Thoughts for ArtServe Interview

Computer interface in a shoe box.

Today I had an interview with Jennifer Baum, a writer for ArtServe Michigan. They're doing an article on the Kalamazoo Makers Guild meetup group. In preparation for our discussion Jennifer was kind enough to supply me with some topics we might discuss and I jotted down some notes while I thought about what I would say. Here are those notes and roughly what I said.

About Kalamazoo Makers Guild...

The Kalamazoo Maker's Guild is a group of people interested in DIY technology, science and design. We more or less pattern ourselves after the Homebrew Computer Club that founded Silicon Valley. Like them, our members tend to have some background in a related profession, but that's by no means a prerequisite. This group is about the things we do for fun, because they interest us, and anybody can be interested in making stuff. We meet every couple of months, report on the status of our various projects and sometimes listen to a presentation or hold an ad hoc roundtable on a topic that catches our interest. "Probably the most useful aspect of the group is that you start to feel accountable to the other members of the group and you're motivated to make progress on your project before the next meeting."

How did it get started...

When I gave up my web design business I ended the professional graphic design association I'd formed on Meetup.com, and then I had room on the service to start another group. MAKE magazine had really caught my attention. I did a few projects from the magazine and thought it would be fun and helpful to know other people who were working on the same kinds of things. The group didn't get going, though, until about 8 months ago when Al Hollaway from the       posted to an online forum about RepRap 3D printers at the same time I was building one. He wanted to meet and talk about RepRap. I told him about my Meetup group. We joined forces and here we are.

Meetup.com?

Meetup.com is a great web site because it's a web service that's all about meeting people nearby in person to share a common interest.

About membership and kinds of projects ...

The group is growing steadily now. We have twenty something members and we're seeing membership tick up at an increasing rate month to month. We have a high school student who is working designing assistive devices for the blind using sonic rangefinders, one member who last meeting showed off a prototype of computer interface built into a shoe box, and another member is on the verge of completing a working DIY Segway (the self-balancing scooter) made using a pair of battery-powered drills for motors. Al should be done with his RepRap 3D printer and I've just finished my 2nd. At least two other members are in some stage of building their own 3D printers. I'm building both a laser etcher and a 3D scanner right now, and I'm excited to start playing with the products of a couple Kickstarter projects I've backed. There are a few of us about to start building CNC milling machines, and there's been a lot of excitement in the group around the brand new, hard-to-get Raspberry Pi (a $25 computer.) Almost all the members so far have dabbled in a bit of Arduino hacking. One member is designing a flame thrower for Burning Man. Another is making a calibration device for voltage meters. So, there's a range of things going on.

Where do I see this headed....

Our approach to this group has been to learn from the mistakes other groups have made. All of the other groups I've seen in Kalamazoo start out with facilities and try to bring in members to support and justify it. Getting people to work on actual projects that interest them is something that comes later down the road. It's the, "if you build it they will come" approach. Those groups quickly get into trouble managing the building and funding, and they go away. We're coming at it from the opposite direction. We're gathering together a community of makers first, people who are already doing things on their own. Once we reach a tipping point then we'll worry about the next step, like getting a hackerspace put together. That kind of bottom-up approach is, I think, much more sustainable and durable, and it fits in with our modern culture (particularly in the maker subculture.)  It was good enough for Homebrew, so it's good enough for us.

About impact...

Silicon Valley came out of a group like this, so the potential is there for us to have a big impact on the community. Being a college town we have access to a lot of smart people, and Kalamazoo has a strong progressive, energetic, entrepreneurial vibe going on. I think what's more likely, though, is that we will have an impact in aggregate with all the other makers--groups and individuals--around the globe.

"Makers aren't just hacking new technologies, we're hacking a new economy. We're trying to figure out how to live in a world without scarcity."

The unsung official slogan of the RepRap project is, "wealth without money."

