Russian Sledges

Where I Work visits Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg of Nervous System at their Boston area studio. Founded in 2007, the firm designs and makes a range of products from housewares and jewelry to tools and interactive applications. Rosenkrantz studied biology at MIT and architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Louis-Rosenberg also attended MIT, where he majored in mathematics. Before joining Rosenkrantz at Nervous System, he worked as a consultant for Gehry Technologies in building modeling and design automation. Rosenkrantz acts as Creative Director and Louis-Rosenberg as Chief Science Officer. Together they lead a team of seven, and if you can’t already tell, are the epitome of geek chic.

Befitting their backgrounds, the duo focuses on generative design methods, and use algorithmic and physical tools to design products inspired by natural forms. Products are designed to be affordably and ethically made. They use manufacturing methods that do not require large facilities or massive manual labor. Often, the team employs rapid prototyping methods by which all unique pieces can be manufactured at the same cost as cookie cutter ones. Materials are inexpensive, because they believe that the value of their designs comes from an intelligent and beautiful marriage of form and function, not, say, the current price of gold.

Flex space

What’s your studio environment like?

Our studio is laid back. We are both basically here all day, every day, and we have six employees that work a standard, weekday schedule. I usually pick the music upstairs in the mezzanine and play a mixture of electronic and indie music. Usually there is a competing Pandora station playing downstairs selected by our other staff.

Jewelry boxes

What is your typical work style?

Our work style is chaotic and scattered, but punctuated by short bursts of extreme focus. We’ve tried to impose a schedule on our work innumerable times, but that usually lasts at most, three days. We typically have several different projects we’re working on or thinking about. Our progress is interrupted frequently by preparing for events, getting orders out the door, and by the mundane tasks of running a business. When we have a major deadline, we stop what we’re doing for a few weeks and bang out a new project.

Jewelry display bubble

How long have you been in your current space? Where did you work before that?

We’ve been in our space for just a year now. I feel like we’re still settling in and constantly making changes. Before that we worked out of our house in the woods of western Massachusetts. It was a big house with a separate floor that we used for our office and a garage we used as a woodshop, but it was still cramped. Since we started Nervous System in 2007, we’ve moved all over the country (Santa Monica, Los Angeles, the Catskills, Shutesbury, Somerville, and Cambridge) and worked out of wherever we lived at that point. It’s nice to finally have a commercial space to settle into.

How is your office laid out?

Our office is divided into a few different areas: double-height showroom space, production room, spraybooth, workshop room, laser room, and mezzanine office space.

Assembly table

Bamboo coaster

The production area is very organized and is where most of the product assembly, packaging, and shipping takes place. It has one, giant C-shaped desk that wraps around the whole space with shelving up to ceiling on every wall. The workshop room primarily houses our CNC router (a computer controlled 3D wood carving machine) and wood storage. It also has a sink and hot plates we use for dyeing 3D-prints. Adjoining the workshop is the laser cutter “room” that’s actually a closet under a staircase.

Mezzanine office with Makerbot Replicator 3D-printer on the right

Our office/creative area is on a mezzanine and over looks the double height showroom space. Jesse and I have desks up there as does Nathan (our programmer/engineer) and Aaron (our business manager). Upstairs we also have a fridge, microwave, toaster, espresso machine, kettle, etc. And an infinite supply of Kimchi Ramen. The  showroom space hasn’t truly evolved into a real showroom yet, but there’s a portion devoted to showing our lamps and jewelry to visitors. We also use it as a flex space for larger projects. Our six foot long window serves as a cactus nursery. And right by the door we have a Elos saltwater aquarium for keeping live coral.

If you could change something about your workspace, what would it be?

Jesse: It would be bigger and have a ping-pong table.

Jessica: I’d love to have more windows! We only have one, which is big, but not big enough to illuminate the whole office.

Double height mezzanine space

How do you record ideas?

Jesse: I basically keep everything in my head. I’m currently keeping a tasks list (in Gmail) of specific things I want to work on, but are not simply daily tasks.

Jessica: I’m pretty disorganized and have many different places I keep track of things, including a smattering of emails to myself, several sketchbooks, scraps of paper on my desk, yellow sticky notes on the bottom edge of my monitor, a Google calendar, and a range of Google docs.

Printed steel rings

Do you have inspiration boards? What’s on it right now?

Jesse: We have a board that hasn’t been updated since we moved into our new space. Lately, I’ve been trying use Pinboards to keep track of information I want to come back to.

