Fabricatorz

Electrochemex: The Current of Change

spencer — 2012-05-16

The conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has been called a "poet of ideas" though you may be forgiven for thinking him a mad scientist. His work recalls an era before experimental philosophy was superseded by natural science. Among his many experiments, Keats has marketed a glass jar that creates universes, has dabbled in extraterrestrial abstract art, and once attempted to genetically engineer God. In 2003, he copyrighted his mind.

The latest (and arguably brightest) from the conceptual architect is the Electrochemical Currency Exchange Company, a "galvanic arbitrage" currency system that generates energy based off the metallic exploitative potential found in contrasting two different types of coins.

Electrochemex is a pun par excellence: playing off the reality that "money is inherently unstable," Keats actualizes this fact at the most fundamental level, and in the process détournés the foot-loose nature of capital by generating calculable, monetizable energy out of... money.

Electrochemex's first event was staged in the basement of the Rockefeller Center where the operation successfully powered a few handheld calculators based off the metallic differences between the U.S. penny and Chinese fen. Now the operation has moved to Hong Kong where the Chinese fen will duel Hong Kong cents in an HSBC lobby.

Visitors are welcome, so for those curious about the current wave in currency all the necessary information is available on the Fabricatorz constructed Electrochemex site (http://electrochemex.com). Go test the powers of simple math.

CKGSB Knowledge Site Debuts

brad — 2012-05-09

Fabricatorz recently custom-designed a website for Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB). Jon and Brad took lead duties in the construction of this dynamic platform based upon Aiki Framework that offers a look into Chinese business knowledge:

The focal point of this open sharing platform is practical insight into China business from CKGSB’s world-class faculty and influential alumni network. These insights as are presented alongside interviews and analysis from executives from China and around the world and other leading authorities.

Along with building the site, Fabricatorz completed the design and public launch of CKGSB Knowledge. Contact us for more information about working together.

Encroach With Caution: A Note on Collaborative Coding

brad — 2012-04-18

If you're an artist, you've been there: applying that final touch or minor adjustment that finishes the piece off. You're done! Everything looks exactly as you'd imagined it, and you can't wait to put it out there and show your prowess to the world. In the few years that I've been working on websites, I've found the building process to be strikingly similar. My latest assignment, the recently updated Open Font Library, placed me in a position I have never quite been in before: the "Code Middleman". Along the way, I learned a lot about the process of a singular developer and how encouraging collaboration in this medium can be.

The task sounded simple enough. Manufactura Independente had been contracted to craft a visual upgrade to Open Font Library. They did so (and quite well). My mission was to take the series of HTML/CSS/JavaScript mockup pages and apply them to the existing work our own Christopher Adams had done in building the site in it's initial form.

What I hadn't anticipated was the hair pulling and sleep-deprived nights that would lay ahead as I began to untangle the two webs and retie them into a functioning whole.

The Open Font Library was built on an open source web software called Aiki Framework. While Aiki is continually growing and gaining in popularity, it wasn't a software that Manufactura were immediately familiar with. The visual upgrade was only one of a number of features that were to be included in the upcoming release, so it soon became necessary for an Aiki-experienced developer to apply the completed redesigns to the site as work on the additional upgrades was going on behind the scenes.

Trial and error was key. I dove in pasting some design code here, amending an existing Aiki-built widget there, as the site slowly began it's metamorphosis. Things often broke, but communication with both Chris and Manufactura Independente helped me stay on course by establishing the commonalities between the two sets of code and ways of thinking. The veil of mystery often surrounding web development began to lift, in the process.

Why is collaboration so difficult in web development anyway? I think the software, as well as our processes and perceptions are at the heart of the issue. To many in my everyday circles (parents, peers, etc), what I do is a very ambiguous thing. I've described my work process in such vague terms that I began assuming the role of a wizard holed up in a tower solemnly researching and brewing his next potion. Sites are increasingly about speedy deliveries and giving clients dynamic control. Management systems like WordPress have evolved to make these solutions easier, but nothing has excelled at allowing real-time collaboration between multiple developers. Standard procedure often involves a repetitive process of a single developer designing, setting up, and configuring a site for general use.