I don't know that another story like Apple is likely to happen again. Steve Jobs relied on a very traditional, very closed model for his business, as did most of the people of that era who went on to make a name for themselves in technology. The ethos of that time was centered around coming up with a big idea and capitalizing on that idea to the exclusion of the competition. It's interesting that even then this view was at odds with that of his partner, Steve Wozniak, who was content to build computers in his garage and share what he learned with his friends at Homebrew. In this way Wozniak was much more like the modern maker/hacker and is probably one of this hobby's forefathers.

Makers/hackers today are all about open-ness and sharing -- not in a hippy, touchy-feely kind of way, but in a calculated way that weighs the costs and benefits of being open verses closed. The success of Linux and the ever increasing number of open source software, and now hardware, projects has proven that there's enormous power in being open. "We tend to think that's the way to change the world."

About the Maker Movement....

I know there are a lot of people who are keen to talk about the "maker movement" but I'm not so sure that I would characterize it as a movement. If it is, then it started in the 60's with people like my dad who were HAM radio enthusiasts and tinkered around with making their own radios and antennas. I think that what we're observing and calling a movement is really an artifact of reaching the steep part of Moore's Law. Ray Kurzweil is famous for talking about this phenomenon. The pace of advances in technology is itself accelerating, it's exponential, and moving so fast now that if you're not paying close attention things seem to pop out of nowhere. For makers, technology has reached a point where Moore's Law has forced down prices and increased the availability of things that just a few years ago were far out of reach. We're just taking those things and running with it. In effect, we're just the people paying close attention.

About me...

I started college in the engineering program at WMU, but I couldn't hack it and dropped out. I went back to community college and got a degree in graphic design. In my professional life I've been paid to be a web designer, photographer, videographer, IT manager, technical document writer, photo lab manager, artist, and I've even been paid to be a poet. For fun I do all those things and also play guitar, peck at a piano, and watch physics and math lectures from the MIT OpenCourseWare web site, do exercises on Khan Academy, play board games and roleplaying games, and commit acts of crafting -- woodworking and model making. For work, I now teach at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. I've taught web design, digital illustration and this fall I'll be teaching classes in 3D modeling and 3D printing with the RepRap 3D printer I have on loan there. I live near downtown Kalamazoo with my wife and many pets, including a 23 year old African Grey parrot named KoKo.

Post interview notes...

I mentioned SoliDoodle, the fully assembled, $500 3D printer. The big hackerspace in Detroit is called i3detroit. Also, Chicago has Pumping Station: One. I'm on the forums for both and will be visiting each this summer. The presentation about 3D scanning we had was from Mike Spray of Laser Abilities. You can actually see the entire presentation on my YouTube channel. Thingiverse was the web site that I kept going on about where you can find 3D designs for printing.

UPS Suck Becomes Endemic

I couple days ago I mentioned that UPS Has Some Sucky Drivers and that's true, but it turns out that the company kind of sucks too. Precisely, it has one sucky policy.

When the Joby Gorillapod finally showed up, both packages were delivered, the replacement order and the original both. So, although I could have kept it and nobody would have been the wiser, the right thing to do was return it to Amazon. When I took the return to UPS to send it back to Amazon the clerk at the UPS office asks me, "Do you have tape?" I say, "no" and she tells me that it will cost a dollar to have them tape it up. Seriously? UPS can't afford to take half a second and a couple feet of clear packing tape and just do that for customers as a courtesy? Really? UPS, you suck.

So it cost me not only the time and trouble of a trip to the UPS store to do the right thing, but also a dollar. Does it ever pay to do the right thing when corporations are involved, or should I just say, "screw 'em" and keep the extra $60 order next time?

I guess Amazon needs to strike a deal with UPS to include packing tape service with their

UPS Has Some Sucky Drivers

I was supposed to receive my Joby SLR-Zoom order from Amazon today and I was really looking forward to getting started with shooting for the Mendel project. However, UPS screwed up and must have delivered it to the wrong address.

We have a bad history with UPS at this house. Sometimes their tracking says "no such address" even though they've delivered here before. I really think that the UPS drivers who don't normally deliver here may sometimes feel like they don't want to go to the trouble, and they put "no such address" as an excuse and leave. I get it, we are hard to find, but seriously! Once someone at UPS has figured out where we are is there no way to share that information with the rest of UPS, like put it in our record or something and not have this problem any more.

