioned it to me) but forgot about.

On web-hosting: C-W uses an outfit called CWI, which he says guarantees 100% uptime (!). He says it’s up way more consistently than MediaTemple (which he’s also used).

On Rhino:

• Adam recommends checking out the ArchCut plugin for doing nice sections.
• I ask about deformers in Rhino, and am told that “Splop”, “UDT Tools”, and “CageEdit” are all worth checking out (start with CageEdit, methinks).
• Adam is considering using TSplines in his class, since there’s a 30-day demo the students could use.
• Marc says there is now a way to script with Python in Rhino! Must check it out… note: it appears to be only via COM, which is probably not worth the trouble (I find almost no references with cursory searching on Google and mcneel.com).
• Marc also says he’s running into many performance issues with VBScript in Rhino (i.e. the native Rhino scripting), so he is looking around for alternatives. He’s trying to decide between VB.net and Python, it seems.  We had a hand-waving discussion while sitting in the cafe, but now I have some better material for you Marc:

• VB.net is primarily intended as a language for creating user interfaces for desktop programs.  It’s an application development platform.  It’s very well connected with all kinds of Microsoft automation stuff, but its users are mostly guys in large software companies doing interface work, I believe.
• Python is primarily intended for web and non-GUI work (i.e. smaller stuff, cross-platform), and is designed to be lightweight/flexible and easy to learn.  It is a very general-purpose language because it has all the object-oriented features of larger languages.  It also happens to handle text manipulation very well — much better than VB — and I think this makes it a much better choice for you because I think you will be wanting to output Rhino macros from your code, right?  Python will make this a total breeze.  VB.net will make it somewhat painful — you will not be using VB.net for the purposes it was designed for.
• re. the “resuming” of a loop after an error/exception, yes, VB.net seems to have this feature, which is fairly surprising (I’ve never heard of this kind of thing before), but in fact if you handle your exceptions correctly in your code, you can basically duplicate this functionality in any exception-handling language, and python does this fine.
• So basically, go with Python!!!! It has a much more experimental community, even if there aren’t a lot of geometry-heads using Python out there yet.

On ITP, wearable computing, pneumatics:

I asked Che-wei whether there were any “Smart Home”-style work there might be at ITP, and he said two classes would be worth checking out: “Metaforms” (taught by Dana Karwas) and “the Softness of Things” (teacher unknown to me at present). He also suggested I check out the X10 system of “smart home” components – they are hackable, apparently. Che-wei is in a “wearables” studio this semester, by the way, and is working on an air-muscle-driven harness for the lower body, to help you “run faster, jump higher, etc.”. Can’t wait to see the outcome!!! We got talking about pneumatics in general and apparently Home Depot uses pneumatic tubes in much the way I saw them used at IKEA in Elizabeth, NJ — to check personal cheques. Che-wei mentioned another indoor delivery system he’s seen, a very thin conveyor belt that runs around the wall and into which you can drop thin things like envelopes, which stand upright as they slide around the room. Also on the topic of wearables, he mentioned Neil Girshenfeld’s work at MIT, but I think he meant this: MIThril . They are building linux-based wearable computers in handy components (processor separate from memory separate from screen). Must check it out in more detail…
On AutoCAD and scripting:

I have to give a lecture this semester that introduces scripting in our primarily AutoCAD-based drawing class at Pratt. AutoLisp as a formal tool is apparently very slow and, of course, considered arcane. For logistical stuff in AutoCAD, Marc says people seem to be using VBA to work between Excel and AutoCAD. The gentlemen reminded me of Scriptographer, too, which is something I should certainly check out for the lecture — much more accessible than automating CAD, no?

There has certainly been a hiatus in my blogging. In order to move beyond this hiatus into the world of free-flowing discourse that awaits, I shall characterize it as well as I can:

One part teaching and grading the final portions of the fall semester at Pratt for my two classes: Arch 113 and Arch 213, as well as my sci-arc workshop/seminar, “Datascapes”.

