Finally got myself a DSLR a couple of days ago. It’s a Canon EOS 600D and it took me a while to settle on this one. I started off intending to get the Nikon D3100 which then progressed to the D3200 but after lots of research and asking around i decided the Canon was the better choice. It has much higher ISO capabilities aswell as phenomenal full HD video recording among many other things. Anyway here’s my first pictures with the camera, just messing around really!
During my recent trip to Sierra Leone I was spoilt for choice for photographs. As well as the tight shooting schedule at the Sierra Rutile mine, we also were fortunate enough to visit some of the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) projects. We visited a local school and were made to feel very welcome by the children. They love their football in Africa, it is one of the past times that children really take to, not only here, but all over the world, and none more so than in Sierra Leone. There are various charities that use this passion for the game as a way to entice the children to attend school – the attendance rate in Sierra Leone is under thirty percent – the hope is that by attending school, they will be rewarded with a football scholarship to football…
In 1982, we were given Blade Runner. Like many movies around this time, Blade Runner attempted to predict the future and to show us what prospects, and challenges we faced in the years to come.
In particular, the struggle between man and machine is what drives the movie forward. That uncertainty about whether something is real or machine, creates a real sense of fear and danger in the film. There is a wealth of technology on show in the film too, from retina recognition to photo enhancements to eye replacement machines, there are all manner of machines and gadgets. These technologies appear dangerous, and sinister, they somehow instill fear into the viewer and generate a real sense that if we don’t watch out, this is how we will end up. But then you compare this to the technology we have today? The retina scan is in force in airports. Photo enhancement software exists on your smartphone and I am in no doubt there are eyeball switching machines somewhere on the planet.
So how is this dark, mechanical, bleak and fearful future portrayed by Blade Runner any different to the world we live in today? Ok, we don’t have full biometric human bodies that can live and exist on their own and we don’t have flying cars but we have the photo software and the eye recognition which are both huge factors in the movie. The difference is, we are given this technology as a nice, fun and interactive software on a smartphone, and told its the next greatest software with all the bells and whistles.
When we predict the future now, it’s all shining and clean and perfect with machines that can do anything, but is this true? or are we living in a fantasy land and almost projecting what we wish was possible. If you look at the current economic climate, the environmental state and the technology advancements, it doesn’t seem to add up to me. I’m sure we could create the technology no problem, but with growing levels of waste and declining resources, i can’t help but think Blade Runner doesn’t seem so far off after all.
So what happened to good old maps? We mobilised ’em.
Gone are the days when we whip out the A-Z from under the seat in the car or somehow manage to manoeuvre a Michelin road map the size of Russia in the front seat of a Peugeot 206. Although my good ol Grandpa still has his maps handy, but i don’t know how he does it.
This is a prime example of how our life has been directly affected by mobile technology. Map reading and map drawing is a very complicated task and one which takes alot of time and skill, but it is being driven out of our society by digital maps and Sat Nav systems.
Ok, so there are good points to this, of course. I for one think the digital maps are excellent and provide an easy and simple way to navigate our way around which saves me alot of time on the phone to my girlfriend when she’s lost. However what does worry me is how disconnected it can make us feel from our surroundings. We have got ourselves to the point where you stop noticing the features and the landmarks around us and rely on the little blue dot. When our sense of direction becomes so diluted that following the dot or the triangle becomes our method of navigation, it spells worrying times.
What i feel we need to retain is that natural sense of knowing where your going. Knowing that you just ain’t going the right way and having that confidence and connection to things around you to know how to get yourself out of trouble. Whether that be by the stars, the sun, the earth’s magnetic field or simply taking a punt, then it’s still progress over that reliance on mobile technology to solve all of our problems.
So here we have it, this is where the mobile revolution began. The Motorola 4500x was released late 1980’s, had a terrible battery life and weighed a ton. If you think of a mobile phone, does this form even cross your mind? If your gran gave you this next christmas, would u take it?
of course not. We all think of the Iphone, HTC, Samsung etc but it’s amazing to see where it all began and where our generation was first defined.
