Future Craft/Love Sounds

This playdough was made based on instructions that can be found on the Instructables website. Playdough (a.k.a Play-doh) is a non-toxic dough that has been sold as a children’s toy since the 50’s. The recipe is a trade secret, but playdough is primarily a mixture of wheat flour, water, deodorized kerosene or another petroleum distillate (which provides the smooth texture), salt, a drying agent such as borax (which deters mold), an alum-based hardening agent, and colorings and perfume (Wikipedia). The instructions that I chose to follow recommended the following recipe:

Basic ingredient ratios:
2 cups flour
2 cups warm water
1 cup salt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon cream of tartar (optional for improved elasticity)

food coloring
vanilla

The main trick is to heat the dough mix long enough in order to get the right, thick and elastic texture. It takes about 5-10 minutes. Apparently, the dough lasts longer if you use mineral oil rather than vegetable oil in the mixture.

After I made the multi-colored playdough, I felt like exploring and learning even more, so I decided to make a short stop motion (frame-by-frame) movie. There are plenty of instruction on how to make your own stop motion movie online. I used my own digital camera to take photos of the clay figures and used Windows Movie Maker to put the images together. I named the movie Making clay dance (note: my roomie in the background):

This is a comment to Peter B. Meyer’s paper Episodes of Collective Invention.

I find the discussion regarding incentives for sharing knowledge and inventions the most interesting one. If you think that you have a really good idea, why on earth would you want to make it publicly available?The paper shows that there are many possible reasons; uncertainty and fame being two.

I’d say that in general, people will only use open source (or any other approach)  if that benefits them somehow - short-term or long-term. Meyer claims that open source is only useful and beneficial within uncertain fields, i.e. fields that have an uncertain future or evolution. That is when you need collective creation and development, as well as diversity and multitude.

I am fascinated by the roles of fame and respect. The Media Lab has a long history helpfulness and open source; send out an email with a question and you’ll most likely receive at least a couple of answers. I wonder what drives people to help others succeed? Apart from the fact that direct reciprocity may benefit these people (students exchange ideas and solutions with each other), it may actually also be that they strive for recognition and admiration. They are working their way up in the hierarchy of knowledge and wisdom.

The video below shows Paulina as she is taking apart a standard Rubik’s cube. During her exploration, Paulina found out that when it comes to Rubik’s cubes it is fairly easy to disassemble the cube, but it is extremely important that you do it in the right way:

To pull apart the Rubik’s cube, put it on a hard flat surface. With a thin blunt instrument such as a medium sized flathead screwdriver (don’t use a knife or any other sharp instrument), gently work the screw driver into the gap directly above one of the centre spindles - don’t try this on a corner, or it will snap. When the screwdriver is in a few millimetres, gently lever the so the edge piece is slowly forced up. The piece should suddenly pop up, but don’t press too hard. With this piece removed, all the remaining pieces can be slid out.

It took Paulina approx. five minutes to remove all the pieces, which, as you probably can understand, is not much of a record.

Some useless facts:

• The Rubik’s cube was named after one of its inventors: Erno Rubik (patent in 1974).
• In March 1970, Harry D. Nichols invented a 2×2x2 “Puzzle with Pieces Rotatable in Groups” and filed a U.S. patent application for it. Nichols’ cube was held together with magnets. The patent was filed two years before Rubik invented his improved mechanical cube.
• A standard cube (3*3*3) measures approx. 2 1/4 inches (5.7 cm).
• The standard cube can have 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different permutations, but the puzzle is advertised as having only ‘billions’ of positions.
• All cubes (3*3*3, 4*4*4, 5*5*5 and 6*6*6) can be solved in 26 or fewer permutations.

This is Paulina. She is a happy student at MIT. More specifically, she is a 2nd year MS student in the Speech and Mobility Group at the Media Lab. Paulina loves people; she loves to learn about how people think and behave; what they like and what they dislike. Actually, to tell you the truth, Paulina thinks that technology in itself is pretty boring. She uses technology merely as an excuse to explore the human mind. The way we interact with, interpret and shape objects tells the rest of the world who we are. If you’d met Paulina, she would probably say something like:

Show me what you would do with this lever, and I will tell you who you are.

Paulina’s academic website can be found here. Her private blog can be found here.

Enjoy.