You May be a Creative Technologist, and What to Do About It.

At some point in your academic or professional experience, you might find that you want to express yourself through your work in a way you don’t quite have the tools or knowledge to do. This post is a collection of some thoughts about how to respond to that feeling— especially if you’re an engineer, who might find you want to express yourself through built environments and artifacts; or an artist, who might find you want the embodiments of your work to be more technical and intentional. You might find your interests overlap engineering, design, and art, and wonder what mediums across those fields can be used for expression. If that resonates with you, this page is for you— a little space where I keep tips and resources I wish I had when I was an undergrad, primarily relating to creative technology.

And full disclosure: I’m not an expert! Just sharing insights as I’m accumulated them. Around my junior year at Carnegie Mellon, I realized this was the space I was most interested in, and luckily I found a community of like-minded peers— but there’s a lot I wish I learned sooner, and that’s what I hope this page contains. This is slightly oriented towards physical/hardware people who started in engineering, as that’s my experience, but hopefully any undergrad with an interest in creative uses of technology can find some value here.

Work

It’s hard to find great creative tech work, and most likely you won’t find work in the same way most disciplines might, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! Here are some ways I’ve seen my peers find great work.

• Explore this exceptional list github.com/j0hnm4r5/awesome-creative-technology by Johns Mars, a coworker of mine when I worked at Deeplocal. It is, as far as I know, the only resource for finding companies that hire people specifically with creative tech interests. It will give you a great idea of what work is out there

• If you’re art/humanities focused, subscribe to Words of Mouth to see many opportunities that aren’t posted to job sites like LinkedIn.

• Set a job alert on LinkedIn for searches that are just words related to tools or methods you like— i.e. instead of searching “design technologist” or “interactive engineer,” search for “Arduino” or “p5js”

• Look in academia— If you’re an undergrad looking for research experience, when you see a new professor is hired at your school in something you’re interested in, read some of their papers. If you’re hooked on their work, send them an email saying you’ve read their papers, are excited for them to come to your school, and would love to know if they expect they’ll need research assistants with your skills.

• Check alternative job boards like jobs.codeforamerica.org and jobs.adafruit.com.

Community

Community and collaboration are a great part of the creative tech world. Beyond social media (though Twitter is a great place to find your peers), here are some places you might find like-minded people:

Newsletters are great ways of finding interesting work, ideas, and people. Subscribe to them and see what webs you can form when you dig into their content. Many newsletters also have communities (Slack, Discord, etc.) that connect people with shared interests. One I love is from theprepared.org.

Academic Conferences and Journals can also be a great way of connecting yourself with people whose work you admire. Make a habit of peeking at the best paper and honorable mentions from CHI, UIST, SIGGRAPH, UbiComp, and Transactions on Affective Computing, and start to see what inspires you (and what does not). If there’s a paper you want to read but don’t have access to, just email the author, 99% of the time they’re more than happy to share a PDF. As your interests become more niche, you may find that connecting with authors of papers you admire is a helpful way of finding other ideas that inspire you, and perhaps even research opportunities.

Physical Spaces, like labs and studios, are the easiest places to meet the people who will inspire you. These spaces often have a connections that expands across time and place, forming a much larger community than who you may see in the room. This is true for may research labs or studios. At Carnegie Mellon, these spaces are large and numerous, like The Studio for Creative Inquiry, The Morphing Matter Lab, TechSpark, and many others. Similar spaces likely exist in your world, but may take some digging to find.

Portfolios

If you have a design background, you probably already have a portfolio and it’s way better than mine will ever be. But, if you started in engineering, there isn’t conventionally a push to document and share your work online, so a portfolio may feel daunting. There are many many resources online about how to make a great portfolio, so there are only two things I’ll say:

Firstly, you can get a domain name and hosting free with your university email address. If you have a .edu email address, you can get a free (for 1 year) domain from Namecheap for Education, and then can use GitHub Pages for free hosting. It’s extraordinarily easy way to put your projects online— though a little tedious to set up initially, it’s exceptional that it’s basically free.

Secondly, 99% of the portfolios you admire are just Squarespace. Of course, plenty of people code from scratch, or boilerplates like Bootstrap, or low code tools like WebFlow— and that’s really cool. But that’s because they may want their portfolio itself to be part of their portfolio. Very meta and exciting, but if you’re a mechanical engineer with no web dev experience, don’t be intimated: you’re not trying to do the same things as someone who studied visual design. There’s no shame in using Squarespace or other site builders so you can focus on sharing your work, and not on becoming a web designer. Though it is expensive, there is usually pretty okay student pricing.