With the completion of Open Font Library's latest release, I found myself leaving behind my worst working tendencies. I lost the desire to forge ahead in solitude or to be overly attached to work I completed and hyper critical of other's work. The necessity of communicating between multiple groups through a new software and meeting a tight deadline has helped me grow as a developer. It stopped feeling like a competition and started being about learning from and helping others.

Is Aiki Framework the ultimate collaborative solution? Not in it's current form, but each release brings us closer, and each project is another opportunity to build together.

Naihanli&Co. Site Goes Live

brad — 2012-04-13

Just today, Fabricatorz have publicly released a new and improved site for Beijing-based Naihanli&Co. Brad and Jon stepped up to the plate to deliver this latest offering, contributing on site design, implementation and deployment under our Aiki Framework platform. Naihanli&Co. founder, Jinjing Naihan Li strives to create furniture built on functional and socially responsive designs:

"..she introduces furniture as a fashionable, social concept that accommodates the mod- ern and mobile lifestyle we live. Her work poses the question, why not have furniture that represents the way you live? And, why not have fun with it? She does."

If you're interested in having Fabricatorz work on your next project, contact us!

Milkymist Gets Rowdy and Jazzy In Warsaw

spencer — 2012-04-12

I spent the past week in Warsaw with some friends and the M1. I arrived on Wet Monday, an Easter tradition where Polish "boys awake girls by pouring a bucket of water on their head and striking them about the legs with long thin twigs". Apparently the tradition continues out into the streets where boys splash girls they have crushes on, but I didn't see anything of the sort. Probably because it was way too cold, but also because Warsaw has a tendency to take itself way too serious. (I was told plenty of flirtatious water fights would be happening in the smaller, more "traditional" towns outside the city.) Fortunately I was able to recoup the fantasy that evening when I did some (visual) splashing of my own with the Milkymist alongside Movie Star Junkies, an impressive blues/punk band from Torino, Italy.

Full disclosure: I've never vj'd previous to this show. But this goes to show how simple the M1 is to use: I just plugged it in, aimed the live-feed video camera at the band, toggled between its preset psychedelic patches, and Boom! an epic visual performance. Everything went so well that I got invited to perform again the next night at a different venue. Despite the change in setting and sound--from underground (literally in a basement) punk show to jazz/funk fusion jam band in a swanky loungey bar--it was just as easy to adapt and compliment the music due to the M1's smorgasbord of visual options. Check out the videos, see for yourself: http://vimeo.com/fabricatorz/videos

Join the Open Font Library: Revolutionary Ideas In Typography

pete — 2012-04-09

Fabricatorz is proud to announce a vastly overhauled Open Font Library. The new site is designed by Manufactura Independente, implemented by Brad Phillips, and utilizes Aiki Framework at it's core. All of these upgrades combine to make typographic processes fast and simple.

Have you ever hit a hurdle in your design phase, not had the money to pay for the font you wanted? Those days are over. With Open Font Library, new fonts are free of cost, easily redistributed, and can instantly be utilizied to achive your design goals. Now this doesn't just apply to those using typography to create print documents on your local machine. Open Font Library provides the functionality to produce engaging web documents by simply linking directly to the Open Font Library server and adding a code snippet to your web document.

For example, if you want to use News Cycle designed by Nathan Willis add the following code to the head of your html page:

Now you can use this font in your css file. Here is an example of a paragraph set in News Cycle regular:

p { 

   font-family: 'News Cycle'; 

   font-weight: normal; 

   font-style: normal; 

}

In addition to the ease of font downloading and font linking, Open Font Library creates a community around typography. Font designers, contributers, and enthusiasts will all recieve feedback directly from the users. This benefits everyone in that the formerly mystical font creation workflow is outlined in the guidebook section. Learn about typography's rich history, how to create your own font, and remix your own in this comprehensive section.

Curation is also provided by active librarians who insure content is respectful and of the highest quality.

Thank you for using these new tools and please share with your friends. Updates will be streaming to Twitter and Facebook in addition to http://openfontlibrary.org, so you can follow updates in real time, regardless of where you spend your time online.

Help us get the word out on Open Font Library, and we'll see you soon!