Apparently not. Amazon's online help says to call the carrier, and I did. According to them the only way to get something added to our record is for the shipper to complain, and when I finally did figure out how to contact Amazon by phone they said they can't do the thing that UPS wants to get them to note the record.

Amazon Tip: If you don't receive your order from Amazon even though UPS tracking says it's been "delivered", you need to go to the "returns" process at Amazon. That's counter-intuitive, clearly, and it threw me off for a while. In the "returns" process there is a place to indicate that you did not receive your order, and then from there you follow the yellow brick road. It ends up, optionally, that instead of calling them you input your number and they call you. They were prompt and the customer service agent could be easily understood. They are sending me a fresh box. If there are no more f**k-UPS then it will be here Friday.

So, no shooting until Friday at the earliest, but realistically I'll probably get started next week.

Beware of Pololu.com

Pololu.com is a bad apple!

UPDATE BELOW

Pololu.com will not issue me a full refund for the order I cancelled before it shipped. I got a call back from them this morning to confirm the cancellation of the order I placed after their normal business hours yesterday, but they then informed me they could not refund 3.5% of the order, the cost of credit card fees.

I was the Manager of Information Systems (and webmaster) at a busy online retailer for a number of years. We did millions of dollars a year in online sales. We never charged any such fee. I was surprised to hear about this fee on the phone, and angry, so it wasn't until after I'd argued with the manager at Pololu.com for a while and hung up that I realized what the problem was. They process the credit card transaction immediately when you place your order.

We never did that where I worked. We only processed the payment when the order was shipped. There are two parts to any credit card transaction. First the transaction is "authorized" at which point the card vendor says you have sufficient credit to fulfill your end of the bargain and the merchant is guaranteed by the credit card vendor that they'll get their money, and that amount is set aside. Then, later, the transaction is "processed" at which time the funds are actually transferred to the merchant's account.

While apparently it's not illegal to process payment before the order is shipped or service is rendered, it is against the terms of service agreements for Visa and MasterCard. I used a Visa. I have no reason to believe this vendor has any explicit exception to the Visa and MasterCard terms of service agreements, so I believe they are in violation. The TOS on the pololu.com web site (and agreement to it incorporated in placing an order) does not obviate their obligation to honor Visa's TOS.

I can appreciate that their ecommerce software, if it's cheap, might make that distinction difficult, or perhaps they simply don't know how to configure it properly, but that's not my problem. They need to change their system, their business practice, and their TOS. Until they do, I do not recommend anyone buy anything from them.

I will be happy to update this post when or if they change their policy and issue me a full refund. I'll also be happy to update this post if they can give me a true and satisfactory explanation for how they can process a payment before shipping and not violate the VISA terms of service.

UPDATE (5-5-2011): Lienna of Pololu.com responded to my follow-up email with this:

Thank you for the additional information. We were not aware of a requirement to delay the charge for an order until the shipping date but are investigating now. In the meantime, we have refunded the remaining $5.44 from your original payment. You may also still use the coupon on your next order. Please contact us again if you have any questions, remaining concerns, or new information for us. Thank you!

So that's responsive at least. I revise my opinion from "find someone else," to, "use them if you can find a part, but keep an eye out and complain to the credit card company if they don't give you a full refund." Hopefully they'll revise their return policy and I can give a more enthusiastic endorsement.

Rotten apple photo courtesy of cooljinny.

First Things First Manifesto

Day 15/150

photo by "Stuck in Customs"

Happily reading my new library book: Graphic Design, Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design.

I came across the First Things First Manifesto, and then the First Things First Manifesto 2000 revision. I find Times Square--hence the photo above--exemplifies "a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact." If you've ever been there you'll be overwhelmed by the commerial advertising, but you don't have to go further than your local downtown, or any mall, to have a similar experience. You almost get it walking out of house. Looking around my own house I sometimes get that feeling indoors too!

