Recording done earlier this week at the site. Much more traffic on the path,. Gulls and cormorants were gathered at the dam for herring migration. Short conversation with another woman on the path, who describes the visuals

Journal entry on site geometry for house at Perkins. Feeling stuck today, and may shift to another project for a bit.

Dandelion overexposures

Artist housing at Perkins: sketch to diagram to rough space plan. Wrote some scripts for placing furniture sizes more quickly, which are shared on the developer forum. Will be refining there.

A white hand-drawn architectural floor plan is sketched on a black surface. It's subdivided into two artist studios and includes a top and bottom floor with some trees on the riht side of the house. It's also showing a quick sketch of the section and you can see a trus system. A wireframe model is displayed on a dark-themed computer screen in Rhino. The draawing is tightening up and some small changes have started.

Recently got to play with some architecture toys at Perkins. This one has an interesting sort of prefabrication logic that I think could be extended in interesting ways.

This is an image of a toy called Room with a View. It's some blue foam walls the interlock like puzzle pieces, as well as small pieces of plastic furniture that can go into the house.

PSA for all who need it (me): Today is not a day for clever CNC’d inside-corner design. Put in some dogbone joints and cut out the prototype.

A white-lined drawing of the flat pieces of a piece of furniture. It's a box, which can be used as a table or to prop up a piece of furniture. It's actually 33 by 33 inches, which is the size of this small foam floor-couch that I have. So if you attach two of these together it could hold up the couch. And the side piece has three different possible heights, so it can be a low, medium, or high box. The whole thing is design to be put together with tension cords and assembled or disassembled like a puzzle, without any glue or nails. Oh, and of course the dogbone joint is when the CNC, which is a spinning router, cuts the wood it creates a circular cut. This is a little hard to describe just through an image description so maybe there's a way you can actually find a piece of wood cut by a CNC to really feel this... But the dogbone is a dogbone shaped joint, which is meant to deal with that. It's sort of like the icon of a dogbone, but it's just the easiest shape to cut that allows for a flush joint. So the point of the caption is: stop worrying about trying to find some way to prevent a dogbone joint and just use the joint, because it's going to make your life so much easier. Whew, that was hard to describe, hopefully I can be more clear and concise next time *wink*

Two design podcasts I enjoyed this week: Design Emergency’s selection of case-studies on contemporary craft, and 99% Invisible’s long and winding history of the em dash

Two constellation drawings experimenting with high and low contrast

Points on a map, circled stars, floating symbols, all in the deepest darkest night. Points on a map, circles and lines, all the hazy background of the collective light of many tiny stars.

Showed a book by Irma Boom to low vision specialist today. There’s no table of contents. Page numbers are everywhere. Some of the text is less the 4pt, printed in orange or red or blue or even yellow. In some ways, the perfect book to read with assistive technology :-)

Test joint on the CNC. Taking something, even a small test like this, from idea to material always reveals so much.

My hand is holding a wooden block with a notched design. I'm outside, on my walk home from the shop.

Image that popped into my head in the shower today representing the fantasy of standardization. Maybe future iterations will come that clarify it. We’ll see.

A grid with dots. at the top the dots are floating around. At the bottom they're increasingly locked into a grid. People often describe accessibility as the "floor" on which other standards build on (the bottom of the grid), but Increasingly I feel the division between standards and experiments is, in my mind, artificial. Code-compliance people and experimental people rely on each other. We're frenemies, I guess.

Soft and hard light effects on double-screened window.

Hard, wavy lines of light on a fitted flannel sheet pulled loosely over a window frame. Bits of scratchy cloth texture catch bits of shadow. Light from slatted blinds curl across the fabric, like the hard shadow lines left by a rake pulled through white sand.Soft, wavy lines of light on a fitted flannel sheet pulled loosely over a window frame. A warm, soft, cloth balloon. The room is cold. Light peeks through the slatted blinds, leaving lines of light to curl across the fabric.

Little joint test for a piece of knock-down furniture. Let’s see how it goes :-)

Thinking about the politics of scale-figure libraries today as I prepare this exercise. A few initial notes as an introduction to the topic. Will revise at some point.

Some notes on disability aesthetics

Quick image collection on the theme of “Dark Mode”

Showed this work yesterday while co-presenting with Hannah Wong at the ABLE Assembly (Berklee College of Music). When I started making tactile drawings a few years ago, I had a really hard time getting people to touch them in architecture reviews. This was probably partly because I was still making “visual things you can touch” rather than truly tactile artworks.

One strategy I came up with to remediate this was to start etching my drawings on glass. It reminded me of something that happened in my first architecture course. Everyone was encouraged to draw with extremely light, delicate lines. The argument went something like: If you draw with really light lines, people have to get closer to see your drawings. Your drawings moves people in physical space, and that’s powerful.

I was unconvinced. Part of the reason was probably that I couldn’t see these drawings even if I was very close. But when I made my first invisible drawing, I kind of got it. There is something powerful about a drawing that subverts you expectations and coaxes you to use your body in a different way. There’s also something interesting to me about a drawing that no one can see… Rather than helping blind people see, the tactile art becomes about helping sighted people to not see. Still have so far to go with these… they are really just scratching the surface of what tactile can be.

A hand touching a piece of plexiglass mounted on a white surface. We can see the faint impression of a white on white drawing, partly because the hand is casting a shadow through the drawing. The photo is black and white, and the hand has the middle finger pressed down onto the drawing on the surface of the glass.

Saw these on the Instagram of Boston Architectural College a few months ago…

A person with long hair stands outdoors, touching a textured wall, with a palm tree visible in the background.A person wearing a black and white striped sweater is touching a pillar inside a large, ornate building with colorful stained glass windows.A person wearing headphones is touching two colorful, textured columns with a humorous caption about design students above.

New email to NAAB sent after our listening session

Thinking today of this quote from the first Disability Meets Architecture episode we did. It’s a quote from Karen Braitmayer:

_“One of the things I do is talk a lot about how we need to encourage young people with disabilities who have an interest in design to come join the design field. There are too many people down the food chain in a student’s life who say “oh, architecture, I don’t think you can do that, because… maybe you can’t climb a ladder… or your fine motor skills…” If there’s anybody listening out there who has had someone say to them “I don’t think you can be a designer,” just come talk to me [laughs].There are lots of ways to go around all those supposed “barriers” so that you can contribute. I think design is about having great ideas, and getting them down in a way that somebody can build it, and we need more people who understand different aspects of the world to engage in that process.” _