Wise Futures and Shared Hardware, Part II

christopher — 2012-04-08

If I were to write an allegory of the computer manufacturing industry in "Greater China", I might be tempted to call it Pingguo and Shanzhai.

Pingguo（蘋果）is the nickname by which Apple Computer is known in China. Its partner Foxconn (a Taiwanese company by the way) is the largest electronic component manufacturer in the world and the largest private employer in the PRC. Foxconn is the pinnacle of industrial scale electronics manufacturing in the Pearl River Delta (and, indeed, the world); and Apple would not be the Apple of today without Foxconn, and China.

Shanzhai（山寨）are the noble bandits of our little allegory: small-scale black market manufacturers who skirt regulations and quality control to produce affordable, relatively low yield, but surprisingly diverse electronics. (I should point out that these innovations were enabled by another Taiwanese company, Mediatek, which sells development kits that many Shanzhai products, such as mobile phones, are built on top of.)

Pinguo and Shanzhai are the well-known protagonists in the technological and social drama of the computer manufacturing industry that straddles the Taiwan Strait. But neither Pinguo nor Shanzhai tell the story of the kind of technology that I want in my life, or that I want to base my business on.

For me the real inspirational story is that of Qi Hardware. Qi Hardware is innovation built not at the cost of billions of dollars and legions of anonymous workers (Pingguo), nor at the cost of questionable legal and safety practices (Shanzhai). Rather, Qi Hardware is a collective dedicated to sharing knowledge, experience and technology, and represents the kind of wise future[1] I am looking to achieve.

In discussing Qi Hardware I am constantly looking for a language to describe this new style of innovation. I am reluctant to call it 'open' hardware for reasons I have already explained; and calling it 'copyleft' hardware (in contrast to 'copyright') puts too much emphasis on the legal underpinning.

I finally settled on the term 'shared' hardware to describe what I feel captures the spirit of the movement. By sharing, Qi Hardware aim to lower barriers to innovation, as well as to profit and pump out genuinely cool technology!

Let's keep telling this story.

Notes

[1] wise futures - I came by this term by listening to public talks by Rob van Kranenburg and Adam Greenfield in Taipei in February of this year. You can read Part I here.

The first photo in this post is of the Milkymist One, which I shot in my studio a couple of weeks ago. The second photo is of Adam Wang, when I visited him in Taipei, where he tests and assembles the Milkymist.

Open Font Library Provides Free Fonts For All, Developers and Stay-At-Home Dads Alike

spencer — 2012-04-04

San Francisco and Beijing, April 5, 2012 – Open Font Library, the online library of community-generated fonts that promotes font freedom and sharing, announces its latest version. Fabricatorz, a global open production company, relaunched Open Font Library in 2011 and have contributed to its ongoing development ever since. The latest iteration of the site features a fresh design by Manufactura Independente, a simple and elegant touch that better reflects the beauty of Open Font Library's collection of quality typefaces.

The Open Font Library's no-frills site allows guests to browse the entire catalogue, which at the time of writing boasts a collection of 116 font families, 168 releases (includes updated versions of font families) and 388 font files (total number of TrueType Font and OpenType Font files). Through a simple registration process, guests can then become members of Open Font Library where they are encouraged to share their own fonts or remix and download those already in the catalogue. Members also gain access to the Open Font Library community, a group dedicated to sharing type and promoting its creative iterations.

Fabricatorz developer Brad Phillips says the site has become more liberating with its latest release. “Getting fonts onto other sites is really easy now since every font page comes with @font-face tags—HTML and CSS example-code for easy embedding—so all members have to do is copy and paste the tags into their own websites and boom!—their sites have a new attractive typeface.”

The @font-face tag embedding process is another step in helping Open Font Library accelerate its growth and usefulness for type designers, developers and font enthusiasts. It also encourages others less familiar with the technicalities of fonts and their use in websites to experiment with this transparent plug-and-play process.

“We're really hoping to get different types of people using the site, not just type geeks,” said Phillips. “I'm not exactly a type fanatic myself, but I've noticed my interest in the history and aesthetics of type grow just from using the site. Instead of “checking out” type like you would books in a traditional library, hanging out “in the stacks,” as it were, has been more educational for me. The Open Font Library community also plays an educational role; it's helpful with learning more about fonts and open fonts in particular.”