The way we live our lives these days is forever on the internet, forever on Facebook and Twitter but not so long ago people had to carry around these massive boxes just to own a mobile phone, but still, people stuck with it and people kept buying them and hence pushed us into the age of the mobile phone.
But how has this affected our connection with each other, and the world around us, in a physical sense? Have our people skills declined? have our communication skills diminished because of this? Hopefully i can answer these questions in future posts as i dig deeper into the world of mobile technology.
The number of mobile phone activations between 1990 and 2011 rose from from 12.4 million to 5.6 Billion. Personally i find that staggering, and with new products like the Ipad, Blackberry playbook, Smartphones etc this number is set to explode through the roof to the point where i believe every single person on the planet will own a mobile device. And i can see this happening in the very very near future.
When i was first told we were going on another trip to The Digital Design Studio, part of Glasgow School of Art, i was pretty miffed. Mainly because i had just walked 3 miles to the Art School only to find the place was a mile and a half back in the direction i just came. It proved to be hugely unjust as it was an excellent little surprise.
as a little taster, heres a video from one of the students in the DDS postgraduate course:
it pains me that this will be a short blog as i feel it deserves more, but i was really impressed by the professionalism and the focus in the department. With, it must be said, world class facilities, it seems like exactly the kind of place i’d love to have studied has i not been doing PDE.
They offer 2 postgraduate courses at the DDS, one being a masters and one being a Phd, both equally as well carried out with top of the range computers and processing power, and the chance to create small, innovative little animations.
with the ability to use 3D scanning equipment to scan historical sites such as stirling castle or mount rushmore adds a different dimension to the department offering a world class and world renowned service which puts the studio and the art school on the map which can only be a good thing. This software has been utilised in medicine by scanning the body and offering an explodable on screen model of the human body which allows the viewer to go inside and explore every nook and cranny.
All in all, i feel this is an excellent department of the GSA, almost like a secret weapon. I really feel the course deserves more recognition and coverage because it really does create excellent output, as you can see from the videos and is a department the School of Art should really be proud of.
World's biggest game of pick-up-sticks got out of hand
Recently, we embarked on the thrill ride of a lifetime down to visit the Nissan car manufacturing plant in Sunderland (despite bus drivers questionable ability to stay between the white lines on the motorway ). Death bus and pit stops aside, the trip proved to be rather insightful.
the tour was roughly 4 hours long, and considering we only saw 10% of the production line in that time, you will appreciate the scale of manufacturing going on down there. The question i found myself asking was, who buys Nissans? Now we’re talking the Juke and the Qashqai here, not the GT-R unfortunately. When u consider the fact the staff work around a 3 x 8 hour shift day ( 1 each of course ) we have 24 hour production, with each man on the line given 90s ( i think ) to complete their task which might be welding, fixing, putting in the windshield, putting in the dashboard etc. This results in roughly 440 cars per 8 hour shift, 1300 cars a day and 480 000 cars, Nissans, a year. Who buys them?!
I can honestly say, i haven’t seen that level of Nissan % on our roads in the UK, but there is a good reason for this. 80% of the production output is export meaning that there isn’t 480 000 cars worth of sale price money being pumped back into the UK economy, which i think is unfortunate.
The recent announcement of a new model to be manufactured in Sunderland came the day after we left Nissan. This would provide 2000 new jobs, which is excellent in the current economic climate and double dip recession. Unfortunately this came labelled with a £9.3M grant from the government, which in the case of the tories, is never a good thing. But that debate can wait for another time.
So i guess it was an insightful but slightly disappointing tour, in terms of the financial information we found out. I was amazed to see how many people they have working on the line ( excess of 6000 ) and how each and every one has a part to play in keeping this incredibly daunting, well oiled machine chugging along. But the revelation that most of it goes out as export slightly ruined it for me but i will always remember that moment when i thought the machines were going to turn into transformers and kill us all.
Ask yourself this question, do you own a product which is sustainable?
