I’m home for a couple weeks for the holidays, and the task of finding summer employment is fast approaching. While I admit that the kinds of employment I’m interested in aren’t exactly maintstream, I know that there are a few things I’ll be getting done in the next week while “resting” at home.

1.-Business/Personal Cards

I’m tired of having no cards to hand out and resort to not maintaining contact with people I meet or havign to give them an old card for a student startup I worked pm that stopped operating a year ago. How embarrassing is it to say: “Oh here’s my information, but actually, it’s all wrong…” That will be fixed! I promise.

2.-Online Portfolio

I actually setup this blog and my website while at home as well. My current “portfolio” page is old, and to my recent horror, not finished at all. This isn’t to say that it gets much traffic, but it is sad that I have a partially completed product up on my website.

3.- Design Portfolio

The last time I worked on this I came up with an idea for a vision in my design portfolio, which hopefully would have gotten across to employers Olin’s approach to user-oriented design and the projects I’ve done relating to this. Since then I’ve had friends who have actually implemented the idea fairly well, but now I feel odd about actually making my portfolio the way I originally anticipated. 

Before I leave I will have an update to my resume, as well as the three described above. January will be my time to find internships. For those who are still reading, I’m interested in working in either San Diego for a design firm or Silicon Valley for a startup. Sigh…ideally of course.

So most of you know I’m taking this year off from school to start up some sort of entrepreneurial venture with 5 of my Olin peers. Our idea is still very loosly defined, as we are still in the trailing end of the first round of user studies and immersion.

Our vision is to design a web based tool for middle school students, parents, teachers, and administrators. It serves to enhance communication and collaboration in the middle school environment by virtually extending the current time and space boundaries of the classroom. It aggregates the best internet software into an intuitive environment, keeping the entire learning community involved and engaged in learning. The participants will each have individualized access to our secure software through their preferred browser. We provide a safe space for students to begin learning how the internet can bolster their learning experience, in and outside of school, while fostering mentorship, friendship, and professional relationships for the educational community.

We’ve actually uploaded our idea on IdeaBlob, an online community for ideas which allows you to vote for other ideas and give advice, and the grand prize winner for every month gets $5000 to get their idea off the ground. Being the poor still-college students-but-not-taking-classes-right-now that we are, it would be amazing to have those funds for the next 6–8 months of work! It might even allow us to survive during the summer and work on this another two months!

You do need to create an account, but I don’t feel bad about that because IdeaBlob is a cool website anyways. Sign up, show your friends! Vote for us! (or whoever you think has the best idea, but still…vote for us!)

It has been many years since AIM 1.0, and now I can chat with my boss if I’m at work, teachers, parents, (albeit using more formal speech patterns.) I’m used to my own level of informal IM speak, and I think I can generally understand most people within my peer group. And while certain misspellings are bizarre, their trendiness makes up for their inanity. For others this is not the case however. Today I can chat with my younger cousins and siblings, but the weirdest thing? (sigh… Note my fragment sentences) I get emails from them in broken english. If you can call it english. In the last 5-6 years I feel like what and how things are mispelled is totally different. When I get emails from younger family members, sometimes I write back with “Hey! speak english! please!” It makes me feel outdated.

Funny. It has only been about six or so years and I have trouble understanding, let alone duplicating and communicating the same way. You’d think I could get to be 30 before I noticed anything like this happening. I guess that’s the same thing that happens in normal conversation, except I think people transition better from groovy, rad, tubular to sic, dank, ill, etc… At least in spoken communication you know what 90% of the weird things youngsters talk about it just the new way to say cool.

Tlak 2 you lader

Marco

Fortunately, we now have an idea we can all feel motivated about and work hard for. Alyshia talked a bit about our education-related, middle school-focused software tool called LearnMeld in the last post.

Well, it turns out there are MORE of our ideas from a few months ago that have just been turned into actual web startups. What this means is that they’be been in development for a year or so, and had we decided to make those website, a yearlong endeavor itself, we would have been saddened to see our idea already implemented, and all our work gone to waste. Sometimes a newcomer to the web space might be a clunky tool that nobody will use, but I don’t think the two website that we just found fall into that category.

Our first idea:

Emotional Tagging of web content, something we’d seen partially implemented in unique ways through the work of Jonathan Harris, an artist and computer scientist that makes online art that “captures the world’s expression.” If you haven’t seen his work, check out his TED talk about the “emotional world of the Web.” I personally love both WeFeelFine and Universe, two of his projects. In any case, our idea was to try and implement this notion of emotional tagging to something like music. Now, Pandora’s Music Genome project is close to what we were thinking about creating, but Pandora is mostly (to my knowledge) focused on musical qualities of music, and picks music in this way. We wanted to use emotional qualities, mood, tempo, to drive musical choices and allow users to browse and listen to music based on a desired emotional state. You could conceivably trace your way from “Angry” to “Flustered”, across “Independent” to “Free” and then to “Empowering, Emotional, and finish with Stirring or Motivational. Imagine listening to music by tracing a desired emotional profile! We thought it would be interesting anyways. Well, there is a new player in the web scene called Musicovery. While they don’t exactly allow you to “trace an emotional profile,” they very nicely allow you to select and browse music based on mood and dance qualities, as well as more standard means like time period and genre. I’m a fan, though Pandora stil holds a special place in my heart, it just isn’t as good at discovering new music, and I like to compartmentalize my Pandora stations nicely. This tool is designed to take you from Pop to Disco to Latin music, all with the same mood. No more need to fine tune my station to specific artists and songs anymore. Different mental models for different times I want to listen to music!

