The Day’s Summary

Last night was Nadja’s Skills for Good(s) on Dressmaking for Any Body. Here’s a diagram leftover from the workshop. There’s a lot of upcoming Skills for Good(s) at CIVIC SPACE that Lucy is putting together in the fall, very excited to see the line-up!

Started the day with some sketches for a proposal, then scanned them in with our Epson DS-30… Very nice little feed-through scanner.

Then, the afternoon with Rosina, as she prepared for her zine night, I cut and then weeded vinyl. Tiny letters.

The result … a test for our Emergency Kits for North Bay … not finalized, but fun to push these parts forward.

Also, almost lost a file for the Hamilton publication. Not sure how it disappeared from Dropbox (and really not sure how I didn’t find it when looking through the deleted files section on the web version of dropbox), but nonetheless, Time Machine saved the day.

12-06-20 4:39:10 PM

The day before our launch. Rosina paints with Kiki.

The table of letters, ever-changing as each layer dries.

The letters that remain to be painted as of this afternoon.

Josh and Kevin’s project for the day…

Sara and Rosina headed out to do a bunch of short installs and photograph them.

The single-use camera Hiba brought. Later Sara bought another 15 or so of these.

Looking like this is exactly what they’re supposed to be doing here.

Sara reaches.

The letter H. Can’t wait to see these photos.

Meanwhile, back at the space, Kevin and Hiba take a rotation on the paint.

Josh begins to assemble their invention.

Hiba and I picked up the special occasion permit for tomorrow!

Kevin and Josh. Heading back to the space now … more later.

 

Installing the sign for CIVIC SPACE, take 1

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (10)

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (13)

Last night, Hiba, Sara, and Justin tackled some initial planning for the installation of the CIVIC SPACE / Letter Library sign. The Letter Library idea came out of trying to think through how we might make our own sign for the space, so it’s really great to finally see the letters going up.

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (12)

Hiba got on the ladder first, installing the letters with some tape, while Sara helped to position from the vantage point across the road.

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (1)

Then Justin made some attempts as well.

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (2)

We did some photoshop mock-ups earlier, but we still wanted to be able to play a bit.

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (5)

The sign will read something like, “CIVIC SPACE PRESENTS THE LETTER LIBRARY.”

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (8)

The title might bleed down into the window where we’ll likely have our return pile of letters.

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (6)

We tried the letters up high and hugging the window. We’ll do some more tests later today. We used a pole to remove our well-taped letters.

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (7)

As an aside, this is the nicely designed new water meter cover in front of our building.

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (10)

Danielle came by for inspection — and approved.

Installing some signage on the exterior wall of CIVIC SPACE (11)

End of the night clean-up.

Sara demonstrating the letter removal technique.

The Done Manifesto

The Done Manifesto, Illustrated by James Provost
The Done Manifesto, Illustrated by James Provost
The Done Manifesto, Illustrated by James Provost

Makerbot founder Bre Pettis and collaborator Kio Stark gave themselves exactly 20 minutes to create a manifesto encapsulating everything they knew about bring a creative vision to life. They called it The Done Manifesto.

Here’s the list:

  1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
  2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
  3. There is no editing stage.
  4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
  5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
  6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
  7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
  8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
  9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
  10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
  11. Destruction is a variant of done.
  12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
  13. Done is the engine of more.

via https://twitter.com/#!/AurashKhawarzad & Fast Co.Design

XBees + Arduino

Although it’s been a while since I last worked on this project, things are continuing to move along. I finally assembled the Ladyada XBee adapters and successfully passed a message between the two XBees.

So, I’m not the best solderer and the first adapter I worked on suffered from an overusing tip on my soldering iron, which made heating up the solder with the tip of the iron next to impossible. There were also some issues (that remain unresolved) in terms of configuring the XBees, but thankfully that step seems to be unnecessary (at this point anyways).

Continue reading “XBees + Arduino”