Getting Your Projects Some Clout Online

So you’ve seen projects featured online that you admire, and wondered how to get your projects a bit of buzz. I think it’s way easier than most might expect. So say you’re really proud of your senior capstone or research project and you want a little clout, there’s many ways to do that, but here’s my trusted method:

Step 1: Document your project really well

This may be second nature for a design student, but for an engineer less so. Here’s some suggestions:

• Horizontal and landscape videos and photos taken across the duration of the project.

• High quality “hero shots” that show the final product.

• A 5-ish sentence summary of what your project is and why it’s interesting.

• If relevant, time-lapse videos of assembling something satisfying are particularly compelling.

• If relevant, a couple gifs from your videos (GIPHY Capture and GIF Brewery are simple ways to do this).

Once you’ve collected all your content, make sure all media is in an easy to open and share format (JPG, PNG, GIF, MPEG). Put everything in a Google Drive folder, and don’t forget to set link sharing to “anyone with the link can view this.”

Step 2: Share your Content Tactically

First, submit your project to Hackaday at hackaday.com/submit-a-tip and any relevant Reddit communities like r/raspberry_pi or r/arduino. Make sure you give Hackaday all the information they’d need and include that google drive link from Step 1, as well as a link to your portfolio if you have one. For Reddit, upload a 1ish minute video with a succinct and engaging title, like “my friends and I made this thing using these tools/methods/parts.”

If you can get your project on Hackaday, or it performs well on Reddit, more than likely other outlets will follow. Especially helpful is listing any technologies you’ve used (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc); this will make it more likely that your work is written up on those company’s blogs and websites. If it makes the leap from Hackaday to Hackster, RPi Blog, and Arduino Blog, it has a chance of leaping to Make Magazine and Mashable. From there, it’s on its own, and will likely get some traction.

Etc.

This post is written by me, Taylor Tabb. I am absolutely not an expert, but there’s so little content out there like this that I still feel it’s worth sharing. This is very much a version 1.0 of this content, and as I gain new insights, I’ll write some more. A visual note: the green/blue horizontal bars on this page come from radio telescope data I collected of our solar system’s hydrogen line.

Feel free to send me your thoughts, suggestions, or hate mail using the form below 🙂

Second Order Gauss Quadrature

At various points in my life, long division, the unit circle, completing the square, projectile motion, the work-energy balance and most recently, Pulse-Width-Modulation, have all been things that I thought were the coolest thing I would ever learned.

However, in the details of a very unassuming idea in numerical methods, I have learned something way more interesting than anything I’ve ever learned heretofore: second order Gauss Quadrature is third order accurate. What is meant by this? Well consider the equation below

Looks like a pretty rough function to deal with! Integrating it over almost any range would be such a mess, if integrating by hand. But weirdly, the following relationship is true:

All that’s to say that you can find the value of a third order or lower function integrated from -1 to 1 just by summing the original function’s value at -1/sqrt(3) and 1/sqrt(3). It’s a great approximation method using just two points!

4D Spork

A fork has two states. So too does a spoon. but a spork? a spork has three. This feature is noteworthy.

Source: The Morphing Matter Lab @ Carnegie Mellon University

Consider sporks are not good spoons, and are even worse forks. Just like a flying car is not a good car and not a good plane. Previous attempts to redefine the spork focus on optimizing the geometry of a fork-spoon union, but what if instead we tried to optimize the spork in a different way.

A spoon and fork each have two states: in use and at rest. A spork has three: in use as a spoon, in use as a fork, and at rest. I think the ideal solution should focus in the transition between rest to fork use, and rest to spoon use. As a spork doesn’t usually have to at once be both a spoon and fork, it just has to be either.

A solution is to adapt 4D printing practices to the utensil space. 4D printing is a way of varying parameters during 3D printing so the final print is flat, but when surrounded by a heated environment, the object can gain permanent 3D geometry. The image at the top illustrates some flat geometry, and their heated final 3d shapes.

very simple graphic of the future of sporks

Now imagine a flat utensil resembling a fork, but with a rounded body. Like the silhouette of a spoon with the tines of a fork

When used in most fork applications, the object would remain in its original shape, able to function well in a fork-like way!

But, when the utensil has to serve in the form of a spoon, it gains concavity. This could happen in one of two ways; if the food to be eaten is a warm liquid like soup, the flat utensil could be submerged in the liquid, and the concavity of a spoon would quickly appear. If the food to be eaten isn’t a liquid or is not hot, the user could place the flat form spork in their mouth for short duration, activating the concave geometry.