Look no further than Facebook and see how much all of our lives center on talking about or interacting with brands? Graphic designers and the marketing industry as a whole have done their jobs well and now it's a challenge to go through any conversation with anybody about anything without mentioning a brand. Considering that the original manifesto was written in 1964, it's probably not surprising that with designers continuing to foster hyper consumerism for nearly 50 years of knowing better that it is impossible to look upon any man-made landscape that has gone unbranded or underutilized for it's marketing potential.


photo by ATIS547


photo by agross96

We literally can not look in any direction, or converse on any topic of cultural or practical significance, or even so much as contemplate our lives for long without selling, or being sold, something. I haven't been able to get through this blog post (see Facebook mention and book advertisement above.) We do it without thinking, and almost without notice, don't we?

If the First Things First Manifesto 2000 was relevant at the time, then it's just in this past ten years that the vision of the original authors has truly come to fruition, that we citizen-consumers have changed how we think, feel, respond and interact. That change has happened, as it was happening in 2000, and was bound to happen in 1964.

Given that the change has happened, what do we --we graphic designers-- do now? What is our responsibility now? If we do as the signatories before us have done and dedicate ourselves to more worthy pursuits, if we design on behalf of more worthy causes, do we not just further contribute to this cacophony of visual communication and accompanying mental shift? But then should we refuse to design, refuse to fill up all the blank spaces in our world with one message or another, will there ever be the relief of a blank wall, or a simple, unbranded object?

Neither course will give remedy, I'm afraid. In fact, there may be no remedy within our means. I wonder, though, if we may yet bear some responsibility to engage in counter-advertising? I wonder if we might not use our talents to rebel, to use what we know to undo some of the damage. Can we counter the messages we've instilled in the public? Can we say, "you do not need to call now," or "you do not deserve a break today"? Shouldn't we feel obliged to take our knowledge and understanding and deprogram ourselves and the public, even just a little?

How shall we write the new First Things First manifesto? Maybe it will be called the Now That We're Here manifesto instead.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

David Marburger's War on Fact-Sharing

For David Marburger, who complains that "parasitic aggregators" drain the value out of newspapers like water out of a bathtub drain, the economics are thus: the substance(1) of a news story is a product which derives its value from scarcity and for which the originator needed to expend effort and expense to develop. In this line of thinking, a quote obtained from the subject of an journalist's interview is the property of journalist's newspaper. To Marburger someone who cites the newspaper and includes the quote in their own blog post is free-loading, because the blogger didn't have to go to the trouble and expense of interviewing the subject. The blogger gets "unjust enrichment" and the spread of that quote and the other information in that report deprives the newspaper of scarcity from which its value is derived. To him that seems wrong, and the solution is to extend and expand copyright protection to the substance of newspaper reports, rather than just the exact form of the report which is already protected. I think that's fairly stated.

What that means, though, is that if TMZ reports that Michael Jackson is dead of apparent cardiac arrest and we live in a world where Marburger's law is in effect, the L.A. Times can't then post "Michael Jackson is dead of a heart attack, according to TMZ" because until the L.A. Times finds out on their own, through their own sources, they are gaining "unjust enrichment". The issue of credit being given to the source is of little consequence here, because if the L.A. Times post that cites the TMZ article is substantively comprehensive, containing all the facts brought to light in the TMZ article, there is not much incentive to go to the TMZ web site. Once the cat's out of the bag that MJ has died, the value of the TMZ article drops precipitously.

It's true that TMZ would not get returns commensurate to their investment after having developed contacts within the hospital that they could get to confirm the death sooner than anyone else. They probably spend quite a bit of money having people stake out celebrities like MJ so that as soon as anything happens to them, TMZ can be the first to react. However, the fact that MJ died was not something TMZ developed. TMZ did not conspire to kill MJ so they could get a bunch of traffic to their web site. MJ died, that was the reality, the fact, and it wasn't going to change regardless of whether or not there was a journalist there to report it. We were going to find out about this celebrity death whether or not TMZ reported it at 5:20, or the L.A. Times reports it via their own sources at 6:10, or an EMT blogs it sometime later. TMZ does not own the facts of MJ's death. Nobody can.

