<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Eric Hunting</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:erichunting@gmail.com">erichunting@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 1:04 PM<br>Subject: [luf-team] Re: maybe im crazy, but why is most of these projects not working?<br>To: <a href="mailto:luf-team@yahoogroups.com">luf-team@yahoogroups.com</a><br><br>What we need as a critical mass for a working group is basically enough people to accomplish the first tasks I've just outlined in my past post. The size of audience we need is whatever is sufficient to produce and maintain that sufficiently large working group as some fraction of that larger fan base they would be found in. We can be sure that, generally, the fraction of people with skills -and interest in cultivating skills- and resources for physical projects is going to be relatively small compared to the potential size of the groups satisfied being an audience. That's the nature of things. It's hard to be precise on numbers because people's abilities vary so greatly. Even just one very talented, prolific, and passionate artist whose time we can very well utilize could be all I need to collaborate with to get our media act together. Or it might take a great many because we can only get a small fraction of any of their time or they cannot take as much as I routinely dish out. (I've scared off some by foolishly taking them at their word when they ask for as much detail as possible...) One accomplished Maker with a full compliment of tools and skills could readily get Utilihab going. If we have to cultivate a bunch of new Makers to find that basic skill base, it's going to take more people. The projects I've outlined in the last post are either relatively modest individually or break down naturally into modest pieces. As a very rough guess, we can say a half dozen people dedicated to each of these projects should be sufficient to get them started. In business, engineering, and science, teams of around five people tend to work well as task-specific work groups. The difficulty we've long had is getting even five people together in the same place at the same time. That's the hard part. <br>
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If people are willing to start contributing membership dues, they can be sent as with any other donations through PayPal to the address 'themillennialproject' at '<a href="http://gmail.com" target="_blank">gmail.com</a>. Money will remain in that account until applied to specific things which we'll report on here in the forum. Such general donations would be applied to things of more general benefit to the group -right now art and events. I don't think we're quite ready for requiring membership dues. It may be more practical to have people contribute to very specific tasks they are themselves involved in. But modest voluntary dues would be a good way to start and to express some group commitment.<br>
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Going to universities and art/design schools has been suggested to me in the past, but I haven't yet found the right venue to communicate with them. One idea that's been proposed is to hold a kind of commission competition for art students where you offer a commission on a full color set of illustrations as a prize won by the best line-art/sketch interpretation of the written material in the TMP2 articles. But this approach has generally only been used in the lofty realm of commercial architecture where designers are invited to compete on contracts worth six or seven figures. The catch here is that we're not dealing with generic art. There used to be -back when photography and printing were much more limited technologies than today- a community of journalistic, commercial, and technical illustrators well rounded enough to routinely work with non-artists and draw just about anything on demand, quickly, and economically. One of the last of their kind was Robert Ripley -who survived as that field of illustration waned by adapting his art to comic strips and reinventing himself as side-show barker to the world. As with so many professions today, artists and designers have become highly specialized in the styles, themes, and subject areas they will work with. They don't get well-rounded educations anymore and they, decreasingly, deal in subjects relating to the real world because of the assumption that it's been obsolesced by photography. So we can't just generally solicit artists. We have to ferret out the ones that deal in the very specific subject matter needed -and the subjects of science, space, and technology have been declining in popularity with artists for a long time. (despite, ironically, being one of the most lucrative areas of commercial art. But the kids don't know this because the clueless art schools never tell them) Since that means looking at their past work, you have to find those that have some body of work published or on-line, which usually means they've already gone 'pro' to some degree. Now, maybe I'm just going about it wrong. I'm very open to suggestions with this, though frankly I'm also rather burned out too. I've been subjected to The Flake Out so many time over the past decade that it's really left me despondent. But we have to keep plugging away. This is just too critical. <br>
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On the Yuri's Night suggestion, attending other already planned Yuri's Night parties is as good a place to start as any. The whole point there is getting involved in the event to help establish it as a routine cultural event in our community. We'll build on it over time. <br>
