1. Week One: State of the art, project management and documentation¶
Research & Ideation¶
My values heavily inform my research.
What I'd like to do at Fabricademy is explore these values more deeply and to build new systems or patterns by leveraging nature's genius. I'll focus heavily on growing materials or working with materials that have been developed by students before me. I'd also like to continue experimenting with organic processes that have an element of the unknown in them.
Here are a few of the inspirations that helped solidify my values.
Leaning Into Simplicity
Published by New York Review Books as part of their NYRB Classics series.
I recently read " The One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka. Fukuoka coined the term "Do Nothing Farming" which is as much a philosophy for life as it was about farming. While his method of farming still required work, it was more about harnessing nature's existing systems instead of trying to control it. He felt that things like tilling and chemical fertilizers, (while initially appearing to solve problems) would only compound them in the long run - that nature is already balanced and when he observed it's rhythms, built his systems around it, and intervened only when necessary, he actually yielded healthier, bigger crops - plus he did less work!
I think it's a really great philosophy for life. So I've been trying to build more of my everyday habits around this principle.
Circumventing Waste
I'm also an avid gardener so I think a lot about interconnectedness - how nature has these incredible built in systems that don't have waste! So this is another thing I value deeply
The folks at Low-Tech Labs have been formative in my exploration of this. This was a great video as documented by the Youtbe Channel Living Big in a Tiny House
You can see the video by cliking the link below:
Watch this video on YouTube¶
Humour
A third value of mine is humour. Humour has this beautiful capacity to disarm people, diffuse tension and help them connect - usually by throwing something unexpected into the mix. This relates to this fascination of mine with combining disparate things to make new things. I love comics and visual puns because they do this so well!
Here is one of my favourite comic artists who never fail to get a chuckle out of me.
Documentation¶
Week one was a challenge because I have zero background with web development. The language of code was new to me, so it took a lot of trial and error to figure out my process.
I first started to familiarize myself with the interface, studying where things where housed on Gitlab and how they actually appeared on the site. Once I was oriented, I learned a lot by just playing, deleting and adding elements and commiting them one at a time. By copying the code already in place I was usually able to achieve similar results.
Next I decided what images I'd like to use. This helped me figure out how to write my text.
I nameed and numbered the images and housed them in a folder on my desktop in the order they should appear. I added those numbers to my text document as I worked.
I wrote my text in a separate file using the simple notepad app on my computer. I then copy and pasted it to Gitlab so I wouldn't lose my changes if they didn't save.
After this I resized a bunch of images but I ended up using only a few because I hadn't quite cracked how to position them. I needed to use HTML to get them to be justified how I wanted. Below you can see how to program the "width" of an image".
ChatGPT was helpful for getting familiar with the code. I sometimes use it to write my code but I always check how the code is written so I can understand and debug code when I need to.
Downsizing Photos¶
At first I used photoshop to downside my photos, making sure each was under 100KB. I then played around with various sizes, by changing the width function to see how they looked on the site.
This tutorial by PHLEARN was really helpful for batch resizing.
Lightroom is another really fast option as I can simply Import all the images I want to use and then Export them making sure the long edge is no more than 800 pixles and the photos are no more than 100KB. This is now what I use most of the time.
Lastly, I changed the colours of my title bar and played around with a few Google Fonts in the mkdocs.yml folder.
Whenever I make changes I go to Source Control and click Commit and push to 'main'. Generally I do this once I've made a bunch of changes at once since the site takes a while to update. But if ever I'm unsure that something will format correctly it doesn't hurt to do a small test.
