learning the ropes

Fashion by Georg Simmel, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol 62, No. 6 (may, 1957), pp. 541-558

Georg Simmel explores at great length the dynamics of fashion, commenting on the affect of class distinction and economic progress on the transitory nature of the sociological phenomenon.

Quotes that stood out:

Thus fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change.

- I was struck by the consequence of this — as well as the point Simmel makes later in his essay, which is that it is impossible to avoid the influence of fashion. Even by attempting to ignore fashion, I still participate in it in the negative.

[Fashion] has overstepped the bounds of its original domain, which comprised only personal externals, and has acquired an increasing influence over taste, over theoretical convictions, and even over the moral foundations of life.

- I think this has increased beyond what Simmel observed in 1957. The television and more recently the internet have accelerated this consumeristic trend.

* Listen Far – spend 5 minutes in an undistracted setting. Park bench, your apartment, or a street corner. Listen. Listen to the faintest sound you can hear. Now try to listen beyond that sound.

Bobst Library, Second Floor — seated at a table facing away from the central lobby. My ears are toward the reference area where students are typing.

Immediately above my head, the HVAC system rumbles.

I hear the electronic ding of the lobby elevator out in the central lobby. It reverberates briefly against the smooth tiled surface of the lobby floor. I am seated in a carpeted area, so the sounds immediately around me are muffled.

A door slams (“guuuhm”) in the distance and its echo lingers in the lobby area.

I hear light female footsteps, the sharp attack of boot heels against the tile ringed with bright reverberation. They approach and become slightly muffled on carpet. They come up the stairs located behind me then continue further up until my listening is interrupted by someone whistling a melody out in the lobby. I presume it’s the lobby by the reverberation.

As I look over my left shoulder, I see a young woman typing at a Macintosh computer. I can hear the faint mechanical clacking of the keys from her keyboard even at a distance of 50 feet. I wonder if I can hear anything beyond the sounds of her typing. Can I hear her shift in her chair?

She doesn’t move.

I wonder what my experience would be like if I could hear the whirring of the hard drive in the computer in front of her.

A pen falls (“taakkkk”) onto the surface of a desk in front of me and my focus changes.

I’m aware of the difference in frequency responses between my right and left ears. Last semester, a large mass of wax built up inside my right ear. It’s starting to happen again. The high frequencies are not as bright in my right ear as they are in my left. It’s time to start using the Murine again to loosen the wax.

A sneeze echoes from the lobby.

How deafening the world would be if louder if I could hear the hard drives spinning — the rustle of clothing — the scratch of pen or pencil against paper… What if the lowest frequencies were perceptable — the atoms in the objects at rest: books, maybe still echoing with the sound of the typesetting equipment that deposited the ink upon their pages.

Then I would be listening deeply and I would understand.

Our first reading assignment was Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros.

I have to admit that the structure (or apparent lack of) made it very difficult for me to read. I had a very hard time following her train of thought. Thanks to Rob Faludi’s BlogBlender, I discovered Gian Pablo’s reaction to it which encourages me to read it in a different way. Despite having played music for years, I had not considered reading an essay as music before.

Some of the themes she discussed with respect to deep listening reminded me of Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music and also of Barry Green’s The Inner Game of Music

I wondered what she meant by “practice practice”, though.

Two things about her essay resonated with me.
1: the desire to create music collaboratively with people who don’t have formal musical training. To this end, I may try out to work out a “simple set of rules” by which we can do this in my Living Art class.
2: when I was in college and worked in a recording studio, I began to experience a deeper listening than I had ever done before. Part of my job was to verify that transfers we made from digital audio tapes (DATs) into ProTools didn’t contain glitches. I listened to the recordings very intently through headphones and through the process, I began to hear details I hadn’t experienced before. I developed a deeper sense of appreciation for clarity and fidelity in recordings.
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We are asked to create a personal “Venus of Willendorf“. The operative idea behind this is exploring the possibility of expression through a personal object.

I have chosen to “embody” myself in a small, pocket-sized ball which serves both as a Rosary and as a reminder of the committment Kelly and I share in our marriage. We are bound together by agreement, but more than that by the grace of God.

The two-toned ball has ten “flowers” on it which correspond to the ten beads on a Rosary. The juxtaposition of the Rosary with the reminder of our marital committment is also a reminder to continually pray for grace in our marriage.