All the fonts in the Open Font Library catalogue are licensed under free licenses, including the SIL Open Font License, Creative Commons Zero license, and GPLv3 with font exception license. Every font in the catalogue is freely downloadable, just as anyone is free to join and become a member.

About Open Font Library

The mission of the Open Font Library (http://openfontlibrary.org) is to promote your freedom as it relates to fonts. All of the typefaces contained in the library are available under a free license, which gives you the freedom to use, study, remix and share each and every font. The site is powered by the Aiki Framework (http://aikiframework.org), a powerful web framework for building network services using the AGPL license.

About Fabricatorz

Fabricatorz (http://fabricatorz.com) is an open global production company that makes successful projects from start to finish. We specialize in developing software using Aiki Framework (http://aikiframework.org), hardware using Qi Hardware (http://fabricatorz.com/projects/qi-hardware), and community-building around the philosophies of Sharism (http://sharism.org).

####

For more information, please write everyone@openfontlibrary.org, or visit http://www.openfontlibrary.org/
http://www.fabricatorz.com
http://aikiframework.org.

Press Contact

Spencer Young

press@fabricatorz.com

+49 1573 7430013

Berlin

Attachments

New Milkymist Action Shots

spencer — 2012-03-27

There isn't much video out there that does the Milkymist justice, an unfortunate circumstance because it really is an impressive little machine. In an attempt to remedy this Barry and I recently shot some video with the hopes of mirroring the representation of the Milkymist with it's actual ability. We (actually, I, since I'm the one responsible for the editing) fell well short of this mark. But despite the poor editing (I haven't edited video since the VHS days!) and poor image quality (who knew high-quality video required so many damn GB's?), you'll get to see how non-intimidating the set-up is and how fast this little guy can get a party started.

The drum clips are meant to demonstrate the Milkymist's integration with electronic instruments and external sound, both of which stimulate the visuals when plugged directly into the Milkymist or intercepted via the onboard microphone. And the club shots, well, those are testament to the Milkymist's party credibility. We actually smuggled the Milkymist into that particular party at a warehouse-like venue in San Francisco's Mission District, then set it up guerrilla-style and proceeded to project on the walls and dance floor despite the fact that there was already a house VJ. I was actually surprised how well our slapdash performance compared. During the short 15 minutes we were there the crowd turned away from the DJ and VJ projection on the far wall and towards each other in the middle of the room where we were projecting. The dancing and interaction intensified, and at one point one of the VJ's assistants came over all starry-eyed and intrigued.

I have to say, I was a bit skeptical about the Milkymist until I saw it in action. It has some incredible psychedelic and dynamic capabilities that will only continue to expand. Keep your eyes peeled, kids.

Footage here: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/bonewolf/ and more to come.

Making Dirt with Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library

jon — 2012-03-23

Its Friday and I want to make a fun post! Last night while working on a project with Christopher, I mentioned that we should add more dirt to some of our designz. He asked me how, so I made a quick HOWTO make dirt using our beloved Inkscape drawing software and then uploading the results, as scalable vector files to our project, Open Clip Art Library.

Check it out! If you like this post, please try to make your own dirt and upload to the Open Clip Art Library:

Download image of dirt from a source like Google Image Search or Flickr.

Download and use Inkscape, the free drawing tool!

Import image in inkscape (I usually embed the image for now)

Select Path > Trace Bitmap...

Play with options (prefer simple black and white)

Convert image to paths by clicking "OK"

NOTE: At this point you will have some dirt. You may want to delete the image source material you imported now, or later.

To create dirty type or make some shape dirrrty, then...

Overlay shape or type on the dirt path.

Then, play with path operations in the Inkscape Path menu like intersection, exclusion until you get a desirable result

Have fun! Undo and Redo menu operations are your friend

Upload your saved SVG (without the image in the file) to the Open Clip Art Library.

Check out my growing collection in my Dirt Gallery (some of you who have known me for some time will get that KC comment ;).