By Justin on February 27th, 2010, 1:10 pm 0 Comments

Not that we don’t already have our hands full, but seeing as it’s nearly March, we’re starting to look ahead to summer time activities. These activities might be somewhat related to this ongoing conversation we’ve been having on the blog.

We’ll be posting more information soon, but for now, just know that if you’ve been planning on visiting Windsor, you should try to keep your calendars open in July.

And, hope to see you SUNDAY, February 28th – 1pm at 362 California!

Tagged: BCL design inDesign plans poster projects research summer Windsor

By Justin on August 7th, 2009, 8:11 pm 2 Comments

It’s probably a longtime coming, but we’ve finally added a PROJECTS section to the website. So, rather than having to dig through our archives, this page will offer a quick overview of some of our finished projects starting back in September 2008.

Tagged: BCL projects research website

By Justin on July 28th, 2009, 12:00 am 0 Comments

We spent the better part of the evening at our new headquarters located at the edge of campus. It’s exceptionally great to be in a place that we can use as a work space / office space that we’ll be able to leave setup. Working in Lebel for the past year was good for a number of reasons, but was also difficult as we shared the space with the Green Corridor class, so we always had to pack up everything at the end of the night. Now, we’ll be able to spread out and have a better space to work together.

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Tagged: BCL grants HQ paperwork projects research

By Justin on June 25th, 2009, 11:08 pm 8 Comments

Another great day in 406 Pelissier. We got lots of brainstorming done and continued our planning and work with plastic bag recycling projects.

It’s been a fantastic three days, and being able to work in such a concentrated way in just one week has been really helpful in pushing forward on some new ideas. We came up with a good plan for some “must do” things over the next few months, more details soon!

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Tagged: BCL downtown ironing planning plastic bags projects research

By Justin on June 23rd, 2009, 11:55 pm 14 Comments

Today was another great, amazingly fun and productive day in 406 Pelissier! We did a lot of material tests, figured out some more details on our book, met some new people, and generally enjoyed having a dedicated workspace.

It’s going to be very hard to give up this space.

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Tagged: BCL downtown plastic bags projects research Windsor

By Justin on June 23rd, 2009, 12:15 am 8 Comments

Now that Intersession is done, we’ve finally been able to put that downtown space to some use. Cristina and I spent the better part of the day in the space, using it basically as an office, but we’ll be there at least one more day this week and potentially one day on the weekend picking up where we left off on some older projects and inevitably starting some new ones.

On today’s agenda: see the new hybrid buses and look for some Text In-Transit signs (which we found), set up a small work area in the space, make some preliminary decisions about our book so we can get started on it, and photograph a new research site.

Also, we’re looking for any biodegradable plastic bags you may have (hint: Bulk Barn gives out biodegradable bags) for another project. If you have any, please drop them off at 406 Pelissier. We’ll be there Tuesday from 12noon until around 4pm.

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Tagged: BCL book downtown fence planters projects research

By Steven on June 16th, 2009, 6:18 pm 0 Comments

Justin has some process shots, and those will probably be posted at some point, but I figured I’d go ahead and share the product of five or so hours of ironing inside-out plastic grocery bags. So far, I’ve made some envelopes, a box, and some random swatches to see if leftover scaps can be fused into a solid sheet (they can). Eight layers (four bags or one bag folded on itself twice) yields a stupidly strong, Tyvek-like material that can be fused to itself (that is, you can fuse seams to make envelopes or pouches or fuse multiple, smaller sheets together to make a piece of material any size). Uhm. And you can also weave strips together and fuse that (top left), but that doesn’t really have much in the way of practical applications.

And there’s these guys:

Each pouch is made from a single bag, and the one on the left is actually compostable (if any of you are Bulk Barn shoppers, you should hang onto those). I do ever so wonder what we’ll do with biodegradable plastic (read: mold-proof) pouches with rare earth magnets embedded in the back…

Tagged: materials planters plastic bags projects recycling research WHATCHOO KNOW 'BOUT PLANTERS?

By Justin on March 24th, 2009, 11:19 pm 0 Comments

It’s a product made by MIO from recycled paper, and is available at Target, but I mainly wanted to post this as a note. As we’ve now “mastered” the process of making paper, we should consider different shapes for the planters we’re working on, which will likely help to guide the process of making the planter frames from the wire we have.

[via Inhabitat]

Tagged: paper plants projects recycle

By Justin on March 14th, 2009, 11:53 am 3 Comments

It’s been a busy last week, getting back from Victoria, and launching the Text In-Transit Call For Submissions, but we still had time to meet for our weekly Office Hours and continue working with the Massey Physics Club. Our adventures in paper making for an upcoming planters project we have in mind, and in learning more high school physics and math are after the jump.

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Tagged: BCL making math paper physics projection projects research text

By Justin on February 17th, 2009, 12:01 am 2 Comments

Darren, Josh, and I met with some folks from the Sandwich Community Health Centre and Maya from FedUp to start discussing community gardens. The meeting went well, serving as a good starting point to start figuring out what we might be able to do in Sandwich. The SCHC is working on a site on Prince Road, so trying to get something at the riverfront shouldn’t overlap with their efforts.

After the meeting we did a site visit to start brainstorming, taking some photos and making some notes. Josh and I did some sketches and really rough mockups to try to start imaging some potentials for the garden. We liked the idea of circular planters, similar to the Victory Gardens, I’ve posted on previously, so that’s what you’re seeing in the aerial photo above, with the  planters being those 12 small dots near the windmill. Though, the planters would probably vary in size, and in general would  be larger than what’s mocked-up above. 

Ideally, a garden that we initiate can act as a pilot project for the rest of the city. There’s a long way to go with this project, but I wanted to make this first post to mark the start.

Tagged: BCL community garden mock-up projects research