All that said, creating a sturdy flat-pack 4D printed spork with low activation temperatures and is food safe is way more complex and less defined than a traditional injection molded spork, but I think a morphing spork is way more interesting :)

Some Questions About Signs

I like seeing things, so I keep my eyes open (usually). As a consequence, I let signs into my life. Some signs are very helpful, some are not. While I don’t know what makes a “good” sign and what makes an “evil” sign, I do know that all signs— whether a billboard or a street sign— don’t ask my permission before invading my thoughts and forcing information upon me.

Without permission, a sign tells me things about the world— but what if I don’t want it? Why do I need to know the name of every street, bank, pizza shop, or corner store? Why does a sign have permission to make me think (and sometimes do or not do) things?

What would a world without signs be like? Surely there was a time, maybe before writing appeared, where we did not have signs. And who thought of the idea of a sign in the first place? Abstracting qualities of something physical into short written words or visuals that carry big meaning— that’s so profound! Was it nice to not have signs, or were people always yearning for signs but didn’t have the tools to make them?

Currently, these are my thoughts on signs. I’ll add more thoughts if I have them

How to Set Up a Raspberry Pi on CMU WiFi

Last Tested in April 2019

Connecting a Raspberry Pi to Carnegie Mellon’s wireless or wired network is a total nightmare. Since I was a student in 2017, this page contains up-to-date instructions for connecting a device in the least convoluted way.

Based on what you have access to, follow one of the three instructions below.

1) A Raspberry Pi, a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, and SD card → Preferred Desktop Set Up Instructions

2) A Raspberry Pi whose MAC address is known or can be known from previous projects or set-ups, a device with network access and an SD card slot (like a laptop), and SD card → Preferred Headless Set Up Instructions

3) A Raspberry Pi whose MAC address is unknown, and SD card → Alternative Headless Set Up Instructions

Option 1: Preferred Desktop Set Up Instructions (easiest)

If you have a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, and SD card, you can boot your device and connect to the network with the GUI.

1. Ensure your device has an OS on in, or start by flashing Raspbian Desktop to your SD card.

2. Insert SD card. Connect mouse, keyboard, and monitor.

3. Boot up, and connect to CMU-Secure using the GUI (select the stadium seating Wi-Fi icon and use your CMU-Secure log-in credentials

4. If you need to enable SSH (remote shell access), open Preferences> Raspberry Pi Configuration > Interfaces tab > Select Enabled next to SSH > Click OK and close the window.

• You’re done! Enjoy your RPi.

Option 2: Preferred Headless Set Up Instructions

If you don’t have a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, you can boot your device and connect to the network “headless” with this method long as you already have your devices’s MAC address.

1. Ensure your device has an OS on in, or start by flashing Raspbian to your SD card

2. Place your SD card in your computer, and enable SSH on the Pi by placing a file named ssh, without any extension, onto the boot partition of the SD card. You can do this by navigating to the Boot partition in Terminal and entering touch ssh

3. Insert SD card and boot up your Pi.

4. Visit getonline.cmu.edu on another device already with network access to register your Raspberry Pi on CMU-DEVICE. Make sure to pick a hostname you’ll remember.

5. SSH into your device from your primary computer using ssh pi@YOUR-HOSTNAME@wifi.local.cmu.edu with the password raspberry

6. Immediately change the default password by entering the passwd command, otherwise your device is essentially accessible to anyone on the internet.

• You’re done! Enjoy your RPi! Connect to it from SSH using your new password with pi@YOUR-HOSTNAME@wifi.local.cmu.edu

Option 3: Alternative Headless Set Up Instructions

If you don’t have a mouse, keyboard, and monitor and don’t already have your device’s MAC address, you’re in for quite a process! Firstly you need your devices MAC address— there’s a few ways you can do this, but we’ll highlight just one, though it requires you to have access to a home (non-cmu and not starbucks/library/etc) wi-fi network.

1. Ensure your device has an OS on in, or start by flashing Raspbian to your SD card

2. Place your SD card in your computer, and enable SSH on the Pi by placing a file named ssh, without any extension, onto the boot partition of the SD card. You can do this by navigating to the Boot partition in Terminal and entering touch ssh

3. In Terminal, navigate to the SD card’s directory, most likely name Boot

   cd /Volumes/boot

4. Create and open file wpa_supplicant.conf (this will replace the current RPi wifi config on next boot)

   sudo nano wpa_supplicant.conf

5. On your laptop or desktop, go to steveedson.co.uk/tools/wpa and copy the wpa_supplicant text needed for your home wifi network.