This is the question i was faced with, and asked to provide an example of a product i felt was sustainable. So i went with the General Electric FlexAero LM6000-PH natural gas turbine.
The benefits of this engine are:
– Fast power up/power down time
– Can run without water, saving 98 million litres a year, per engine.
– Flexible enough to run on unstable power sources such as wind and solar energy
among many others. So i guess what this identifies is my belief that the way to protect our future and become more ‘sustainable’ is to make changes to existing processes to reduce consumption overall.
However Ian Grout, Product Design Tutor at Glasgow School of Art made the obvious and valid point, how can any product claim to be sustainable? If you see my previous blog ” The future is now ” i have shown that the overall cost of creating these products, far outweighs the gains during use. Just think of the number of components on show in the engine i have shown above.
Now each single component was manufactured in a factory. Each component will have been created by other machines, whether they be robotic or static, there is still an enormous amount of residual energy in the manufacture. Beyond that, the machines were created by men for example, but the materials were extracted from ore’s which takes an enormous amount of energy … and you can see where i am going with this. Even when u consider the smallest of products, the manufacture has still amassed to huge amounts of energy used to produce them.
So each and every product we see, each piece of design and technology comes with the guilt of knowing that although it may claim to be environmentally friendly, energy efficient or just “green”, it isn’t. It simple can’t be.
Therefore this puts me in a difficult position because i have been championing the Product Design Engineer and our ability to protect future generations through purposeful and essential design, but how can i deal with the knowledge that what i am doing can potentially cause more harm than good? Well the only option i have is to ensure every part and every design i create has the smallest possible negative impact on the planet.
Hopefully this period of sustainability blogs hasn’t put you off and it makes sense to you reading it! I would love to hear any opinions anyone has on the matter wether it be in agreement of disagreement of my view.
Ok, so most of these blogs have the theme of sustainability running constant, and i’m as sick as anyone about it, but the next blog will challenge the very basis of sustainability and whether it even exists as a topic.
Following that, some interesting topics will come up including trips etc but i will also be exploring another topic.
I want to investigate how the current boom in mobile technology is affecting the connection that we as the mass buying public have with the 3D world around us. With programs like Google maps, itunes and an increase in augmented reality technology aswell as our lives being lived through websites such as Facebook, Twitter and even WordPress, how much of a connection do we realistically enjoy?
Hopefully i can come to a logical conclusion which can see the benefits of this aswell as the drawbacks.
I swear, this isn’t a sustainability blog, but it’s beginning to sound that way.
I was recently enlightened to the demise of the human race. Predicted to occur around 2030 based on the limits to growth info graphic shown. Having previously been completely ignorant towards this prediction, it came as quite a shock to me as i hope it will for anyone reading this. Recent predictions also show that we are on course for this demise, with no signs of slowing up. But with everything i have mentioned, aswell as consistently shocking headlines about the topic of a sustainable future, why haven’t things changed? Why are we still so irresponsible when it comes to protecting our future?
we are not alchemists. We cannot create gold from steel and we cannot, just now at least, produce oil and resources from nothing. Everything has an inherent cost and everything takes time and effort, particularly oil, as we all know. This points to a blatant fact about the way we live, our system of economics isn’t working and has to change.
This does not mean we cut all of our habits cold turkey and change over night, but the question is ” can we descend to paradise rather than climb into hell? “. This can be achieved if we change our economic ways and alter our levels of consumption but this can be a gradual change.
To take lead from previous posts, i believe we as design engineers have a key role to play in this. But can we infact prove that we are the K species after all. This theory states that the R species come along and use the land to the point of overshoot. The K species then move in to fill the niches and live more sustainably by learning from the mistakes.
So, can we become the K series? can we ADJUST our ways to live more sustainably or will we just use the earth to the point of destruction? I think design engineers can be the pioneers of this way of living and by attempting to adopt a new form of economics early in our careers, we can open up possibilites for future generations. Although we may not be able to design with the same freedom as we experience today, our designs can actually enrich the experience of those who need the product.
Design Personifications 