Originally Posted on DINO Studio’s blog
Aaron and I are on our way to Book^2 Camp in New York. It’s an “unconference,” an event that has a participatory style of generating bottom-up content from the attendees rather than providing top-down, pre-determined content. In the tech industry this is a very common format. After talking with a couple of our clients also attending, I realized that to people used to “normal” conferences, the notion of unconferences can seem really, really strange.
So in advance of the Book^2 unconference, and in the spirit of open participation that defines this format, I thought I’d jot down a few notes and approaches if for no other reason than to prepare myself for the weekend.
Originally Posted on DINO Studio’s blog
(this was meant to go up last Monday. Oops.) Ugh. Halloween, and by extension, October has come and gone. 2010 is nearing its end.
This has been a hectic couple of weeks for us. Transitory periods have a way of making you feel like time is rushing past and also like you’re not going fast enough.
Some highlights from the past these past couple of weeks:
- Aaron and I participated in the IBM Place Summit 2010 conference. That deserves its own post.
- We shipped some initial story scenes for our current book clients… these are going to be really, really amazing pieces — We’re helping these publishers put enormous amounts of thought and care into the experience of storytelling
- I watched The Social Network, and coincidentally(?) we had a meeting w/ our lawyer to review a few things.
- We pitched a Facebook-oriented “personal story of wellness” game for a potential client.
- I listened to a panel on ebooks at the Why Books? conference at Radcliff/Harvard. Post to follow.
- We launched a very cute flashcard app for toddlers for our client, Mezmedia.
- Aaron has put some great effort into sorting through some infrastructure of AMP, our skunkworks project.
- I bought a bottomless coffee cup from the nearby bagel place — either the smartest investment of the year or the direct contributor to my impending mental breakdown… probably both.
Iggy, our green-scaled HR director, has been unusually frisky… making laps around the studio — climbing onto her high perch and through the supplies shelving. Her request for her new heating pad finally went through, so she’s in a good mood overall. Also, we’re thinking she may be gravid.
I’m currently in Pittsburgh at the Art&Code Mobile event.
We arrived last night and came straight from the airport to attend the Rossum’s meetup. The group is an Art and Robotics collective that meet regularly to host speakers, collaborate on projects, and promote their work.
This morning, I particpated in the OpenFrameworks and iPhone workshop taught by memo akten and Zach Gage
The project we were working on was, essentially, pong for the iPhone. It was a great starter project for those that needed an intro to OF because it exposed the basic structure of an OF program (memo and zach did a great, patient job of going through the IDE and the file placement idiosyncrasies of OF). The class proved that OF can be quite cross-platform right out of the box. There are some obvious exceptions (ex. multitouch isn’t available on all platforms). These unique features are handled as addons to the basic OF project.
As expected, the most difficult part of getting an iPhone OF project to work is the whole provisioning / signing process. Luckily, I’ve done quite a bit of iPhone work before, so this was somewhat smooth for me (once I made sure that the correct SDK was selected in XCode — that messed me up a bit).
I didn’t realize that iPhone OF creates ‘legitimate’ iPhone apps that are acceptable for app store submission (and sale). What’s especially exciting about working with something like OF for iPhone is that the platform encourages building art / toy / pretty apps… so the scope of interestingly designed applications that can be offered is small enough that you could iterate through many experiments with ease. That being said, in my experience, since OF can also be essentially use any library that compiles (c++ or objective-c on OS X), you can use it as a framework for more complex applications.
Tonight, I’m spending evening at HackPGH – very cool do-oriented space. somebody’s soldering near me, somebody’s crocheting. I’ll be trying to build an iPhone toy using OF.
Special thanks to Matt Mets for letting me couch surf at his apartment this weekend.
Good times.
Tonight there is a dorkbot-boston as part of the CHI2009 conference.
“What do glitter and glue, needles and thread, batteries and wires have to do with Human Computer Interaction? What can makers and crafters teach technology researchers and designers about the world and technology? How can CHI researchers engage with Do-It-Yourself communities? This session will be a dialogue about the relationships between academia and DIY communities. It will include presentations from the workshop organizers and participants who will demo and discuss their own DIY projects and then use them as springboards for open discussions with the audience. Come to see some interesting projects and to share your own insights and experiences.”
I have the pleasure of making some opening remarks; it’s a little bit of “what is dorkbot,” but I’ll be mixing in some of the call-to-arms rhetoric I’ve used before with a DIYist slant:
I giggled out loud, had a brief moment of “Wow, I can’t believe this is what I get to do for a living right now,” and then came crashing down when I realized that it’s 330AM.