Our second idea:

Categorization and recommendation of movies by way of mood, emotion, director, themes, etc. While recommendation engines are nice, we wanted a better way to track and navigate through movie preferences in a more social and open way, ideally bringing in such qualities as actors, directors, and thematic elements. You don’t JUST like Forest Gump because it is partially about the military, or because it is set in the past. You may like it because it has Tom Hanks, and that is enough for you. Maybe you really liked the theme of growing up and overcoming the odds, or found the movie particularly motivating and moving. Well, there’s a new web startup called Jinni in beta right now that looks to do just this. (Not exactly, but still.) Check it out!

That’s it for now,
-Marco

Steve Gold: So…why don’t you guys try to narrow this down a little. Ideate in something you’re all interested in.

Me: Well, I like sustainable design, green engineering, psychology, sociology, and education.

Andy: Education.

Christina: Helping people communicate, especially getting information to teachers and then students.

Evan: Maps

Marco: I really want to take an idea from start to finish, and I’m excited about Olin’s unique take on education.

Steve Gold: Well, it sounds like you’re all more than a little interested in education…

From there, we all came back home with a lot more focus and drive than we had had before. I think a lot of us had given up on the idea of having a unified project. Six was a big group, and we hadn’t really come into LOA with a coherent idea. While it would have been nice to have something together, taking LOA as an individual with group support was still a great experience, if not quite as planned.

Fast forward to last week—we’ve basically been doing UOCD nonstop. Our idea has been narrowed down to a web based tool to facilitate communication within and outside of schools, in the middle school realm. All of us have been visiting middle schools, observing, talking to teachers, students, and parents about anything we can get our hands on. We’re due to have a complete business plan drafted next week, along with a technical outline of our product.

Tomorrow I’m going to the MASSCUE conference (for Massachusetts Computer Using Educators) in Sturbridge, which means I’ll be waking up in about 5 hours. So goodnight, and wish me luck tomorrow!

-Alyshia

1. – Speedpak!

A feature new to Solidworks 2009 is an excellent way to reduce the size and load time of a large subassembly. Chances are your assemblies aren’t large enough to get the kind of benefit that big corporate CAD projects would get, but you can still open an assembly in “Lightweight” if Speedpak isn’t for you. Speedpak creates a simplified configuration of an assembly without losing references. You can create Speedpak for specific configurations and select any number of faces and/or bodies to “keep.” What you don’t select will only be stored as graphics, and the result is that you can make Speedpak configurations with the important faces/bodies you plan to mate to while allowing the part/subassembly to still look like it would. Below are five snapshots of what making a Speedpak looks like. Also, a Youtube description of Speedpak NOT in English . Here is a video description in English. Below is what the creation of a Speedpak configuration looks like. Notice that a handful of faces (3) and a body has been selected. The rest will not be stored in memory for the speedpak configuration.

2. –Hole Series

Hole series is an assembly feature which creates hole features which extend through parts/subassemblies in the assembly which intersects the axis of the hole. If you need to create holes that extend through multiple parts, instead of creating holes in each part, or even holes that are created using geometry from the other parts to ensure they will update accordingly (better than the first approach), use hole series! The holes you create are contained in the individual parts as externally referenced features. You can see in the picture taken from Solidworks’s help directory (<–very helpful by the way. Use it!) how the hole series extends through three different parts. Smart Fasteners allows you to very quickly drop in standard bolts, nuts, washers, and the like to all the hole series created holes, which saves you not only the job of making and organizing these for each hole, but also mates all of the fasteners in and allows for easy editing of your fasteners.

3. – Smart Fasteners

Smart Fasteners allow you to very quickly drop in standard bolts, nuts, washers, and the like to all the hole series created holes, which saves you not only the job of making and organizing these for each hole, but also mates all of the fasteners in and allows for easy editing of your fasteners. Note: using this assembly feature requires you have Toolbox loaded in as an Add-in first. Tools >> Add-ins >> Toolbox & Toolbox Browser should be enabled. You can load in Smart Fasteners from the Assembly toolbar, or you can add them directly from inside the Hole Series property manager menu. You can see in the picture below (also from Solidworks Help Menu) the red smart fasteners that were dropped into existing holes at the assembly level. Useful, though not exactly something the average Olin student doing Design Nature, or even our new Mechanical Prototyping course would use because those projects tend towards laser-cut assembly construction.