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Concerning the Fab Lab and cultivating maker skills, the goal here is a culture of industrial literacy, not creating a community of fine-arts craftsmen. It's more important to cultivate a common knowledge of the spectrum of technology, industrial processes, and techniques than to be some master artisan. Industrial literacy is like general literacy, computer literacy, financial literacy; basic knowledge that you now need to be a competent person in our contemporary culture. Remember, teaching slaves to read and write was commonly illegal in slaver cultures. That fact should give one pause whenever you realize you don't understand how some machine or process works, or where some product you're buying comes from, or whenever some corporation tries to prevent you from opening a product or using it in a way they don't like, physically through design or by abuse of the legal system. All profit originates in a divergence of perception of value between the parties in an exchange. The less you know about how things work and where they come from, the more easily you can get ripped-off. So I often ask, how do you know the actual value of something if you don't know how it works, how it's made, and where it came from? This is why Americans are routinely raped economically through their willful ignorance of how things work and what's going on in the rest of the world and their casual willingness to accept what corporations tell them is fact. Cell phone service, internet service, drug prices, textbook prices, music and movie prices, health care, housing, banking, on and on you see all these things where Americans routinely pay far more for far less than anyone else in the world because they're passive, ignorant, willing suckers. An essential objective of TMP is the cultivation of a community with it's own progressively more independent infrastructures, eventually capable of living well with some degree of freedom from common economic exploitation for the sake of recovering and repurposing personal productivity so it can be directed to space. That means we are compelled to be industrially literate as a culture in order to cultivate that alternative infrastructure. It's an essential survival skill. It doesn't matter that you're not proficient at everything. What matters is the knowledge and the potential for innovation, invention, empowerment that comes from that knowledge.<br>
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The reason I focus on the tools of the Fab Lab is because it's convergence with information technology makes processes more accessible, less dependent upon the kind of hand-trained-skill you noted was always a problem with carpentry. Digital machine tools eliminate the dependence on that the same way a computer printer eliminates dependence on the hand-trained-skills of calligraphy and manual typesetting. Obviously, a computer printer doesn't totally obsolesce those crafts, but it eliminates the dependence on that for most forms of writing and so enables people who can't dedicate a whole career to that craft to get most stuff they need in print by themselves. And so it is with these new digital machine tools. They enable people with modest, generalized, skills to fabricate things that once required highly specialized skills and large expensive tools with enough quality to suffice for most of their uses. You come away with a good understanding of technology, materials, and process without having to dedicate your life to learning about one particular industry just to get something relatively simple done. That's how Fab Labs started. They began at MIT with a course program created by Neil Gershenfeld called How To Make (Almost) Anything. He realized that many of the basic industrial processes were, with digital automation, being reduced to desktop scale systems. They might not have the same capabilities, but they made the processes accessible and understandable, even for children. They all worked rather similarly to a computer printer. And so he could get a bunch of them, put them all in a 'classroom', show people how the world is made more-or-less, and invite them to experiment. <br>
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These tools also represent the cutting edge of where industry is generally going. On the one hand they are limited and so can't always compete with mass production systems. On the other hand, because they are limited they present infinite potential for those who understand them to improve them, and thus hugh entrepreneurial potential. Building on that is how I intend TMP to develop its new infrastructure. This is what Savage was talking about when, in the original TMP, he referred to the Aquarian communities cultivating a more advanced, highly automated, local industrial capability and capitalizing on that. When he wrote TMP there were no fab labs and only a few of the digital machine tools we have today. But, like many futurists, he saw the general trend in evolution of industrial technology pointing to this eventuality and realized its importance in an overall development scheme. When we move to space, we're not taking three storey steel presses with us.<br>
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Concerning the use of Utilihab for housing, initially we're dealing with more generalized work developing a diversity of parts. Longer-term, we're looking at teams -and eventually individual business ventures- specializing in development and production of specific areas of components. A key aspect of the system is eliminating sophisticated 'craft' through prefabrication to facilitate user-assembly. The Utilihab home is mostly two kinds of parts; the T-slot framing and panels that attach to that. The framing is already prefabricated. You can order frame components pre-cut to length with fittings for connectors. So you just use a hex key and put it together. That's still a bit expensive in the US because of marketing for the 'special' industrial automation market. We'll have to expand our sourcing and consider doing our own extrusion eventually. But for now the added cost is compensated by the great savings in labor overall. The panels require some fabrication skill, but aren't produced on-site. They too are prefabricated -though we have to do that prefabrication. The biggest are wall panels about 1m wide by 2.4m high and 20-50mm thick depending on composition. Roofing and exterior cladding panels are larger, but will be based on off-the-shelf panel roofing at first that is, again, just pre-cut to length at the factory and assembled by being attached to the framing with screws. The system favors materials that don't require elaborate finishing. So we're looking at pre-finished interior fiber-cement, luan, wood and stone veneer, cork, fabric, etc. that is pretty much just cut to size and glued onto a backing panel like wheatboard if necessary that's also just cut to size. We can make panels with integral insulation by, again, just gluing on some panel insulation material There are some more sophisticated panel mounting schemes in my Utilihab catalog that I intend to explore, but the basic methods either bolt to the T-slot or, use press-fit battens, or, in the case of flush interior panels, press-fit into the space between secondary framing members and are held by a finished wood strip that snaps into the facing T-slots. So the fabrication throughout is generally not complicated. There's no joinery or things that need special skills. (though I have included a few things in the catalog that will get into that, like shogi, latticework screens, and so on) With the pavilion framing system it's even simpler, since you're likely employing an open plan interior with that which means fewer walls and more reliance on furnishings in organizing space. <br>
