Here’s what happened:
I made the fake Crate and Barrel stuff.
I made it good (better)
I went and tried to sell it on a blanket by the store.
No one was interested. No one called the police. No one bought anything.
I tried again to sell the stuff in central square with a group of friends.
Still nothing.
I made a video about the whole experience.
I began thinking about those guys who came by with their $100 laptop-charger and I was thinking about charers that would work with things that we allready do. I had a simple idea for a bicycle powered charger for any USB device. Too good to be true. I checked the internets and sure enough, in addition to a handfull of DIY’s (of varying degrees of success), Motorola has just unveilled a bike powered charger that seems to work well. Here’s the motorola thing
Here’s one of the DIY’s that seemed to work in the end
I still think a simpler DIY might be worth persuing, but I’d like to cme up with something more original.
My second Idea was more of a Man versus Machine kind of thing. A modern day John Henry or something (without the trying so hard that I die). I thought it might be interesting to compare a mass produced, machine made product- something available in Crate and Barrell, for example, to something that I make by hand.
I thought this project might manifest itself in video-form. Something that both shows the two processes, and tries to determine if one is in fact “better”. Hand-made glass is slower, more expensive, and has a lower success rate, but it looks so sexy:
I wonder if it is possible to prove that it is worth the extra everything in some way. Perhaps I can relate it back to this idea that buying one of something that is so nice that you keep it forever is ultimately one of the most “environmentally friendly” ways to consume.
My idea from the “up-cycling” project was to make an item out of trach that made it valuable so that it would be kept. The challenge was to do it with a glass beer bottle. So I made these three objects that are kind of related and try to maintain some connection to the object that they came from. It’s one of those things where the farther from the original form it gets, the less efficient the process gets (although glass shops are by definition, huge bottomless pits of energy consumption, probably negating the environmentally friendly aspect of this entire project). I was also interested in making something that was no longer a traditional “vessel” out of the bottle, but what I ended up with were a cup (very “traditional vessel”), a bottle shaped jar with a lid, and something that I’m not quite sure what it is, but could possibly make a nice lampshade. All kind of disappointing in terms of straying from the vessel thing although the lampshad starts to go somewhere.
I was perticularly attracted to the beer-bottle/brick product we saw in class and thought I’d like to make something similar out of glass for this project. Due to a lack of a helper however, I was unable to work in the glass shop this week, but I promise I’ll have something for next week. Anyway, here’s some stuff that other people make out of old beer bottles.
Apparently, everyone and their mother thought they were brilliant when they discovered that they could make a glass to drink beer out of the bottle that the beer came in. these people are geniouses.
As a reaction to my father’s constant complaints about too many features and too little size, I thought that a cell-phone would be a good choice of object to de-technologize. Since my proposal occurred in the form of a power point talk, I decided to post some of the images I showed and mention some of the points that I made.
First, cell phones seem to be designed with ergonomics as an afterthought. they seem to have always been made in unweildy and uncomfortable shapes. Below are acouple of “early” designs. The “brick” phone from the eighties is actually a product that can be purchased today. It is advertised as crappy as a phone, but pretty sturdy as a door-stop.
Here’s a little phone timeline from the last few years. You’ll see that not much changes.
My first idea was to put the guts of cell phone in an old rotary phone. Kind of unweildy on one hand, but certainly fits this concept of”human scale” we discussed in class. Anyway, it’s already been done and here is the product (available for about $300 on sparkfun.com)
Finally, I thought it might be a good compromise to fit all the phone stuf into the handset from an old phone or payphone.
that’s pretty much what I talked about.
I recently read this article about a company that claims to have made a polystyrene substitute that biodegrades, AND is cheaper than the bad for the environment stuff. NOT THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT! The ineteresting part about the material is that they also say they can engineer the rate of biodegradation by adjusting the ratio of ingredients. It would be cool to see some kind of packaging that last exactly three years and then instantly becomes a biodegradable powder. Anyway, here’s the link to the article
I just got started working in the glass lab again this week, so my first thought was to do something with the material. I was inspired by the guy with the electronics and fabric and thought I’d play around with some electric glass- It’s kind of perfect- It’s a good insulator and has the same (or very similar) expansion and contraction as copper so it can be attached in many ways ant the two materials “agree”. Anyway, it took too long to get the copper in the form I was looking for, so I did this experiment instead. I wanted to find a way to keep the structure of broken glass. I thought that if the whole thing were dipped in rubber before it was broken it might have some qualities of each material. I got some of this nasty stuff:
And I coated a cup that I had made earlier in the week.
I left the rubber stuff to dry overnight (which it didn’t- at least all the way) and smashed the cup on the floor. The result was actually surprisingly more rigid than I expected.
I had made two similar items so that I could compare the two, so I repeated the process on these guys
I ended up only breaking the neck of this vessel because there was so much still wet rubber inside of the ball…
this project smelled bad and got red shit everywhere. sweet.
This week I decided that in keeping with my angsty teenage interest in all things illicit and subversive that I’d learn to open padlocks with a soda can. I’ve seen the instructions floating around the internet before, but took the opportunity to take the time to learn the skill. It turned out to be more difficult than expected, but I eventualy got it to work and am satisfied that in an “emergency” that required a forced entry, (and there were no bolt-cutters lying around) this would do the trick. 
The first step is to cut the top and bottom off a soda can. I did the big arizona iced tea because it gives you more material and thus more chances to screw up and ruin your tool
Next, you flatten out the thin sheet of aluminum and cut off the jagged edges so you end up with a nice looking rectangle.
Measure out a bunch of 1 1/4″ X 2 1/2″ rectangles and cut one (or all of them) out.
Next you divide the square into four quarters, and then make kind of a curved “M” shape in the center of the bottom half. I’ve added some extra lines to make it easier to make the “M” nice.
Cut out the “M” and fold down the top quarter of the sheet.
Fold the flaps on the left and right up and around the part that’s allready folded over. Then, wrap the shim around a bic pen to get it into the shape of the loop on the lock.
It takes quite a bit of fiddling to get the shim to fit in between the rod and the clasp, but it can be done. I had to mangle about five of the shims before I got it. It’s a pretty neat trick though…
This version is slightly more boring, I think. Below is a composite image, showing the various parts of the phone.
As we were assigned the project of taking something apart and teaching the rest of the class something about it, it occurred to me how mysterious the workings of so many personal electronics were (to me at least- I know I am at MIT). I know from general knowledge that phones are made up of tons of little integrated circuits and other little electronic components, but I had never actually seen them. So, it was to my delight that when I opened the thing up, sure enough, out of the hollow plastic case spilled about half a handfull of gravel.
