Josh Rab's Blog

Multi-Functional Spaces – 11/19/09

p0indext0r — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:43:07 +0000

Efficiency in home design is paramount. Space has a cost just like materials and labour. When designing the designer should always consider the space in which he/she is working in. When space is limited we must think of a creative way of “adding” space. By creating spaces with multiple uses we can increase each spaces usefulness, and give an “added” space effect. You can fuse your kitchen with the dining room, or bedroom with living room and even the bathroom with the laundry room. Each room has its own needs, it is up to the designer to find an elegant way of combining each rooms needs into the other. In some cases you could combine more than two rooms.

Stitching communities together – 11/13/09

p0indext0r — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:16:10 +0000

It is important to have a broad view of the impacts our designs have on an area. Bridges, freeways, train tracks and even large lots of undeveloped land can act as walls separating communities. Understanding that boundaries are not just physical but also mental or political. A bridge may have free room underneath for people to cross under, but the bridges large structure blocks the view from one side to another; much like a wall. Train tracks act more like a mental wall; you can see thru to the other side, but you get a feeling of difference from one side to the other. Our job as designers is to take our bridges and railways and freeways and fuse them into a community rather than alienating them. Instead of being “walls” these areas can be designed to attract people, allowing people to gather together. As designers we want to bring our target audience together, not separate them…(generally anyways).

Is Sustainable Design Ugly? – 11/08/09

p0indext0r — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:22:50 +0000

The idea of sustainable design being ugly or beautiful is not so much limited to the type of building, but rather the creativity of the designer. I believe it is harder to create a “beautiful” sustainable building just because there are less materials listed under the sustainable category and some materials may be considered unpolished. More and more materials are being added to the sustainable list and designs for sustainability are becoming more and more desired. Desirability for a sustainable building, in my opinion, started with the environmentally friendly aspect; now a days sustainable design is becoming desired more for its aesthetic and environmental friendliness.

Nano Tecnology – 11/04/09

p0indext0r — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:04:29 +0000

Although this may not be pertinent I felt the need to write about a touchy subject by some, nano technologies. Gadgets and technologies of the 21st century have been getting increasingly smaller and from what I can tell people view this as both intriguing and dangerous. Intriguing in the sense that we continue to see humanities amazing ability to invent new things that further our limitless knowledge. Dangerous because we have created technologies so small that they can not be seen. People generally fear what they can not see. Imagine millions of tiny robots entering your body healing all illnesses and possibly even extending our lives by X number of years, intriguing no doubt. Imaging now millions of unseen soldiers slowly eating you from the inside out, no way out and nothing you can do but wait. Humanity is inherently evil. Free will has given humanity the means to learn/create great things, however free will comes with a price. There will always exist ‘bad’ people in the world. There fore technology must be both revered and feared because technology has two faces; a face of righteousness and a face of damnation.

Effects of Globalization – 10/16/09

p0indext0r — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:39:16 +0000

I’ve known about globalization for many years now; I grew up with it. I have studied it through out highschool and even in detail in university. It wasn’t untill I read Ellen Dunham-Jones’s article, Economic sustainability in the Post-Industrial Landscape, that I started weighing the scale between good and bad effects of globalization. Here are a few.

Good: we have a diverse economic web which allows us to purchase what we want when we want and from whom ever we want it from. Once we categorize things on a global level we begin to blur the lines of countries and merge the idea of a single nation. Globalization, to me, is humanities best way of forging a relative world peace.
Bad: globalization means global travel and because we depend on fossil fuels for travel we end up destroying our planet a little more each time we start our planes, trains or automobiles. Although globalization may seem good for some it certainly doesn’t appeal to everyone and when the ideas of some clash with the ideas of others it is a safe bet that conflict will arise.

The above examples are just a few of hundreds of points brought up by the complexity of globalization. They are meant for you to reflect and think of your own pros and cons to globalization. Perhaps you can be encouraged the same way I was.

Cartesian Paradigm of Use – 10/02/09

p0indext0r — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:00:07 +0000

I have at times found myself intrigued by the thought of witnessing human evolution on a large scale within my lifetime. Such a profound change in lifestyle would have to occur to accommodate our newly evolved selves. As an example you can think of the impact on the world in the Hollywood production of X-men and the sudden change of social interactions.

While reading Barbara Allen’s Cyborg Theories and Situated Knowledges I realized that I have been witnessing human evolution everyday. Technology has become humanities next evolutionary step. I believe this theory to be true and very eye opening. Everyday we use an object that on its own has no purpose but when used becomes a part of our bodies and an extension of our ability. Humans have evolved to the point where we can “grow” back limbs, travel vast distances and even leap to other worlds beyond our own. Technology has no end, therefore we have no limits.

Multi-Form Design With Functionality – 09/24/09

p0indext0r — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:14:00 +0000

Today we explored the idea of The Compass House, a sectional design home that can be changed depending on a few different conditions; conditions like which side the lot of land had street access. The house had 4 different layouts. The Compass House allows diversity in form to suit the individual family while allowing developers to build large communities in a relatively short period of time. The current problem presented of course is the amount of diversity available. With only 4 different layouts a neighborhood of homes would begin to look very similar. The idea of a sectional home needs to be expanded to the point where you could create a home to suit your personal tastes but also balance with the functionality of the ecosystem you live in.

Imagine instead of buying a home you bought a lot of land and depending on the size, shape, location of that lot you would go to your local walmart and purchase different sections of your new home or even take your old home with you. The sections could connect in hundreds of ways to form a house different from all your neighbors. Everyone could be their own architects. Imagine the diversity of homes on your street changing every year, homes just as different as the people who live in them.

Introduction to Ecology and Design – 09/17/09

p0indext0r — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:46:57 +0000

Back in the old days we use to sit and wait for our teacher to call out our name, as to earn their check mark of approval. The future is now boys and girls! We’ve gone digital and now my attendance is calculated using a set structure of pixels. Otherwise known as my face.

The main ideas I recall from todays lecture are that nature can be believed as an entity (Gaia) and everything within our earth-bound system has a connection with the things around it and a connection with Gaia as a whole. We must study the interactions between things in order to understand them. Once we understand the interactions taking place day-to-day and place to place we can then reproduce them. By reproducing the correct interactions in our built environments we can insure a healthier environment and more importantly an ecosystem that can continually support human life. Remember cyber friends, we need the Earth to survive…but the Earth doesn’t need us.