Alex’s craft-related rant

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.