Jessica: Not really but you can generally tell what I’m interested in by what books I have around. Right now they include The Cactus Primer by Gibson, Book of Coral Propagation by Calfo, and The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges and Corals by Kaandorp, among others.

Generative jigsaw puzzle pieces

What’s on your desk right now?

Jesse: An embarrassingly random set of objects. Scattered papers, laptop and monitor, a Kinect, a bag of chips, rainbow permanent markers, an external harddrive, a CFL light bulb, a bottle of acetone, an X-acto knife and a sample of acrylic.

Jessica: Two giant monitors, two external harddrives, Sour Patch Kids, X-acto blade, black Sharpie, sketch book, mechanical pencil, Klean Kanteen water bottle, stack of generative jigsaw puzzles, sennheiser headphones, and a printout of slides from our last lecture.

Failed 3-D prints

What kind of design objects might you have scattered about the space?

Almost every design object in our studio is something we made. We have finished designs, prototypes and experiments. These range in size from 8-foot long rippling wood tables to small experimental prints made with our Makerbot Replicator printer. The only exception is a bunch of fiberglass Eames chairs. We do have two glass cases full of natural objects though. We have collections of sea shells, minerals, fossils, and other specimens some of which have served as inspiration for past projects and others which we may investigate in the future.

Custom reaction table

Are there tools and/or machinery in your space?
We have a lot of different tools. We’ve got the computer controlled tools: an Epilog laser cutter, a large CNC router (which we built ourselves), a Makerbot Replicator 3D-printer, a Canon Pixma Pro inkjet printer. We then have various other tools: basic woodshop equipment (table saw, drill press, etc), a spraybooth setup with an air compressor and spray gun, jewelry tools including tumblers and a fusion welder, and tools for doing electrical work like a soldering station.  We have many hand tools and a workbench as well.

Lasercutting a puzzle

What tool do you most enjoy using in the design process?

Jesse: The laser cutter is definitely the most satisfying. It is so versatile and so fast. You are limited to 2D cutting, but you can use so many materials and unlike 3D printing or CNC routing, it is practically instantaneous.

Let’s talk about how you’re wired. Tell me about your tech arsenal.

We love computers and have a lot of them. There are 10 computers being actively used in the office: two laptops, two desktops for design, two desktops for sales and correspondence, a desktop that runs the laser cutter, a desktop that runs the CNC router, a Mac Mini for iOS development, and a Linux desktop used by our newest employee. After a recent theft, we’ve had a proliferation of external harddrives, and make sure to back up as much as possible on Dropbox.

What design software do you use, and for what? 

The vast majority of design work we do is using the software that we write ourselves. We write our software using a variety of tools. We use Processing as our go-to for sketching out ideas. We use Microsoft Visual Studio for C++ development, and we do a bunch of web development stuff just with a text editor (Notepad++). We’ve begun to use LuxRender as our open source rendering software. We occasionally use Rhinoceros to design components, sketch out plans, make displays and the like. We also use specialized software, including MeshLab and NetFabb, to process geometry we generate.

Silver Vessel Pendant

Orbicular Lamps

Do you have a favorite piece or collection that you’ve designed?

Jessica: I have a lot of favorites! My favorite piece of jewelry is the Silver Vessel Pendant.  My favorite interactive product we’ve made is the Cell Cycle app. And my favorite housewares design is the Orbicular Lamp. Or maybe the Pollen Lamp.

When did you feel like you “made it”? 

Jesse: I don’t know if I feel like I’ve gotten where I want to be yet. But I do know the moment that I decided to quit my day job. Jessica was already working on Nervous System full time, while I supported us with a “real” job. We participated in the Designboom Mart at ICFF in May of 2008, and we had a tremendous response and sold what was – at the time – a game changing amount of products. We were ecstatic, and I decided to do Nervous System full time.

Lasercut Bamboo Trivets/Coasters

Tell us about a current project you’re working on. What was the inspiration behind it?

Right now we’re working on creating a toolkit of interactive products/applications for our website.  Earlier this year we introduced our revamped Cell Cycle app that allows people to play with a physics simulation to design their own 3D-printable jewelry designs. We’re really proud of the result and it’s been very popular. Many people are choosing to design their own pieces with the application instead of just picking from among the options that we designed. That’s really exciting for us, because one of our goals at Nervous System is to use new technologies (like generative simulations and digital fabrication) to engage people in the design process and create custom, one-of-a-kind designs. In brief, we are making a bunch of web apps that visitors to our site will be able to use to design products ranging from cellular bamboo trivets to sculptural 3D-printed ceramics and coral-like stainless steel jewelry.