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That iT House I posted a slide show of is a very custom design. It doesn't have the the kind of standardization of parts I propose with Utilihab, its framing system is a little peculiar -as if the designers somehow didn't get the whole Bosh/Rexroth parts catalog- and in a couple of things they 'cheated' with the use of wood framing to support old fashioned drywall for a fireplace enclosure. Construction was apparently protracted by the problem of lining up suppliers, since this wasn't fully pre-frabricated in advance. But it still well illustrates how many things would assemble with Utilihab. This site offers an overview of that house's construction;<br>
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<a href="http://www.tkithouse.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://www.tkithouse.blogspot.com/</a></p><div class="im"><br>
<br>
Eric Hunting<br>
<a href="mailto:erichunting%40gmail.com" target="_blank">erichunting@gmail.com</a><br>
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On Mar 11, 2011, at 4:29 AM, <a href="mailto:luf-team%40yahoogroups.com" target="_blank">luf-team@yahoogroups.com</a> wrote:<br>
<br>
> Re: maybe im crazy, but why is most of these projects not working?<br></div>
> Posted by: "keithd21" <a href="mailto:keithd21%40yahoo.com" target="_blank">keithd21@yahoo.com</a> keithd21<br>
> Thu Mar 10, 2011 4:48 pm (PST)<div class="im"><br>
> <br>
> <br>
> <br>
> <br>
> <br>
> Eric,<br>
> <br>
> That was wonderfully said.<br>
> <br></div><div class="im">
> I'll weigh in with my reaction on some of your earlier steps to keep this important thread alive. I don't want to weigh in on everything as you've given us more than enough work for years in just the first few steps. Don't want to jump ahead of myself.<br>
> <br></div><div class="im">
> Building membership: How many do you think it will really take to get this thing off the ground? According to the records Reg was able to get from Tami, we peaked at 423 members (if memory serves). I'll throw my hat in the ring and be counted. So far that officially gives us...two... I mentioned earlier in an off list discussion that I think we need more than warm bodies and you expounded on that more clearly than I can. It is a leap far beyond my original intention to recruit folks who already had the skills we needed to actually build them from the ground up. Ambitious.<br>
> <br>
> Membership 2: Anyone here willing to pay monthly or yearly dues? I've been toying with the idea of fronting the cash to re-instate our 501(c)3 status. It would take about 500 dollars. Maintenance of the status would eat 400 a year out of any dues income. Worth it? Maybe TMP2 should be for profit.<br>
> <br></div><div class="im">
> Illustrations, graphics, and richer media: This is a real chicken and egg problem for us, isn't it? Media is expensive. Do you think there is any chance if we worked with a University art program we could get quality images at a discount by commissioning a starving student? I could talk a friend whose brother got his MFA and see if he is either interested in producing some media for us or getting us in contact with someone who might.<br>
> <br>
> Events: 1) Yuri's night. I just checked and there are already 4 scheduled in my area. I can attend one or more as they are on different nights in some cases and show up with my copy of TMP. If I can recruit anyone I will. Anyone else here in the Houston area that would like to join me? 2) Anyone here going to the Mars Society convention in Dallas Aug 4-7? I need to clear it with work because it is mighty close to the close cycle but I think I'm going. Would love to meet up with anyone else who is attending.<br>
> <br>
> Fab labs: Here is where I am really going to struggle to live up to expectations. I have a basic set of tools and do my own auto repair. But it always results in a lot of swearing and busted knuckles. My home carpentry work is, despite great effort, never quite true and square. I'm afraid the accountant in me goes down to the bone. I'm willing to try but it might be a lost cause due to personality constraints.<br>
> <br>
> You said "Relating to this, I think everyone in this group needs hands on experience with some of the following; gardening, hydroponics, permaculture, aquariums, mariculture, algaeculture, Living Machines, and renewable/alternative energy systems like wind, PVs, fuel cells, Sterling and Rankin cycle systems. Everyone here should have experience with building at least something like a sub-irrigation planter, a 5 gallon bubbler hydroponic planter, a table-top flood-drain unit, and know how to assemble a home PV/wind power system." OK, I'm game. I used to have a lot of fish but I'm over that. PV and wind would be a poor choice for my current site but I'll build a small hydroponic system in the backyard this Spring. It can't go any worse than my last attempt at gardening.<br>
> <br>
> Utilihab: It will be a few years to five before I am ready to replace my current dwelling. Using Utilihab construction will be the number one approach considered. The interior might be ugly if it depends on my own carpentry but maybe I can sub out for a conventional make ready team to do the buildout. If the housing glut continues and interest rates continue to rise, they will be desperate for work.<br>
> <br>
> -keith-<br>
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