Making Studio

Hi Everyone,

I am Cassandra aka Ca$$andra aks Cassy aka Cass. You can call me any of these names. Here I am hanging out on a rooftop in Park Slope:

So about me: I grew up in El Paso, Texas or as we locals like to call it El Chuco. It is a border town and one of the safest cites in the US. It is on the border with Juarez, Mexico which is one of the most dangerous cities in the world (think No Country for Old Men). I am Mexican American. Here I am as a kid:

I studied filmmaking in my undergrad education. After graduation I worked as a documentary video editor at a small studio in Berkeley. I then started working at a consulting firm–Bassett & Partners. We specialize in ethnographic research and design/brand strategy. Ingrid’s job at IDEO is similar to what I did/do except we did not do prototyping. After years of working with/for many talented designers I decided that design school was for me!

If you want to know a little bit about some of the projects I have worked on (work and personal) you can check out the portfolio section on the website I made for my application to this program here.

I am really looking forward to this class and working with all of you! Here I am in Berlin at the Hamburger Bahnhof aka Museum für Gegenwart. The exhibit was ryoji ikeda’s db (decibel).

Durable Animated GIF.

For my “Durable Animated GIF” I first began to think about what it actually means to be “durable”.

I then began to create some rough storyboards on what the concept of my GIF would be to illustrate this adjective effectively.

I decided on myself to be the subject of “durable”. Humans seem pretty resilient & I happen to be one, so I guess I’m pretty durable. “Long-lasting” was a synonym that came up, so I wanted the animation to be a constant cycle in which the last frame transitions to the first frame well in a repetitive sequence. People seem to enjoy watching other people getting punched or kicked over & over again as well (ie America’s Funniest Home Videos & the crazy guy below).

The source file of the GIF I created is copied to 3 of my personal computers, on 4 external drives (3 thumb drives & 1 external hard drive), uploaded to 2 cloud storage servers & attempting to upload it to Amazon Glacier (their super archival secure cloud storage service). The image below shows the final GIF playing in the VFL on the Panasonic Toughbook.

& here’s the final Durable Animated GIF.

Thanks to Richard for being gentle.

Damon

Upcycled Teapot

I had the pleasure of creating an upcycled teapot during this past week. This means that the teapot is to be created from other things. Early on I wanted to work with either metal or marble, and after showing up to school with an inch thick steel pipe I chose to downgrade the heaviness. Instead I wanted to create a teapot from only one other thing. My choice fell onto an aluminum coffee bean container. The former lid of the coffe packaging became the handle of my teapot, and instead the user can place his or her saucer as a lid. That means that you can heat the milk of your tea at the same time as you heating your water.

Magnetic Water Carrier

These rambunctious neighborhood kids during a heat wave on a summer day were the inspiration for the fire hydrant extension. One of my favorite things about living in Brooklyn is the gathering around the fire hydrant to stay cool.

Supplies were investigated and gathered from hardware stores and summer clearance.

I decided to use a low-fi way of crafting to celebrate the ideas of play and fun this design embodies.

The extension has a magnetic attachment which holds to the cast iron of the fire hydrant. Most fire hydrant water isn’t potable so the magnets have a dual purpose of filtering the water. One can easily fill up a bottle to stay hydrated on those hot summer days.

Play can be diverted to the side walk, helping children stay safe from traffic.

Different nozzles on the hoses create different jets and streams of water.

Everyone enjoys cooling off!

DIY Light-up Blow-out Party Favor

The project dictated that I make an electric party favor. I chose to make a tutorial video describing the process by which one can take ordinary inexpensive party favors and “light them up”.

Initially I was very ambitious, thinking of ways to make a breath-sensitive switch to activate the light, or how to make a strip of lights along the blowout, but in the end I chose to make something that could be more readily replicable at home. Also, it was very important to me that what I made, being electrical, be fully functioning and I was not confident in the feasibility of my earlier ideas.

The instructional video I made is lengthy but comprehensive, as if it were made for someone with no real experience with circuitry. I hope that it’s length and thoroughness isn’t too much of a deterrent for it to be useful.

Here is an establishing shot of the supplies and a picture of the circuit concealed under the face.

Project One: Vegan Phone Dock

Research, Tutorials and Hacks:

Vegan 101

Etsy vegan iPhone cases

Potato battery

How fruit batteries work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-eqmNVUh7Y

Everything you wanted to know about charging your ipod

The Vegan Iphone Dock:

This is an iphone dock designed specially for vegans. It is based on multi level Kit-set distribution model. The highest level is the Deluxe kit, with comes with everything needed excluding the fruit and crate. The Standard kit requires the user to find, hack or purchase a dog clip, copper wire, galvanized wire, fruit and a crate. There is also a free demo that shows hacker-vegans to make the entire kit from scratch by themselves.

The system works of a fairly well know chemical reaction that causes ions to move when the citric acid comes into contact with the zinc on the galvanized wire. Although sometime the iphone doesn’t indicate that it is charging it actually is, just at a much slower level than is required to switch on the charging indicator. Over time the fruit and wire will need replacing but that is the fun of the kit.

The kit was designed to suit a range of vegans from ‘standard vegans’ to ‘ultra vegans’ who criticize anything that removes natural landscapes and habitats from animals, sometimes this includes conventional electricity systems, thus the v-dock was born.

Coming to Etsy late 2013 starting at $49.90 + shipping.

Main Image 1.

by Richard Clarkson

At first I was a little skeptical at how I could make something so digital into an edible experience. I did some research on different email notifiers and found that they are usually audible, distracting and annoying, and they only indicate and email received without incentivizing the reading of emails. I decided to remedy these issues by creating a fun, bright, incentive system for reading your emails.

My concept was for an M&M to drop into a glass every time an email is received, and the M&Ms are “released” to you once you have read all the emails. I drew inspiration from other DIY candy dispensers, especially this one, but decided to design my own acrylic candy stand. I designed the stand around a repurposed wine bottle and laser cut it out of acrylic so the bright colored M&Ms are visible throughout the spinning. The stand is adhered together by silicon sealer, for a solid attachment with some flexibility and give.

If this was a fully-functional unit, the white box would be a servo, to rotate the wheel, and it would connect to the circuit board that is programmed to relay when an email is sent and read. My goal is to make this unit fully functional once I’ve learned the necessary skills.

I also made a stop-motion video of the email notifier working. This video is my first time making and editing a stop-motion, so I used a few different tutorials to learn how to make one. I got a general idea of how to do stop-motion at this Instructables website: http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-Motion-3/. I used iMovie to make the video, and this youtube video was the most helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipE3nCjI0IU. The final tutorial I used helped me with the music on the video: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=596923.