Reaction plate

Do you use any of your pieces in your own home/life?

Jesse: We use our Reaction cups and Reaction plates everyday. We’ve also been using some new trivets/coasters we’re in the process of designing. We have frou lamps at home: Hyphae and Reaction in the living room and Pollen and a prototype Seed in our bedroom. We also built our dresser, but it’s not an item we sell.

Black Interstice Bracelet

Jessica: I have a few pieces of Nervous System jewelry that I wear quite frequently. In addition to the Silver Vessel Pendant, I wear the Silver Cellular Pendant, Silver 1-Layer Twist Ring, Stainless Steel Convolution Bangle, and a black Interstice Bracelet.

Portrait and photos 1, 12, 13 by Ken Richardson.

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"The old press of the Statesman Journal has gone dark. For the first time in 161 years, a daily newspaper will no longer be printed in Salem. I spent one of the last nightly runs with the pressmen, my Hasselblad and ten rolls of film." Via Feature Shoot.

um·brage (mbrj)
n.
1. Offense; resentment: took umbrage at their rudeness.
2.
a. Something that affords shade.
b. Shadow or shade. See Synonyms at shade.
3. A vague or indistinct indication; a hint.

The theory that access to the internet will be the undoing of organized religion has resurfaced. But do the data show anything like this?

In 1910 Andrew Carnegie built a library in Mill Valley, California, one of 2,500 libraries he would build throughout his lifetime. Fifty years later it was converted into a private home, and since then has been remodeled dozens of times. But the latest reinvention may have gotten it just right: one of the rooms is now this stunning modern kitchen! How gorgeous is the slate grey paired with all that wood and brick? See more photos below: More

“The question of whether or not Michelle Obama was “throwing shade” at John Boehner after last week’s inauguration likely hadn’t been asked of a first lady before; the term, which originated in the drag world, has officially entered the language. Before there was Michelle’s eye roll, there was a winter of Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey reading each other in clips from the nation’s most popular television show. Recently, Prince threw shade at Madonna. “Dissing” someone is so 2004!”

- RuPaul sashays into the mainstream - Salon.com

In today's edition of good news/bad news, we'll bring you the good news first. Even though Staff Meal has sold off its truck, it has begun a series of weekend pop-up engagements at District (180 Lincoln St.) under the name Rising Sun Tavern. "The name speaks to the east meets west style of food that we’ve settled on doing. The original idea was to call ourselves Super Fusion, which we came up with while eating at Super Fusion, but that idea never left the building," they write on their new website, coincidentally called Rising Sun Tavern. Ever on-trend, they're doing a series of ramen pop-ups with Guchi's Mark O’Leary. More ramen! Check their page for schedules and dates.

Meanwhile, on a sadder note, Sel de la Terre hastily shuttered their Back Bay location over the weekend. Their Aquarium location is now City Landing. The only remaining SDLT is all the way out in Natick. Reps issued Eater a statement from the company:

"Effective immediately, we have closed the Back Bay location of Sel de la Terre. We are committed to helping relocate our staff whether that be within the company or elsewhere. We are eternally grateful to our talented team members and loyal guests who have supported us over the past several years. This does not affect the Sel de la Terre location in the Natick Mall which will continue to operate. All gift cards and promotions will be honored at the Natick location."

Mysterious and sudden! Last we heard, SDLT Natick's executive chef Daniel Bojorquez was planning to open La Brasa meat parlor in Somerville. Does this mean the end is near for the Natick location, too? Hmm. Maybe Staff Meal can open a permanent location in the old Back Bay space?

Goodbye Sweet Staff Meal [Rising Sun]
Sel de la Terre Closes Its Last Boston Location [EB]

Read more posts by Kara Baskin

Filed Under: closings, openings, ramen, rising sun tavern, sel de la terre, staff meal

Credit: Wikipedia

Black holes, being black holes, aren't the easiest things to take pictures of. Not only are they black (absorbing nearly all the light that falls on them) , they also tend to be small, far away, and surrounded by things that are very very bright. The only way we're going to get a good look at one from here is to use as large and sensitive a radio telescope as we possibly can, and the largest radio telescope you can possibly build on Earth is, well, a radio telescope the size of Earth itself.

This sounds a little nuts, but astronomers want to build a virtual Earth-sized radio telescope by linking together a bunch of different radio telescopes all over the world. They're not going to try to fill in all the gaps (which ould involve covering most of the planet with antennas), but they don't have to: thanks to a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, an array of widely separated telescopes that are carefully synchronized can emulate (in some respects) one single telescope the size of the maximum distance between the farthest apart telescopes in the array.

