These prototypes are sketches; quick explorations and validations of ideas. These sketches, like all sketches, are capable of describing the complete but abbreviated contours of a concept, while also offering space to work out the parts of that concept that are as of yet incomplete. Sketches make concepts concrete, giving form to the abstract, inviting us to imagine how such a thing might exist. These masks are sketches; studies of what has become the defining design icon of the global pandemic. Within a relatively short period, masks have become widely adopted (and also widely rejected) as they become intimately integrated…
Every spring I teach a design studio in the School of Engineering at Brown. The class is a project-based studio course where students learn to translate their ideas into physical objects through iterative prototyping, critique, and the development and documentation of their creative process. Working with one’s hands, mind, and peers are essential elements of the class. We develop our projects within the frameworks of various design strategies, from which students are encouraged to cultivate their own creative process. …
Ezekiel is one of the most enigmatic books in the Tanakh. For centuries upon centuries, it has inspired the mystical imagination and given commenters a speculative framework to contemplate the meaning and purpose of exile, while attempting to interpret the Image and Spirit of G-d. It can also be read as a meditation in Speculative Design. Speculative Design, like Speculative Fiction and other related literary genres, including prophetic literature, imagines how things could be in contrast to how things are. [1] The Book of Ezekiel begins by describing, in superlative terms, a kind of machine, the function of which has…
Interviewer: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. Before we begin, what is your preferred pronoun? CEO of Elephant: I could be anyone. Interviewer: OK then, let’s start by discussing the remarkable rise of Elephant, and its widespread appeal and adoption. CEO of Elephant: In the past decade or so, we’ve seen smartphones become practically obsolete as more and more people shift into Augmented Reality platforms like Elephant. We’ve also seen ubiquitous computing and Strong AI expand in ways that would have been difficult to imagine, even a decade ago; computers have became intimately embedded into the architecture and…
An Incomplete Design Taxonomy
Design is never finished, never complete. Every design project is an iteration on a much greater process that has been unfolding since our ancestors first learned to use tools. Every design strategy is the culmination of that historical process, from which all creative disciplines emerge. But this endowment of creative knowledge resists easy classification. Its boundaries are porous, and perpetually being extended further outward. Each iteration adds something to that greater whole. Every iteration is the opportunity to ask a new question.
Design as a mode of inquiry has become increasingly salient within academia in recent years. And yet, design…
I once overheard several adults pose the following riddle: How do you divide 10 apples between 11 kids so that everyone gets the same amount? The solution struck me as such a creative and equitable way to address a seemingly insuperable problem.
The solution… you make applesauce! And I love applesauce!! So I thought it appropriate, given that I am a toddler and that I possess all the bonafides that one might expect from a 2 year old, to insist that Daddy serve me applesauce. I have come to develop a fondness for the tasty apple goo, and I take…
On a walk yesterday, just off Mass Ave, I came across this window that was curiously aslope.
I recognized what it was, although I had had never actually seen one before. It’s called a Witch Window, which is more of a Vermont thing than a Salem or Boston thing. You won’t find any reference to it in the Malleus Maleficarum. It’s just one of those charming idiosyncrasies of New England vernacular architecture that you come across from time to time. According to tradition, it is tilted due to the belief that witches cannot fly their brooms on a slant.
From…
Why isn’t there a seam on the color wheel?
One might expect to find it somewhere between red and violet. If the visible spectrum is measured as decreasing wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, from red (620–750 nm) to violet (380–450 nm), from the lowest frequencies to the highest, placing red and violet at opposing “edges” of this spectrum, why aren’t red and violet qualitatively more dissimilar? Instead of this dissimilarity, one finds the same continuity between red and violet that one finds between any other adjacent areas on the color wheel.
We asked members of the Brown faculty from across disciplines…
It was late on a Friday afternoon when a rabbi came to the perimeter of a town protected by a formidable wall. Facing west, toward the setting sun, there was a monumental gate that anyone wishing to enter or exit the town had to pass through. And, at this gate, stood an indomitable guard, who stridently and silently protected the town. But as the rabbi approached, the guard became alert, and threw a question in the rabbi’s direction.
“What is the reason you’ve come here?” the guard inquired.
The rabbi smiled with a kind, but tired face, and replied in…
The Torah has been translated into nearly every written language. It has passed from Hebrew into Greek, from Greek into Latin, and from Latin into the English with which these words are written. The Torah, as written and spoken, might most laconically be characterized as the story of the Jewish people as told by the Jewish people. It is a story, but it is also a conversation; a conversation that can also be understood as a sacred dialectic through which the Spirit of history plays out. But the Torah can also be characterized and defined in other ways. Abbreviated even…
