Craig Colorusso is BOSS

I ahve had the awesome honor to hang with Craig and his project Sun Boxes currently installed at the Uni this week. Today I simulcast the event for an hour you can watch the recording and hear the discussions I was having:



Video streaming by Ustream.

The generous Mr. Castro and squeaky circuits

Last week, I recieved a gift from André Castro (www.andrecastro.info) when he generously shared his circuit diagrams and plans for his noise circuits he calls Tactile Noise Machines. I combined his drawings and with my new drafts using Eagle CAD so that I could prepare PCB's and printed guides for my students.

here are my files to share:
tactile_noise_machines/tnm1.brd
tactile_noise_machines/tnm1.sch
tactile_noise_machines/tnm2.brd
tactile_noise_machines/tnm2.sch
tactile_noise_machines/tnm3.brd
tactile_noise_machines/tnm3.sch

Experimenting with these circuits over the past two weeks, they are making circuit bending instruments using found circuits in a 'sound toy' and adding in one of the Tactile Noise Machine plans. Next we start working on HMI. THey are all assigned to look at the act of making an instrument and consider the aesthetic/symbolic and maybe semiotic value of the methods that the instrument will require to 'play'. Taking a cue from the criticisms in Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne, I have asked them to look for these additional interpretations and metaphors that they can create in the instrument's form.

The sounds they are achieving from both explorations are pretty darn fantastic.

21st Century Macrame: Open Source and the Maker Movement

i thought i would share the thesis statement for my lecture since i mentioned it in my first post on Kickstarter lessons. i will writing about the accompanying laboratory in this year's faculty exhibition pretty soon.

21st Century Macrame: Open Source and the Maker Movement
The re-emergence of the do-it-yourself culture as a social movement, cultural form, and genre.

In the latter half of the 1960's and throughout the 1970's, a group of independent artisans and everyday people shared a moment of intense creativity that sought to return to the 'handmade'. This group was motivated commercial culture; life had been subsumed by market, social, and industrial forms that arose post WWII. Heavily oriented around the then nascent Ecological Movement, this group sought to live closer to the earth, they encouraged the idea of sweat equity, and they desired to directly engage hands-on living. This generation spawned sewing circles, social justice movements, organic food co-ops, collectives, and communes around the globe following the Leary-ian mantra "Tune In, Turn On, and Drop Out". The Foxfire series, the myriad inexpensive 'how-to' publications form the era, and magazines like Mother Earth News are some of the artifacts that evidence the a desire for life without corporate mediation.

Today a new generational movement is flowering with many of the same goals of the 1960's and 1970's Love Generation. They are known colloquially as The Maker Movement; this group is motivated by many many of the same wishes of the earlier generation. They are decidedly anti-specialization and hands on, but they approach it with a very different set of politics—shaped by an increasingly interconnected world. Oddly enough this generation has weaved a relationship with factorization and corporations to achieve similar goals. They are at ease with any means by which they may create. The contemporary DIY peerage can comfortably outsource a new design to be manufactured via the miracles of print on demand technologies, create Frankenstein mashups of existent products, reapply older to ancient technologies as an option, or even ingeniously hack a commonly available materials to cobble into new, cheap, and functional fixes. Many of this generation's reverse engineers and hacks do this work as contemporary artists.

money in the 21st century fundraiser

more lessons from kickstarter

so i saw a predicition sometime last week that within 10 years that wallets will be obsolete. now i can see this as possible because i use applications that securely fill in my data on webforms, but PayPal is not what this post is solely about. we will get back to them in a few moments.

an interesting flaw appeared in our Kickstarter campaign this past 6 weeks. Kickstarter contracts through Amazon Payments to do the accounting on the pledges. i haven't looked into who runs Kickstarter and their attachment to Amazon, but it is an issue. Amazon Payments only takes 'credit cards', now i know the saturation of the Visa and MC brands are extensive and it is rare to find someone without at least a debit card without that sanctification. i found out, though, that i have a close friend who doesn't participate in that, and it got me to think that Amazon needs to figure out some more ways to collect money.

Amazon Payments require linkage to a U.S. bank, creating another barrier also. additionally, you must make an account on Kickstarter to pledge. these points actually put up a barrier for a few more friends and family members who didn't or didn't want to grok the web interface. we considered taking donations from people who couldn't participate for whatever reason and then apply them to the campaign from our account, but this is an issue too. it is a violation of the TOS to donate to your own cause. so you have to go find someone to do it for you, complicating the process even further.

this all is a huge deficit in the system. i actually think that we lost a few hundred dollars because of these inherent prejudices and hurdles. last week i found a open source laser cutter, Lasersaur, that is collecting donations like Kickstarter campaign, but through PayPal on their own webpage. the downside is that you lose the high profile visibility of Kickstarter with it's very involved community and all the easy buttons to plug into the other social media.

i have come to the conclusion that a fundraiser needs to be a two prong attack where you do both. you really should be trying to funnel as many people as you can through Kickstarter to take advantage of the trendy high profile nature of the platform (and the all or nothing nature of the pledge model). additionally, you need a side channel. ideally, a close friend who can collect through PayPal for you and that can make a deposit in Kickstarter for you in the case you get pressed to the wall for for your goal, which is probably a TOS violation, but what can you do other than handle it discretely.

and you definitely need a PayPal donation page immediately after the campaign closes because less than 12hours from when we closed our campaign we started having 'knocks on the door' to still participate. ah i love the procrastinators.

the fees

the continued Kickstarter analysis

so Amazon Payments is the vehicle for payment of donations in Kickstarter. the system charges a percentage to be the bank that allows people to pay by card. these are calculated off this schedule:

For Transactions >= $10:
2.9% + $0.30 for all transactions
Volume Discounts
2.5% + $.30 for all transactions for monthly payment volume from $3k-$10k
2.2% + $.30 for all transactions for monthly payment volume from $10k - $100k
1.9% + $.30 for all transactions for monthly payment volume over $100k
For Transactions < $10:
5.0% + $0.05 for all transactionss

plus Kickstarter applies 5% to the successful campaign. so in the wash we cleared $1813 from $2,078.66 or approximately 88% of the donations. you should definitely take this into account when setting up the goal of your campaign. We should have shot for $2250 or $2500 if 2k was a firm goal.