Lawrence Siulagi

Neri Oxman with a model of a molded chaise lounge. (Photo courtesy MIT)

Bones, computers and art: Neri Oxman, MIT researcher, artist and medical scholar, has created yet another prolific project of genius in the form of… a chaise lounge?

Yep.

Looking a little bit like a bio-mechanoid piece from H.R. Giger – the artist behind the Alien movies – the chair’s design, she says, “drew inspiration from the internal structure of bones and other biological forms,” according to MIT’s Tech Talk.

Her work aims to use computational tools to produce “performance-based design,” she says, in which, as occurs in nature, “the organization of the structure is directly linked to the forces that are applied to that structure.” To achieve that, she studies natural materials like the cellular structure of a bone, or microscopic images of a butterfly wing, and translates those principles into construction that takes advantage of the flexibility of modern materials and processes. “It’s about process, not product,” she says.

For more of Oxman’s work, you can follow her blog: Materialecology.

This is a website I designed for an environmentally-friendly painting service based here in Portland. I bartered for some interior painting – which is a good thing in these economic times.

I designed the site using WordPress and a modified K2 theme. The slow panning banner images use javascript and panoramas of the client’s work shot by the client.

For the animated image above, I used ScreenFlow to record a .mov file which I imported into Adobe ImageReady and exported as an animated GIF.

Are you ready for the new line of eco-friendly cars from… IKEA? Quoi?

Apparently, this has the backing of the WWF no, not the World Wrestling Federation but the World Wildlife Fund.

But a NYT article is placing its bets on “Practical Joke” as the release date is, you guessed it: April Fools Day.

Le’go of my LEG-oh.

Every now and then, an idea comes along that is truly a Luddite’s lament. No electricity, coding or digital wizardry. Just good ol’ fashioned, handmade sleight of hand.

A day of tweaking images, CSS and PHP files. Testing out the zillion plugins/widgets available for WordPress.

Note to widget authors: Don’t assign yourself 5 stars for your own widget. Who does that? Stop it people. I always count the number of users who submitted a review. If the number of stars equals five and the number of users equals one, I check who gave the review. If you’re the author, I won’t try it out until other people download your widget and/or review it.

Also: helped out someone with their website using the barter system. Did lots of template tweaking with good results. Sometimes I most happy when I’m designing. After tweaking my blog image header, I think I’ll put up a screencast of how I did it.

Better throw in that I applied for a senior web design position for a national corporation with offices here in Portland. Yet another long process of filling out profile info but we’ll see how it pans out.

Okay, off to bed after a full day of WordPress tweaks. I gotta launch my site sometime.

Going to buy a scanner tomorrow to scan artwork for my portfolio section.

Honest Abe was inaugurated as the sixteenth President on this day in history. “So, how does time off from work affect the recently laid-off,” you ask?

Trivia. Lots and lots of trivia. This fills in the time between applying for jobs, updating a post, reading e-mail, scanning news and general screen-staring.

I like to think of the looking up of trivial information as a palate cleanser for the brain.

Anyhow, tall hats off to you Mr. 16th President.

I spent 10% of yesterday looking for a job online and 90% in web design bliss. Me, a blank document, a keyboard and a screen. Hmm, sounds like a new geek version of A Chorus Line.

I was planning on having WordPress serve as a blog page but its tools and plug-ins have gone ballistic. So much so that I moved it to my root directory as my home page. This is mainly for organizing purposes.

I can’t wait to trick it out some. Add some new plug-ins or develop my own. We’ll see.

Reactivated my Twitter account and had a laugh when I read Jeff Jarvis’ interview on Metromix

…the Internet is a magnificent vehicle for individual expression. That said, my 16-year-old son Jake recently complained that the problem with Twitter is all people Twitter about is Twitter. But that’ll change in time.

A few technical setbacks: DandyID crapped out on me and WordPress wouldn’t let me link using the Visual form. Safari 4 Beta version is the most likely. Will revisit.

On this day 44 years ago, Julie Andrews belted out The Sound of Music on the big screen.

It’s time to design my website. So far I’ve made a list in my head of what I don’t want but not a lot in the I Do Want column.

It is time to make Do. A deer. A female deer… okay, stop.

After reviewing a lot of websites yesterday – from flash-heavy to german minimalists – I woke up this morning with these thoughts.

While the Flash sites were – and I hate to use this term – cool, they were geared toward entertainment and not quite appropriate.

The German minimalists were nice with an overabundance of impact white, but they screamed minimalist, as in, “Look at me! I’m hardly wearing anything!”

What was great about both styles was the high usability factor. And while I lean toward minimalism, I don’t mind a little clutter – as long as the clutter is functional.

By functional I mean just that: serving a purpose. That purpose could be as dry as a menu flyout but it could also be an art form for an aesthetic enjoyment of space.

Picture a white couch on a wood floor with a white area rug, a coffee table and a lamp. While the elements and setting are functional and even pleasing to the eye, there needs to be a surprise. And I don’t mean a large Miro painting on the wall, but something that belongs, but altered in an organic way.

Huh? Let me explain.

Good quilters know that a good quilt design incorporates a single, cloth swatch which is different in pattern and/or color from the the other swatches. And not so completely that it distracts and not so subtle that it disappears entirely.

Which brings me back to TSOM. Remember that fly-in shot of Julie Andrews singing about those Bavarian hills? The song melody is the pattern, but the hills – or nature – are full of surprises: verdant greens, dandelion yellows, and lily blues.

So here it is. The first item in my I Do Want column is: I want a surprise on every page which is functional and in plain sight.