5 Unit 3: Benjamin Shaykin

For Wednesday, October 15:

Continue your experiments. Refine and define your tool(s).

Please bring your final results to class.

Additionally, in the spirit of growing knowledge through the sharing of tools, please also provide a set of instructions for using your tool(s). Your instructions can be as simple or as complex as they need to be, to make your tool available and accessible to others. The method or form of your instructions is open, but you are encouraged to make something appropriate to the tool itself.

A few examples:

Simple, wordless diagrams from a chopsticks wrapper:

Four simple sentences from the Content Aware Typography tumblr:

or Daniel Eatock’s “participation” projects (for example), or his Pen Prints:

or Xavier Antin’s Printing at Home:

or the how-to guides from Obedient Objects:

Panoramahacks
hacking the iphone camera’s panorama feature
by RISD GD Critic Paul Soulellis

Excel Drawings by Danielle Aubert

iQ font—When driving becomes writing
A modern take on Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting

Illucia: a patchable videogame controller
by RISD GD critic Chris Novello

Moiré (film excerpt), Bruno Munari

Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide

Seeing in Circles (vimeo)

Content Aware Typography

Whole Earth Catalog

Jürg Lehni

Chartwell typeface

Router: A typeface inspired by a routed industrial type

Daniel Eatock uses a paper cutter

Tool (Or, Postproduction for the Graphic Designer), Andrew Blauvelt, from Graphic Design: Now in Production

Program or Be Programmed (introduction), Douglas Rushkoff

Design As Art (excerpts: Micro-Art, Moiré, and Direct Projections), Bruno Munari

Original Xerographies (excerpts), Bruno Munari

Jürg Lehni talks with Philippe Cao & Daniel Giuditta, HTML Output, Spring 2014

A tool—any tool—is possibility at one end and a handle at the other.

Select two tools of your own choosing, from two different quadrants of this matrix:

1. physical + design/art— (ex: letterpress, calligraphy brush, camera)
2. digital + design/art— (ex: photoshop, or one particular action / filter within photoshop)
3. physical non-design/art— (ex: photocopier, telephone, trowel, dice)
4. digital non-design/art— (ex: microsoft word, excel, google)

Explore both tools’ default behavior(s). Explore their most unorthodox potentials. Hack the tools, break the tools. (If they belong to RISD, please don’t actually break the tools.) For this week, experimentation is key. Process rather than final results.

“Tools make revolutions. ‘When we make a new tool, we see a new cosmos,’ says physicist Freeman Dyson. He was probably thinking of microscopes, telescopes, and atomic particle accelerators.

But even the workaday tools . . . can alter our perspective. A tool—any tool—is possibility at one end and a handle at the other. Because tools open up options, they remake us.”

—Kevin Kelly, 2000

You will each receive a common item—art supply or household item—sourced from RISD 2nd Life.

How can this object be utilized as a tool? For communication? For writing? For mark making? Experiment using your tool on letter-size paper. We will pin them your results for a brief discussion at the end of class.