	I started with a simple ball of foil and covered it with Sculpey I (polymer clay). After baking the sphere for 25 minutes at 250 degrees, I mixed some Sculpey Premo colors together and applied them to the cooled sphere to create the two colored hemispheres.
	Using a metal stylus, I carved paths and “beads” into the sphere. There is a single continuous path which travels through all of the beads and joins the hemispheres.
	I baked the sphere again and after it cooled I sanded it with 400, 600, 800, then 1000 grit sandpaper to give it a smooth surface. I tried to polish the Rosary Ball with my Dremel using a muslin wheel, but the surface began to melt. I sanded away the burnt spots and enhanced the texture by rubbing drawing ink into the carvings. After the ink dried, I sanded it off with the 1000 grit sandpaper.

I built a base for the clock last night and asked Kelly to try reading the time. We learned several things in the process:
- Tracing a circle is difficult when you can’t see. Kelly didn’t have a sense of the size of the outer ring with her eyes closed, so her fingers went off the ring several times. Each time, she had to return to the 12 o’clock index marker and start again.

- I built a prototype with a visual mapping that doesn’t correspond with the way we speak the time. Since Kelly and I have been using clocks for a long time (although she can read the non-digital ones much more quickly), we expect the longer hand to always point to the number of minutes. When I designed this clock, I thought the outer ring should also represent the minutes in order to mimic the way we’re used to seeing a clock. This would be a positive thing for a visually impaired person with memories of clock faces. For a person blind from birth, however, this visual/spatial mapping doesn’t exist. The way we speak the time, “four forty-nine, pm” rather than “eleven minutes to five o’clock, pm” defines a mental sequence: hours, then minutes. With this mental sequence, it makes sense that the outer ring is the hours and the inner ring the minutes. Despite our visual/spatial maps, Kelly and I both found our minds wanted to use the outer ring to represent hours when our eyes were closed.

- 12 != 1 != 0 (or twelve doesn’t equal one doesn’t equal zero). Another problem of the traditional clock face is tied to starting with twelve. Kelly experienced difficulty remapping the 12 o’clock position as zero when she couldn’t see the clock face. I realized that it doesn’t make sense if you haven’t grown up looking at a clock. My instructions to her were to “trace clockwise around the circle, counting each depression until you reach the raised marker.” I could either clarify my instructions or try another prototype which addresses some of these issues.

I began to experience firsthand some of the blocks we put in place as we consider designs. I stereotyped the user of my clock (in this case a visually impaired or completely blind person) as a sighted person in several key areas.

I started with another approach to the clock design. I wanted to try prototyping a tactile clock face that would eliminate the need for a talking clock. Allistar noted in his blog that “[s]tyle is something that’s also apparent – never assume because someone is blind they don’t embrace style. After all others can see us.”

I wanted to see if I could propose something more stylish that would be enjoyable for both sighted and blind people.

To tell time using this clock, the user begins by locating the raised marker at the 12 o’clock position on the outer rim of the clock face. They move their finger toward the center of the clock (moving up two levels) until they find the depressions on the hours layer. Starting at the 12 o’clock position, they will trace clockwise around the circle, counting each depression until they reach the raised hour marker. To determine the number of minutes, they return to the 12 o’clock marker on the outter rim and move their finger toward the center of the clock (moving up one level) until they find the depressions on the minutes layer. Starting at the 12 o’clock position, they will track clockwise around the circle, counting each depression until they reach the raised minute marker.

In class on Tuesday evening, we were given a problem to solve in ten minutes: design a clock for a blind person. This short exercise became the first assignment of the class. Although I played with several concepts, only one stayed with me through the end of the ten minute brainstorming period. I proposed a talking clock.

I began by brainstorming what I believed to be the user’s needs:
- Telling time on demand
- Waking up at a specific time
- Easily setting the time

As I started sketching from there, other needs emerged:
- Reliable power source (AC line voltage + battery backup) so the blind person should be able to obtain the current time under either battery or main power failure conditions
- Volume control in order to avoid unnecessarily disturbing others
- Automatic time setting radio signal

When I returned to the problem yesterday afternoon, I researched current products marketed to the blind and visually impaired:

Pyramid talking clock

Talking Thermometer Clock I wonder how the blind or visually impaired person will know where to aim the infrared remote.

Keychain clock Seems similar to a product that might be used to “remember everything”

Simple clock

My initial impression was that few appeared to have been designed specifically with this market in mind. I did find a another design feature to inform my previous brainstorming:
- A heavy base with non-slip feet might be useful for the blind

I researched braille numbers in order to see other possible ways to design the clock.