Sponsor Week -- thanks to glemak on Flickr for the photo.

But demos are hard, and not because of technology.  How does a person take a big, beautiful, perfect idea sitting in Plato’s land of forms and force it into the ugly, imperfect, duct-taped monstrosity that is a “prototype?”  Even with all the technical knowledge in the world, that first step from mental to reality is the single most difficult moment in the process of idea realization.  It isn’t difficult because of time, or risk, or giant R&D brick walls that need hurdling (although all of those can be a real pain in the ass).  Whether you realize it or not, it is an issue of humility.

It’s an incredibly humbling experience to sit down with your best ideas and crank out something quick and dirty for the world to see.  In order to make something, you have to get your head out of the clouds and come careening down to earth.  I knew this coming into the Media Lab, and quite honestly it is why I joined; I came here to force myself to demo or die.  (So far I’ve done a bit of both, but that’s what learning is all about!)

At this point I want to mention the Knight-Mozilla learning lab, which is actually the reason I wrote this particular blog post.  The program is essentially a miniature lecture-based course being run online as a joint effort between the Knight Foundation and Mozilla.  I managed to sneak in!  The first lecture, by Aza Raskin, was about exactly this concept: prototyping.  In particular, the value of.  For me the most important takeaway (aside from “Prototypes are the tits of software design”) was a direct order from the Mozilla head designer himself: sit down with an idea, give yourself a day, and make as much as possible. By forcing yourself to cram you get the benefits of procrastination with none of the negatives.

I’m hoping that this mentality will numb the harshness of the reality descent just enough to bash through that subconscious mental block.  Once a day is burned, if the idea is still worth pursuing I’ll give myself a weekend. Then a week if still needed.  The point is that I need to just !@#$%& do it!

To give you an idea of how great StarCraft is – it is a national sport in South Korea. Television stations are dedicated to broadcasting games between professional players on a 24/7 cycle.  Think chess but the board is digital terrain, the pieces are infantry, and instead of taking turns everyone moves their pieces at once.

You might ask “why are you talking about StarCraft in a post about pumpkins?“ Well there is a good answer.  The answer is that Blizzard, the company that created StarCraft, has an annual pumpkin carving competition.  This year I decided to give it a shot (spoiler alert: I didn’t win).

The beginning of the journey

I’m not crafty and I don’t have any skill when it comes to slicing gords, but I have advantage.  You see, I have access to thousands of dollars of equipment!  In particular I have access to a laser cutter.  A laser cutter is exactly what it sounds like – a machine that uses LASERS to cut things.  The lasers are attached to the heads of sharks.

I wanted to try this novel technique but assumed that the folks who run the shop wouldn’t be thrilled with the idea of putting pumpkins in their expensive equipment so I let the idea die.  A week later my friend (and fellow Info Eco member) Matt Hirsch found a picture of a pumpkin carved into the death star online and declared his own interest in cutting pumpkins with the laser cutter.  This tipped the scales.

I rushed out and bought a test pumpkin.

Understanding Laser Cutters

Laser cutters cut on two axes.  This means they can make cuts in two dimensions.  Think of an ink jet printer only instead of putting ink on spot they burn away the material there.  The laser is attached to a head, which can move forward, backward, left and right.  You put the material underneath it, focus the laser, and let it work magic.

Laser cutters are great at cutting shapes out of flat things like cardboard, or sheets of wood, or acrylic. They aren’t so great at cutting shapes in pumpkins.  `Luckily our shop has a device that converts round things into flat things – it turns the laser cutter into a laser lathe.  Instead of having the laser move forward and backward, the laser only moves left and right, and this device spins whatever it is you want to cut.

The cuts themselves are designed digitally as a drawing.  You just “print” the picture you want, and the laser will burn away the material to match the image you printed.  Of course there’s a bit more to it than that.  Vector (i.e. line drawing) images are used to make lines.  Raster (i.e. solid shapes) images are used to burn away large areas of material.  Vector is far faster than raster, but raster is needed for certain kinds of effects.

Science!