Astronomers say that if they can get this thing to work, they'll point it at the center of our galaxy (26,000 light years away) and try to snap the first ever photo of the gigantic black hole (with a mass of about 4 million suns) that we're pretty sure lives there. What we want to see, specifically, is the outline of the black hole's event horizon, which should be a perfect circle in a radio image. If it's not, then Einstein's general theory of relativity is going to have some explaining to do.

We've already seen plenty of visual evidence for black holes; for example, here's a Hubble pic of what's assumed to be a black hole at the core of a galaxy:

Of course, we're not seeing the black hole itself in this image: we're seeing all the energy that the stuff falling into the black hole is giving off. The radio image, on the other hand, will be the first ever of the event horizon of a black hole proper.

Astronmers are meeting this week to plan out how the project is going to work, and they say that this new system, called the Event Horizon Telescope, could start producing pictures within five years.

Via Space.com

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So you know, who has the best goalie mask in hockey this season, by Katie Baker. I'm going with Ben Scrivens.

What to drink with heavy beef nachos at that Super Bowl party? Eric Asimov tells you.

Skeleton Damask stencil wallpaper installation by Skull-A-Day's Noah Scalin.

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

I don’t know if she had been sumbited, but Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria.

A recording from 1905 of one of the 19th century’s most famous opera singers Adelina Patti singing “The Last Rose of Summer“, a song based on the poem by Irish poet Thomas Moore. Although the sound quality isn’t great and her voice is past its prime (she was 62 yrs old), through the dust and scratches we can hear glimpses of why Giuseppe Verdi, writing in 1877, described her as being perhaps the finest singer who had ever lived. Patti’s piano accompanist for this recording and others she made at the time, Landon Ronald, recalls his experience working with her: “When the little (gramophone) trumpet gave forth the beautiful tones, she went into ecstasies! She threw kisses into the trumpet and kept on saying, ‘Ah! Mon Dieu! Maintenant je comprends pourquoi je suis Patti! Oh oui! Quelle voix! Quelle artiste! Je comprends tout!’ [Ah! My Lord! Now I understand why I am Patti! Oh yes! What a voice! What an artist! I understand everything!] Her enthusiasm was so naïve and genuine that the fact that she was praising her own voice seemed to us all to be right and proper.” (Wikipedia) MP3 Download Internet Archive Link SIGN UP TO THE [...]

The prevalance of Jane Austen's most famous couple in literature

THE bicentenary of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" on January 28th celebrates one of fiction's most popular romantic couples. In a light-hearted attempt to measure the relative appeal of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy over the years, we have compared the number of times each is mentioned in books or journals published in Britain. Elizabeth Bennet, as the Jane Austen Society points out, is seen as "the world's sweetheart". This might explain the steady frequency with which her name is mentioned. The brooding Mr Darcy, however, did not fare well during the time of women's suffrage or second-wave feminism. But in the 1990s he bounced back, thanks to a BBC television series featuring Colin Firth in a wet shirt and Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones's Diary" (the film adaptation of which also starred Mr Firth). Numerous literary adaptations have followed. The novel itself has been re-imagined as a murder mystery and a zombie invasion, while Mr Darcy is now the solo star of countless spin-offs. For romantics, the lines could also represent heartbeats: Elizabeth's simmering desire and Mr Darcy's ardent love fighting with his better judgment. Luckily for them, Austen liked happy endings.

A Secret Service dog tragically died over the weekend while in the line of duty.

The Secret Service dog fell to its death on Saturday night while investigating a six-story parking lot across the street from the Ritz-Carlton in New Orleans, where Vice President Joe Biden was speaking, CNN reports.

Federal agents and police rushed the dog, a Belgian Malinois, to a Metairie veterinary hospital around 6 p.m., according to WWLTV. Despite the efforts of the veteranarians, the dog could not be revived.

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Rick Scully posted a photo:

Book published in 1891 and given to me by @jessamyn. It is also dedicated to "the friends of Georget Egret"

Artist Adam Harvey has spent the last four years designing counter-surveillance fashion. Tim Maly reviews his work:

His latest addition is a collection of clothes and accessories called Stealth Wear. The collection includes an anti-drone hoodie and scarf that are designed to thwart the thermal-imaging technology widely used by UAVs, and the OFF Pocket, a phone accessory that blocks all incoming and outgoing communication from your phone. Harvey’s earlier work includes the CamoFlash, a set of powerful LEDs that trigger when it detects camera flashes, turning the tools of the paparazzi against them, and CV Dazzle, a experiment with makeup and hair styles that will confuse facial-recognition systems.

