Category: 4-in-4

My plan for the final day was to try to build a small, inexpensive device that could be attached to a pair of sneakers. Each time the sneakers were worn, the device would increment a counter, so I would know how many days the shoe had “lived.” It would be a way to track my own wearing patterns, but also add a personal quality of age to an arguably inanimate object. When I mentioned this idea in the initial 4-in-4 meeting, people seemed to like it, and Rob Faludi suggested the possibility of using RFID (radio frequency identification), which sounded simple and kinda genius. The more I thought about it, the more the aging/tracking/rfid concept connected to another potential idea for my upcoming thesis, which has to do with individual inventory and has been marinating in my mind for a couple weeks now. Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to build any device; instead, I spent day 4 researching online, posting additional documentation for the first three days, and trying to set up a spring internship. All in all, 4-in-4 has been a real productive warm-up for this last semester, and I’m glad we made it happen.

For the third day, Alex Feng and I teamed up and worked on a Rube Goldberg machine using, a camera, LEGOS, Peanut M&M’s, and lots of found items around ITP (mainly from the old “junk shelf”). After seeing the IDEO chain effect challenge and a recent Honda Accord commercial, I was inspired to look at more examples and build one myself. The gist of our machine was to take a picture of a the user as s/he tries to catch a piece of candy with their mouth.

While playing with objects and learning about physics is real fun, I also really liked this project because the result is a big metaphor of sorts — lots of events in our lives, maybe all, can be perceived as a chain reaction. We can see where things go wrong, and where things work out fluidly. . . etc. Anyway, here’s Alex using the machine and some photos it took of some daring volunteers below. Thanks everyone! note: Alex + Liesje were successful, hence take the top positions. The rest of us missed. Womp, womp.

rube goldberg: photo candy catch from ben yee on Vimeo.

For the second day, I wanted to get out and about and use my legs and eyes. My original idea was to make a list of items to be captured on video, and then go capture them. The process would have been great as a group competition or collaboration, but everyone at 4-in-4 had their own awesome projects to work on for the day, so I adapted the concept to be an exercise for one. I walked and subway’d around the city with a Sanyo Xacti h.264 cam in hand and grabbed any bit of interesting motion that I could find (about 50 clips). Observation with a specific, unusual perspective in mind is super fun. Throughout the day, I kept thinking about how fortunate I was to be spending time in such a way.

I was thinking (a) I could edit the clips I took and slap them on a map according to where they were filmed, or (b) I could just sequence them together with an appropriate tune as a soundtrack. Although I didn’t get to do either of these yet, rest assured that the clips won’t go to waste. If nothing else, they’ll hopefully come in real handy as inspiration for my “methods of motion” class starting a week from today (one week! ay!). For my own reference, starting at ITP, I walked down Broadway, covered some of the Village until mainly 6th ave / 4th St, went up to Times Square, over to Grand Central, out to Queens on the some train called the 7, and then back to ITP. Good times, good times.

A little time has passed. Given shortage of time, I went with option B. Surprise, surprise. The tune is called “Meals To Dinner Time Prelude” from Asheru and Blue Black’s album called “Soon Come.” There’s no obvious correlation, but I enjoy the flow and hope you do too.

For only being Tuesday (well, Wednesday technically), this week has been ridiculously busy, but still pretty great.

You can follow 4-in-4 here and see my cheese here.

. . . means that day 2 can only be better, right? Maybe. ; ) Today, I wanted to build a unique, flavorful “about page” for my personal website (yeeality.com). I intended to entertain the user with an animated story about my place in the world. It would start on my year of birth, move to present, and then theorize about great things to come in the future. It was going to share some random facts about me and demonstrate a side of my personality that might not come across in a resume or through projects — I’m often sarcastic and don’t take myself seriously much of the time. Well, in this effort, I failed miserably. I’m ok with the missed shot though. You can see the swf file it in all its “glory” below. Click the globe to play. On the bright side, it was good to be in the company of some awesome itp’ers.