So, what does TMZ deserve for being fleet footed enough to report it most of an hour before anyone else? What could they sue for in terms of damages when they bring their lawsuit against Susie Q. Blogger for her post at 7:15 that MJ has died? How will TMZ lawyers know that Susie Q. got her facts from the TMZ post, rather than the L.A. Times one, or the EMT's post at 6:45, or that she didn't hear from a friend of a friend who works at UCLA Mercy before she heard about it from TMZ but is not a professional journalist and didn't cite her source in the blog post? What does TMZ do about the hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Facebook posts that are up instantly, from posters from all over the world? They aren't motivated by enrichment, unfair or otherwise. Does TMZ have to file individual suits against all hundred thousand posters, or just against Twitter and Facebook who do gain enrichment by providing the posters the forum. If so, can TMZ fairly deprive Facebook and Twitter of their profit by forcing them to revise their user agreements and implementing a moderation system which would kill them as useful services. What about Susie Q.'s work in piecing together facts from various sources to flesh out a more complete picture of what is happening, along with her personal perspective about which her audience of 15 friends and family members is interested? What does she deserve for her work? A lawsuit?

If Marburger would look at the above and suggest that the problem is only that Susie Q. is copying and pasting, more or less, the TMZ article and posting it on her own blog, then he should be dismissed out of hand. The copyright laws as written protect TMZ against plagiarism. If she can change it enough that it's not covered by copyright as currently written, then all that's left is the unalterable facts, to the best they are known, at the time it is written, and which can not be reasonably thought of as intellectual property deserving of protection.

Maybe the problem here is not copyright, as Marburger suggests, but rather that the technology of the day has made it so that there is never the scarcity of information upon which content originators can and do solely rely for gaining readership. Instead, the real problem is that breaking news is losing its value and the news business is failing to adjust. Perhaps it's not important for TMZ to stake out MJ's house because getting a jump on the competition can not practically produce value, and so it's a bad business decision to spend the cash on the stalker reporter and bribes at the hospital. Just because you expend money and effort does not mean you deserve anything.

By the way, the professional news business is losing its importance as more and more news comes from non-professional sources. These days, it doesn't take a reporter or a newspaper to get the word out to the world when you want to blow the whistle on a corporation or a government scandal -- you can do it in 140 characters in about 20 seconds. If the news is coming out of Iran via Twitter, what's a newspaper good for anyway? What social benefit is Marburger looking out for anyway? What have newspapers done for us lately? Buggerit.

References

1. substance -- "As long as their Online competitors are free to help themselves to the core of the newspapers' best and most expensive journalism, newspapers will continue to close and go bankrupt," --blog.clevland.com, "Idea for protecting newspapers draws national spotlight, bloggers' ire, by James F. McCarty/Plain Dealer Reporter, July 22, 2009 21:23PM. Also, in an interview on NPR's, On the Media Marburger says that a headline and a link to the originator's article is not "substantive" and therefore not objectionable. Clearly he means the substance of the news report, the facts, since he acknowledges that the articles are commonly rewritten when reposted on other web sites.

Duct Tape

http://stuckatprom.com/contests/prom/media.asp


Far out.

What I love most, though, is the "2005 1st Place Winner - This image is no longer available due to copyright restrictions" 'cause that means the jerk who did the prom portraits got his panties in a bunch about "copyright". If in this age a photographer is going to depend on keeping digital files under wraps and force the students to buy physical prints, he should go out of business and starve. He could instead, and I'll bet the rest of the photographers from the other proms here did, charge enough to take the pictures in the first place that he can just post the photos online and let them all go crazy posting them on Facebook or whereever the bleep they want. They're going to post them anyway and to stop it you have to spend a ton of time enforcing your copyright. Bah! Kevin to copyright guy: "Get with the program! It's a brave new world."