How Harvey explained the philosophy of the project to Maly:

Conformity is what surveillance wants and fashion is anti-conformist. And I think the decision to conform or not happens on a personal level. The projects I’ve been working on act upon surveillance in a way that exploits a vulnerability and makes this vulnerability accessible through using something ordinary (hair, makeup, or fashion) in a non-conformist and legal way.

More images here. 

(Image by Adam Harvey/ahprojects.com)

[source]

People seem to be calling for felids after the kerfuffles of the last few days.  Well, I feel your pain. Here, via Matthew Cobb, is a Cat With Eyebrows, from a picture tweeted by Kash Farooq.  (Click to enlarge.)

He looks so worried!!!

Every year cats in New Zealand destroy our native wildlife. The fact is that cats have to go if we really care about our environment.

Tim Kreider on the how Amtrak's Quiet Car isn't all that quiet sometimes.

Eventually I found myself on the wrong side of the fight. I was sitting in my seat, listening to music at a moderate volume on headphones and writing on my laptop, when the man across the aisle -- the kind you'd peg as an archivist or musicologist -- signaled to me.

"Pardon me, sir," he said. "Maybe you're not aware of it, but your typing is disturbing people around you. This is the Quiet Car, where we come to be free from people's electronic bleeps and blatts." He really said "bleeps and blatts."

"I am a devotee of the Quiet Car," I protested. And yes, I said "devotee." We really talk like this in the Quiet Car; we're readers. "I don't talk on my cellphone or have loud conversations -- "

"I'm not talking about cellphone conversations," he said, "I'm talking about your typing, which really is very loud and disruptive."

Tags: Amtrak   Tim Kreider

Claude Debussy and Erik Satie

CATNIP: EGRESS TO OBLIVION?: Debuting at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and available only on YouTube

As surprising as this may seem, there are many photographs of Paris shot in direct color from 1907 to 1930. The Autochrome process was developed by the Lumière brothers in 1903. The technique was based on a composite of black and white emulsions passed through a series of color filters (red, blue and green) designed based on potato starch. The presence of these filters reduced the sensitivity of the emulsion, where the length of the pause time and difficulty required to capture movement. The first shots were carried out in Morocco in 1907. The process was a such a hit such that the Lumière factories produced up to 6000 plates per day! This technique was abandoned in 1935 in favor of the process Kodachrome, then Agfachrome the following year. The banker Albert Kahn, who wished to leave an imprint of the period, sent photographers across five continents to create the "Archives of the Planet". Its foundation is now a base of approximately 72,000 Autochromes. The images published on this site are among others the work of Leon Gimpel, Stephane Passet, Georges Chevalier and Auguste Leon. They offer an unexpected proximity with this century that imagination restores in black and white. This site is a collection of Autochrome made ​​in Paris between 1914 and 1918.

Soledad O’Brien tricks Kingsley Browne into supporting racial segregation in the military, and in doing so draws a strong link between the arguments against women in combat and the arguments of the 1940s against African-Americans in combat. (The same applies to similarities to arguments against ending DADT.) Being familiar with Kingsley Browne’s work (lots of publication on why women will ruin war if allowed in combat), he totally deserved the takedown. Below is an excerpt, but watch the video for full impact.

O’BRIEN: I’m going to read a little bit from this colonel who said this: ‘The army is not a sociological laboratory; to be effective it must be organized and trained according to the principles which will ensure success…Experiments are a danger to efficiency, discipline and morale and would result in ultimate defeat.’

KINGSLEY BROWNE: I think that that’s true. I don’t think it’s true with respect to ultimate defeat of the United States in a war. I think what’s likely to occur though is the defeat of the United States in small battles, which means people are going to die. […]

O’BRIEN: That was from a guy in 1941. And that argument was about not allowing black people in the military. That was his exact argument of why blacks should not be allowed in the military, because it’s a danger to efficiency and discipline and morale and will result in ultimate defeat.

via ThinkProgress

Carcasses have been sent to a forensics lab for analysis but officials suspect this could be another case of robins eating too many fermented berries.

On October 19, 2012, Twitter turned censor. In response to complaints from the Union of French Jewish Students, Twitter pulled tweets that used the hashtag #UnBonJuif, or “a good Jew,” which had been worked into slurs and jokes, some using concentration-camp photographs as illustrations.