After gutting my test pumpkin it was time to give the cutting a shot.  I didn’t know what settings would work – I wanted to be able to cut through the pumpkin in certain spots, but I also needed to be able to make shallow cuts, since the most fancy pumpkins tend to have different depth cuts in them to create different shades of orange.

Cutting through was a breeze, but required very slow settings.  The big issue was that because the pumpkin isn’t a cylinder it curves down on the sides.  This means that the surface is further away from the laser and so the laser loses focus and intensity as it moves further away from the center (i.e. lines that are closer to the sides are wider and shallower).

It was also clear that the bottleneck to this whole process would be pumpkin size.  The lathe attachment can’t hold objects that were wider than about 7 inches, so I would only be able to cut shapes on tiny pumpkins.  Blast!

Design #1: Tassadar

Since StarCraft has a fan base, there is a lot of artwork out there.  I just had to pick one I thought would look good on a pumpkin, and convert the image to a format that a laser cutter would understand.

I wanted to try making a pumpkin with four layers.  The first layer wouldn’t be cut at all (darkest), the second and third would be different depths of raster art, and the fourth would be cut all the way through (lightest).  I used Adobe Illustrator to “trace” the image I had selected.  This process converts a full-fledged image into a much simpler one; in my case the new image had only four colors.

The original artwork.

It looks good, but it is very... very badly burnt

It's all lit up, oh boy!

Design #2: Tychus

I was impressed with the amount of precision you could get with this technique, but the small size of the pumpkin meant that I was limited in the amount of detail I could accurately display.  I wanted to try again with something a little less involved – the face of Tychus Findlay, one of the main characters in StarCraft 2 and also the image that announced the release of the game several years ago (Blizzard had promised never to make a sequel, so this announcement image is iconic).

This one was amazing, but only when you looked at it correctly.  Check out the black and white one at the bottom.

Halloween It's About Time...

In conclusion, my camera isn’t very good, the pumpkins were too small, and I didn’t have enough time to create original artwork that worked well for this project.  As a result, I didn’t even get an honorable mention!  I don’t mind, though, because now I know how to make awesome pumpkin carvings for next year!

By the end of the semester I will know how to use milling machines, laser cutters, water cutters, make chips, program micro controllers, and build devices that utilize sensors and networks. I’ll finally be a real nerd!

The best part about the course is the incredible amount of skill diversity. Some people are practically experts at half of this stuff, and others (like me) have never touched a machine that cuts since they took shop in high school. It should be a really interesting time.

As part of the class, everyone has to set up a website to share their lessons as they go through. Mine can be found here, while the class page can be found here (click “People” to see everyone’s sites. There are some really cool things there. click “Past Classes” to see the projects that people did in the past).

Here’s the note I wrote for my “application” to the course.  (Over 100 people applied for about 36 spots).

————————–

Dear Dictators of Fate,

I’m a first year masters student in the Media Lab working under
Henry Holtzman (in the Information Ecology group).  My experience as a
fabricator began a long, long time ago, when I would build lopsided
vehicles out of legos.  Unfortunately it also ends there — unless you
count Ikea furniture.  Most of my work as a productive member of
society has involved the softest of software (I am a web developer)
and the closest I’ve gotten to hardware was that systems programming
course I took as an undergraduate.

My interest in fabrication today comes from the realization that my
“realistic imagination” is dramatically limited by my inability to
create new devices and construct new things.  My
research/interests/passions surround group-centric information, civic
media, geographic communities, and collaborative meaning making.  I
want and need to be able to create new tools in the real world in
order to explore these spaces and provide new outlets (and potential
inputs) for information in physical space.

I assume begging gets me nowhere, but I’ll do it anyway:

please please please pretty please!  Oh please!

Sincerely,
– Dan

————————–

My other class is “Pattern Recognition and Analysis.”  I’ll write about that later, but for now I’ll just say that it’s intense in a very different way.  We’re going to be learning how to write applications which can intelligently categorize various types of input.  This might mean being able to recognize facial expressions, or maybe it means being able to identify spam, or recognizing what news content pertains to your community.  You get the idea.  The math behind it is 50% things I have seen and vaguely remember, 30% things I haven’t seen, and 20% things I’ve completely forgotten.