One part family Christmas in Chicago, with its concomitant gourmandise: foie gras shipped surreptitiously past the windy city’s blustery censors, spiral-cut Virginia ham, gigantic roast beef, chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, sushi by the square foot, shortbread cookies, peppermint ice-cream, and chocolate-dipped candied orange peels which, though store-bought, nearly match the hand-made ones of yore. I never made it to IIT’s campus as I had hoped to do, even on this fifth or sixth trip to Chicago since entering architecture. But I did discover the Jazz Record Mart, one of the few good CD stores left in the world, it seems.

One part high-school-friend reunion in Ottawa, dignified by three feet of snow, and sealed with a ‘progressive dinner party’ New Year’s that brought out Ottawa’s core values: marry somebody smart, buy a beautiful old house near your friends’ houses, work for the government, and cook often. I should add that I made it cross-country skiing twice, and was reminded that the minutes I spend on cross-country skis are among the very best of my entire life.

One part overly-intense charrette at work, ending with a 36-hour push to complete models, drawings, and renderings of a house in Taiwan (Next Gene 20).

One part recovering slowly and pathetically from the charrette — a vivid reminder of why pulling an all-nighter is almost never a good idea.

Distributed throughout, escapist online Go-playing sessions and varied reading (Slavoj Zizek, Horatio Hornblower, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). On the IGS, I am now 15k+, must find a teacher to progress much further, I fear.

What’s next? In the short-term, ethical banking, more salon news (I hope), more teaching (now arch 114 and arch 213), and God knows what else. Happy New Year, belatedly!

Well, the notion of a ’salon’-style get-together got a second chance today and seemed to work relatively well. I’ve dumped some notes about it below. The venue was Think Coffee, a fairly good if overly-NYU-student-populated spot. If we had arrived an hour or two earlier I think we might have grabbed an entire table for our group, which is something to consider for the future (perhaps noon is the best time to start?).

Anyway I’m certainly committed to salon #3, in two weeks’ time. I hope to see even more people there.

____________________________

Salon #2 review:

In attendance were Adam Elstein, Che-Wei Wang, Mark Collins and Toru Hasegawa (both of Proxy), and yours truly. Others dropped by briefly to chat.

While I think we had labeled the event as a ‘working session’ of some kind, it became clear from the outset that in fact everybody really wanted to talk. As the event evolves (and we know each other a little better), I imagine we will be able to get work done without much trouble, but in this session everybody wanted to discuss specific technologies (Houdini got a good showing), talk about teaching, muse about the challenges of scripted work, and discuss the potential value of various collaborations (especially in publishing, I think). On the possible collaboration front, I don’t think we uncovered any new types that I didn’t mention in my last post. Actually, I guess Proxy’s idea of a constantly-updated book was new to me: a kind of FILO stack of content that gets printed at any point you like with whatever chapters happen to be in the stack. But then they have already taken the first step towards doing this — see their book on their website (I just ordered it, gentlemen!).

Only two laptops were ever turned on, I think. Shreds of ideas from the conversation included:

- Wouldn’t it be nice to have a wrapper of some kind for Processing, to turn it into a primitive 3D modeler?

- tapping the income stream of ‘forcing your students to buy your book’, which is non-trivial when one counts up all the students we teach as a group over the course of a year.

- discussion of how much better Maxwell is than V-Ray as a plugin for Rhino (especially to teach with, because it has some nice ease-of-use features!).

- general recognition, it seemed to me, that Maya actually does great formal scripting and that we may be abandoning it too soon (for Rhino) without ever having really tapped its true power (which would involve really creating parametric objects, I think — but alas, I’m not a Maya scripter). Oh, also, the newest Maya uses Python, for Christ’s sake! (compare with VBScript in Rhino)
- mention of a whole bunch of cool projects I hadn’t seen before, many by Proxy, such as their clever OpenPoly project, which really shows the power of plain text as a stepping stone between programs (in this case from Rhino to Flash).
- discussion of a website that would store and map scripting methodology. This is a pet project of mine that I hope to kick-start soon.

- discussion of how to teach technical material, especially coding. I was impressed to learn that Mark and Toru actually teach students to write pseudo-code before they write ‘real’ code. Of course this has its challenges too.
What else? Hit me with some comments, folks.