a place

“Biking in Beirut has the feel of bungee jumping, without the bungee cord. You leave your house with two choices: do you want to ride on the road or the sidewalk? Half the people on the road don’t know what a driver’s license looks like, the other half acquired it by taking a bribing test. Throw in the crazy cabs and the delivery scooters phenomenon and that eliminates the road option. Sidewalk it is, people cussing you out won’t kill you, uncovered manholes will. Suddenly disappearing sidewalks, trees, traffic signs, dog shit, and cars parked on the sidewalk make it a very challenging obstacle course.”
Jamal’s Propaganda: Beirut by Bike…

I found this blog post when I googled the phrase “biking in beirut.” I’ve been really enjoying biking around Savannah lately. I haven’t driven my car in over two weeks. I want to buy a bike when I get to Beirut this winter break. My brother and sister already share a car, and throwing me in the mix means we’ll be arguing over who gets the car when a lot.

But this post isn’t very comforting. It got me thinking about the chaos on the streets of Beirut, and my slim chances of survival on a bicycle. On the other hand, I know that one of my sister’s friends bikes in Beirut, and he’s still alive (last I heard). I also have no idea where one would go to get a decent bike, bike lock, lights, and helmet in Lebanon.

I’m still going to try. It’ll make the vacation much more interesting, and keep me from growing my vacation belly.

My first week back at school is over. I’m taking four classes to make up for not being here for two quarters, and I hope to graduate this spring like I was supposed to. From this first week, it looks like it’s going to be a busy but interesting quarter.

I’m taking a class called Design for Sustainability. Verena, our professor, has a lot of mini-projects and field-trips planned for us, which is exciting, but first we’re going to learn more about this whole sustainability thing. It’s a relatively small class, only seven people showed up last class, so it’ll be intimate and unpredictable. Next week we’re doing a design charrette in which we’re going to come up with a “green” bag for JC Penney. I’m a little skeptical, especially considering that just about everyone is doing a whole bunch of greenwashing right now, but apparently this is the real deal. In any case,I’m really excited about the class and I’m hoping to get some good work out of it. I just hope that I’ll have time to do good work with all my other classes.

The other class that’s going to be a lot of work and a lot of fun this quarter is the JCB project. It’s a studio class sponsored by JCB, which kinda puts it on the opposite end of the scale from the Design for Sustainability class. This quarter we’re going to build upon the research that some of my colleagues did last spring and help JCB develop their brand. We’re going to work with some advertising and graphic deisgn students, which should be cool.

I’m also taking Intro to Anthropology. I’m going to be designing for human beings, so I might as well get to know them. This class will give me new ways of studying and thinking about people that should make me a better designer.

My last class is Portfolio and Resume Development, which is exactly what it says it is. It’s great that the SCAD industrial design program offers this course, not many schools do. I’ve been meaning to put together a portfolio for a while, and now I sort of have to, and I’ll be getting constant feedback all the way. I really like the first assignment for this class. We had to evaluate ourselves using something classed a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It forced me to take a few steps back and really look at who I am and what I am good at, as well as what I suck at. It’s been making me think of what I can do to be better, to do better. It also neatly coincided with my reading of Merlin Mann’s article, aptly called “Better”. All I know is, I want to keep getting better and better. And then even more better*.

*I realize “more better” is very incorrect. It’s just something my friend Beau says.

I’m doing some restructuring around here.

I started a blog powered by Tumblr to serve as a sort of scrapbook where I can easily collect snippets from the web. Tumblr is really good about that. The bookmarklet is so convenient, and you’re not under pressure to write and write like you are (or at least I am) with a regular blog.

I’m keeping this blog though. I’m going to use it as an online journal. I will try to post at least once a week. Hopefully that will encourage me to keep thinking. Because sometimes when you don’t have enough stuff going on, you just forget to think.

So there you go. I’ve done away with the theme I threw together in a couple of nights in favour of a more complete yet more minimal theme. I’ve been thinking about minimalism a lot lately. I hopped from here to here to here to here. It was refreshing, and inspiring, to see such honest designs that honour content over all. And though I’m in a different league than these gents, they say you should dress for the job you want. So I’m going minimal with my website.

I’ve thought about how this affects my product designs, or whether it should affect them at all. Just because my website is (or will be! soon!) minimal, does not mean that everything I design needs to be stripped down to the essentials. On the contrary, the point of the minimalist website is to emphasize the content with no distractions.

Funnily enough, I got an appropriate fortune at the chinese restaurant today. It said:

“When more become too much.
It’s same as being not enough.”

I bought this bike off of a guy in Augusta for $50. It’s a vintage Japanese Nishiki bicycle from the late ’70s. I’ve been meaning to post pictures online for a while, and using Picasa made it easier. Here they are:

The guy gave me a lot of convenient stuff with the bike, like a little pouch with tools and a tire patch kit, a water bottle holder, and a mini pump. It’s in pretty great shape, the only thing I might need to do is get new tires.

I often find myself unprepared for a situation. I can’t think of a better way to put it. I’ll want to take a picture, write something down, sketch an idea, or just kill time, and all I have on me are my keys, wallet, and cell phone. I need a go bag for my gear.

My friend Adam swears by his Chrome messenger bag (well, he really likes it). But the price turns me off… $135 can get you a lot of other nice stuff…

Maybe I’m just being a tightwad. But I want to make a project out of this. I’m thinking of designing and making my own bag, tailored to suit my needs. If anything, it’ll be a fun sketch project. I’ve never really sketched bags… unless you count that one intro project… but we don’t talk about that……..

For my online 20th Century Art History course, I decided to write a research paper on pixel art. I’ve already mentioned my love of pixel art on here. I thought it would be a good learning and discovery process for me. Then my professor reminded me of one limitation: my paper had to focus on pixel art of the 20th century. So I tried to constrain my research to this era.

Here’s what I’m going to focus on:

• Pixel art “predecessors” such as mosaics, pointillism, Van Gogh…
• Introduction of GUI and bitmap technology.
• The icon designs of Susan Kare for the Mac OS.
• Video game sprites.
• The return to pixel art despite advancements in display technology — celebrating the pixel
• Traditional media art that imitates computers.

I’m writing my first draft, due Sunday. So far, it’s a jumbled mess of thoughts typed out rapidly. We’ll see how it goes.

Due to popular demand, here are a bunch of pictures of my tiny — but charming — one-bedroom apartment.

My first paper wallet fell apart after a week of use. Let’s just say I’m pretty hard on my wallets. So I found some heavy vellum and made a second one. The idea was that since vellum is almost transparent when it’s pressed against something, I would have no need for an ID window. Alas, it didn’t work as well as I thought it would, but it’s still a really sweet wallet.

It seems very durable. It’s lasted over a week and it’s still got very crisp corners and creases. And the fold is springy, it always wants to stay shut. Very nice.

How many times have you told yourself at night, right before you go to bed, “I really need to shave tomorrow, my beard is getting scraggly”, and then completely forgotten to shave until you’re on the way to work? For me, that happens a few times a week. So I came up with a little trick to help me remember to shave. I don’t know if anyone else does this, but my trick is to shave half of my moustache off the night before. That way, when I brush my teeth in the morning, I’ll remember that I need to shave.

Why not shave completely the night before? Well, I use an electric razor, and hair gets everywhere, so I like to shower right after the shave. And I shower in the mornings.