Next time: useful dimensioning tools!
-Marco

EDUCATION-RELATED

–I’m working on the Olin Saturday STEM Academy program which is starting in January. Right now we’ve been meeting as small focus groups of two Olin students, one Olin professor and one local high school teacher to develop the curriculum for the first and second semesters of this program. I always did like teaching, and even told myself I would grow up to be an engineer and then retire to be a teacher, but it turns out you can do both? sort of….

SOLIDWORKS!

—I’m still chugging along at Solidworks, working two days a week right now on a number of different projects. I’ve been assigned to actual development projects, and who knows, maybe I’ll have a bigger role in shaping some of these new features. At least, a bigger role than many of my actually implemented, extremely minor bug fixes while I’ve worked there? I’m a huge fan of the new Speepak feature out for SW2009, though I’m not exactly the kind of user who would actually need to use it often.

READING AND REFLECTING

–I’ve been spending a lot of time reading rss feeds and news, writing and reflecting, as well as reading books! Once I finish some more books I’ll write a bit more on this topic, but for now a list will suffice I’m currently reading ” 50 Facts That Should Change the USA” is an interesting read, though I’m only a fraction of the way through the book.  There is a stack of about 20 books waiting for me once I finish typing this post… Though it will take me a long time to get through them, since my reading speed has severely deteriorated since middle school. I think.

RANDOM BUSINESSES

–Olin Tutoring Squad is still moving along, and surprisingly, so is Go Green, which has been a source of a handful of emails this week. The best part about these two “businesses” is that marketing efforts in the last couple months has been completely lacking, but we are still getting customers…Who knows what will happen with this at the end of this year, when school and classes decrease the feedom to schedule meetings and worktime for these businesses…Oh, we’ve also got potentially 4 new clients to make websites for, not only good practice at web development (which I never thought I would ever be doing, even as late as a year ago), but also a great source of income

-Marco

Part 2: How physical features can to dictate our responses

“Some qualities and features prompt us to behave in particular ways” –Jane Fulton Suri

General observations…

Today I went to the barber shop without an appointment. There were six or so young blond boys in line ahead of me, so I had to wait a while. It was the wait time reminded me of the Thoughtless Acts book. Interestingly enough a good example of what would fall into the “responding to our surroundings” section of the book was brought to my attention while waiting around.

For people who haven’t seen any of the pictures used in the book to describe this “responding” section, here are two examples. You can see that whoever decided to litter in so geometrically pleasing a fashion could very well have done so without paying much attention to it at the time in the picture on the left. I could see myself somebody else looking around for a trash can only to find none in sight, thus resorting to the ground or bench nearest them. Throwing it on the ground feel a bit wrong though (as it should), and it just feels right to put it on that fence over there just like that. Alternatively, opening the recycling might be nasty, smelly or dirty, but shoving an empty water bottle into the handle isn’t so bad is it? Given the option of the black trash can and the blue recycling, you did well to shove it by the blue bin, right?

In any case, back to my haircut earlier today… I realized that the act of flipping through a magazine draws heavily on both the kind of magazine you have and your surroundings, though you might not think so at first. At the object-interaction level, there are a number of ways you could interact with the magazine. How do you read magazines? I bet you have curled up in a chair and flipped through pages with your right hand, licking your fingers perhaps to facilitate the turning of the pages. Perhaps you have used your hand in a flipbook fashion, stopping to actually read the magazine only when something of interest pops us, or even just jumping a couple pages at a time by flicking your wrist sideways and letting pages fall onto your left hand. You’ve walked around with a magazine folded in half I presume, maybe if you really wanted to read a specific article, and wanted no distractions. The point is, I think most people aren’t exclusively flipbook magazine readers, or finger-licking page turners. I think everybody is a bit of everything, depending on the situation. Are you waiting at a dentist’s office with nothing to do? If so you are less likely to care about the random, outdated magazine stack that is there to distract you. If you know you will be there a long time though, you certainly aren’t going to flip through all the magazines quickly! You have a while to wait; might as well look at all the pictures, read all the article titles, maybe most of an article or two…

Your interaction with the magazine depends largely on setting: waiting at the dentist’s while your daughter gets her cavities filled, curled up in a big chair with hot cocoa at home, etc… Chances are you will not “flipbook” through your magazine at home, though this is a fairly obvious observation. You may however, flipbook through one magazine, being slow enough to accommodate the 3-5 minutes you know you will wait for your turn to get a haircut, or you will flip through lots of books or read one you like slower since you know you have 20 minutes to kill… In any case, who knew how you hold and browse a magazine involved a lot more background/subconscious thought. I just figured I picked it up and looked through it. J

-Marco
Technorati Profile