6. Paste (ctrl+v) the text from the previous step into the file, it should look something similar to this

   country=US
   ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
   update_config=1
   
   network={
          ssid="SOMETHING"
          key_mgmt=NONE
       }

7. Save the file (ctrl+o) close it (ctrl+x)

8. Insert SD card and boot up your Pi.

9. Connect to the same home network as the Pi from a laptop or desktop, and scan the network for your Pi by using a command like arp -a in Terminal. When you spot your Pi copy down its MAC address (no need to note its IP though)

10. Visit getonline.cmu.edu on your laptop/desktop and register your Raspberry Pi on CMU-DEVICE with its MAC address. Make sure to pick a hostname you’ll remember.

11. Power down, and place your SD card back in your computer— now we have to tell it to auto-connect to CMU-DEVICE when you’re on campus again.

12. In Terminal, navigate to the SD card’s directory, most likely name Boot

    cd /Volumes/boot

13. Edit the wpa_supplicant.conf (this will replace the current RPi wifi config on next boot)

    sudo nano wpa_supplicant.conf

14. Delete its entire contents, and replace it with this

    country=US
    ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
    update_config=1
    
    network={
           ssid="CMU-DEVICE"
           key_mgmt=NONE

15. Save the file (ctrl+o) close it (ctrl+x)

16. Move your device to campus, Insert SD card and boot up your Pi.

17. Wait a few minutes, then SSH into your device from your primary computer using ssh pi@YOUR-HOSTNAME@wifi.local.cmu.edu with the password raspberry

18. Immediately change the default password by entering the passwd command, otherwise your device is essentially accessible to anyone on the internet.

• You’re done! Enjoy your RPi! Connect to it from SSH using your new password with pi@YOUR-HOSTNAME@wifi.local.cmu.edu

Getting a raspberry Pi registered on CMU’s wifi is weirdly one of the most challenging parts of cmu— If you have questions about these instructions, or they are not working, feel free to comment below.

Wool Slippers

In Special Topics in Do-It-Yourself Fabrication, the final project is to create literally anything that brings joy to a person and employs interesting fabrication methods. I decided I would:

1] Find a farm that sells wool.
2] Go to the farm, get some wool.
3] Fabricate a mold for a slipper.
4] Use wet felting to make the shoe.

And then I will have a local, low cost, super cool looking ultra comfy pair of shoes I made myself. Potential challenges include the fact that I have literally never done any soft fabrication and don't know anything about shoes.

A university setting encourages building high complexity things by making tools and information more accessible (TAs, Arduino, desktop 3D printing, etc...), but a side effect of this is that we don't often engage with the lower levels of abstraction of a project. When I want to build a part, luckily I don't also have to build a computer, CAD software, and a 3D printer. But what does it feel like to build a low complexity good from scratch? Will it feel like engineering? Or more Design, Art, Science?

Maybe this isn't nearly as lofty an idea as it feels like, but at the very minimum, I'll end up with a pair of slippers.

Tuesday, March 20th 2018 —

Possible Farms Identified: White Dog Farm or Wild Rose Farms. Both about 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh. Also considering a booth or clog instead or in addition to a slipper.

Wednesday, March 28th 2018 —

Submitting project proposal! Have watched like 10 hours of youtube videos on various wet felting methods.

Wednesday, April 25th 2018 —

Called some farms. No calls back.. I have ordered some wool from Amazon. I'm less certain I'll be able to make it to a farm that is nearby with roving for sale during this part of the season.

Friday, May 4th 2018 —

Final product turned in! Turns out making slippers is not easy. Final product: one single okay looking shoe, but a whole lot more knowledge of wool roving and wet felting. ☺

Wool Roving

Me + Wet Felting Fabrication

The First Promising Looking Shoe!

Would ya look at that

Plasti Dip Sole Drying Outdoors

Same Shoe, New Angle

First Few Attempts...

Plasti Dip Rubber Soles

How To Embed Google Calendar in Squarespace Without a Premium Plan

1. From Home, navigate to Pages

2. Create a new blank page called “Calendar” (Or something else, if you’d prefer).

3. Click Edit Page Content, then the + and add the “embed” content block to the page.

4. Click the </> icon beside “Enter an embeddable URL here”

5. In the text box, paste the below code block, but replace name and gmail.com with your email address, leaving the %40 in place of @. Make sure your Google calendar is set to show availability publicly. You can also customize some of the attributes like height and bgcolor.

   <iframe src="https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?showTitle=0&amp;showPrint=0&amp;mode=WEEK&amp;height=500&amp;wkst=1&amp;bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&amp;src=name%40gmail.com&amp;color=%231B887A&amp;ctz=America%2FNew_York" style="border-width:0" width="100%" height="500px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

6. Hit set then apply then save

7. Hover over the page name “Calendar” on the left side panel and click the gear icon for settings, then adjust the URL slug to “cal” or “calendar”

8. Take a moment to celebrate; you have a new calendar page 🎉

last updated: june 2020.