Tag: modular

Open Source Ecology

/ dmueller

This morning I came across this short video on efforts by the Open Source Ecology initiative to develop prototypes for easy cast, easily assembled, low cost farming and building technologies, what they’re calling the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). It connected with some of the things I’ve been thinking about for ENGL505: Rhetoric of Science and Technology this fall.

Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

How? First, we hear nowadays about everything “ecology.” And I have ideas about how “ecology” in many cases functions as a metonym for rhetorical action, which of course includes readily identifiable material qualities in the case of OSE. The video itself is not all that different from Marcin Jakubowski’s short TED Talk, and I haven’t spent much time going carefully over what’s posted at the site and wiki (wish there was an RSS feed or date stamps for their blog). But I can already see issues of modularity and scale foregrounded here, which, combined with the ideals of open source might be enough to return to this as a rich case for further consideration.

Pixton

/ dmueller / 4 Comments

I spent time in class today introducing ENGL328ers to a variety of comic writing applications and platforms, the latest of which is Pixton. Pixton is the best thing to come along in template-driven web comics. The site offers several templates–a fairly comprehensive suite of modular figures to be repositioned, stylized, and otherwise modified (color, rotation, size, flip, etc.). For more context, follow the discussion here, and check out user Brunswick’s “The Simplest Comic Ever.”

Here’s my first run at Pixton.

Were I not so much in the weeds following CCCC (e.g., I found frisbees stuffed in my campus mailbox, for Pete’s sake), I would create two or three more.