Matthew Borgatti

As a followup to my previous post, I’m going to try and elaborate more on the individual techniques I use for tricking my brain into acting like the focused productivity machine that it certainly isn’t. Here are a selection of tools and tricks I’ve used to good effect when trying to keep my productivity up and my wasted time down. Some of them work incredibly well with me. Some of them are tricks of last resort I use when I can’t seem to get focused any other way. Your mileage may vary.

Calendars

I try to plan out every moment of my day at least a couple of days in advance. Sometimes it gets all wonky and I have to spend time shuffling and juggling tasks as things get thrown about by unforseen circumstances, but sticking it out is worth it especially for the record of what I actually spend my time doing. This is all motivated by the need to prioritize tasks without having to decide, when I find myself with a free moment, what the most important thing I could be doing it is. If I break down tasks into actionable chunks and then sort them into my schedule based on priority and accounting for deadlines I can actually get a substantial block of crucial work done without having to choose it over more fun but less urgent projects. The schedule is law and what’s on the schedule shall get done. Looking a week ahead and popping in a few slots where I have to do some research for a pending project or manage some tedious CAD I’ve been avoiding helps make sure they don’t get put off further.

I tend to schedule in more time than is truly necessary to complete each goal so that I can use the remaining bits to faff around, check my email, and generally reward myself for keeping on track. Cool down time between highly disparate tasks seems to be pretty important to prevent burning out. I use a pretty extensive task list to manage what goes on the calendar.

Task Lists

I’ve got a Google doc that I share with a few friends who are more-or-less in a blood cult of getting shit done. We check in with each other to see how we’re progressing on our goals, what we’ve accomplished during the week, and where we are in our long term plans. The doc includes a long list of tasks I want to get to divided up into a few categories. The general outline is as follows:

• What am I doing right now?
• Queue for little stuff I’ve just remembered but can’t break from what I’m doing right now to manage
• My goals for today
• My goalcheck buddy’s goals for the week
• What I’m writing about for #blogday
• Long term goals
• Emails that need writing
• Recurring tasks (blogging, drawing, exercise, boning up on programming, and managing my store)

Everything that doesn’t fit neatly into the list gets put in a database I use to keep track of ideas. I like  having a separate document that acts as long term storage for things that just aren’t actionable, don’t have a clear goal or deadline, or will take up too much time in huge chunks so can’t be easily filtered into the calendar. If things grow an extensive tail of notes they get spun out into their own document.

I try to keep my daily goals down to three items. I find that splitting focus too much or trying to bite off too much daily quickly leaves me burnt out. I like keeping completed tasks on the list for a while with a strikethrough so I can revel in them before deleting the entry. It gives me a pretty good barometer of what I’ve been up to and how well I’ve been keeping focused.

3 Kinds of Time

Amanda Wozniak once shared some excellent advice with me about how she manages her time. She said that there are essentially three ways for her to tackle a demand on her schedule: right now, on the calendar, and never. There are things that she can spare an hour for right now. If someone in her department rings her up with a question she doesn’t have to devote more than an hour to answering she almost universally has time for it. If it will take longer, it gets moved to a discrete date and block of time on the calendar. If things are pending, nebulous, and difficult to schedule, it’s very unlikely they’ll ever get tackled. I try to keep this in mind when scheduling things for myself. I try to turn big amorphous tasks into little, edible blocks of time.

Goal Check

This research article from Psychological Science suggests that a strong part of self motivation and avoiding procrastination is setting external rewards and consequences. It’s definitely worth a read. It says that we have more-or-less two sets of motivations: one when we actually set our goals and another when our mettle is being tested. To quote from the article directly:

"... individuals have a set of preferences, X, atsome point in time (or under a certain set of environmental conditions) and a different set of preferences, Y, at some other point intime. In the case of the crème brûlée, dieters may prefer not to consume it (Y) before going to the restaurant, prefer to eat it (X) when ordering dessert and consuming it at the restaurant, and prefer not to have eaten it after the meal is over (Y). This type of systematic preference reversal is often described by hyperbolic time discounting(e.g., Ainslie, 1975; Kirby, 1997; Laibson, 1997), under which immediately available rewards have a disproportionate effect on preferences relative to more delayed rewards, causing a time-inconsistent taste for immediate gratification. Crème brûlée poses but a minor self-control problem. Examples of more important self-control problems include not exercising enough, scratching a rash, nail biting,smoking, engaging in unsafe sex, abusing drugs, overspending, procrastination, and so forth."

The article goes on to say that imposing firm, evenly spaced deadlines with strong consequences for lateness is optimal for getting the most work done. Work done on those kinds of schedules also ends up being much higher quality and less stressful than the work produced on a self imposed schedule.

I’ve found that social pressure is a great way of creating external motivating factors that help curtail my own distractions. Having another person expecting progress, setting rewards and punishments, and helping me be realistic about what I can accomplish has been incredibly helpful. So, every week, I have a half-hour video meeting to check up and plan the next handful of days. I’ll also do a coworking session if there’s some incredibly tedious work that needs getting done. If I’ve got a dozen emails to write it helps to have someone looking over my shoulder making sure they get written.

Pomodoro

The Pomodoro Technique is a way of managing tasks with a timer. The general principle is that you have a 25 minute timer; you set the timer every half hour and work solidly until the timer rings and then use the next five minutes to mess around and relax before setting the timer again. Occasionally I’ll employ this one, but I’ve found a system that works a bit better for the type of work I do. Since getting into the zone and hitting my stride for CAD work or illustrations can take the better part of an hour before I am at my peak, I will often work to a playlist. I find that queuing up an hour and a half of music and working until the playlist ends gives me a good way to space out and produce without forgetting to look up and give myself a rest to prevent burning out. This mix is one of my particular favorites.

Distraction

Over the years I’ve gotten a good sense for my own attention span. I find that I need a little distraction going on in the background to keep from switching channels when I get frustrated with the thing I’m working on. If I’m thoroughly engrossed in a design and suddenly Photoshop crashes losing me an hour of my time having an audiobook playing somehow helps insulate me from rage quitting and spending the next couple of hours posting snarky comments on Twitter.

However, there is another side to this. Things like chatting and video seem to take up way too much bandwidth. If I’m trying to watch a show or IM while working chances are I’ll be incredibly prone to switching tasks rapidly, surfing the web idly, and wasting time.

Rewards, Forgiveness, and Micro Tasks

Don’t forget that all of this is in aim of doing things you want to do, climbing the big mountain of your goals in life, and getting to that sometimes distant shore called happiness. Don’t punish yourself with a mountain of work and then punish yourself again for not being able to finish it. Schedule time to reward yourself. Don’t isolate yourself and blow off friends because you’re too married to your calendar. Remember to be flexible and if you end up getting behind forgive yourself like you’d forgive your favorite people. Learn to work new habits into your life by starting small. Instead of trying to go from zero to exercising an hour every day, start with five minutes of exercise every day to make a hole for it in your life and then build on it by extending the time you exercise a little each day.

Although these techniques aren’t the balm for every one of the world’s problems, they keep me from falling off cliffs and crashing through deadlines. Let me know if you’ve found a particular GTD system or method that keeps you performing at your peak over on Twitter.

Photo Credits:

Calendar Round by vbecker, on Flickr
My to do list is healed and in use! by robstephaustralia, on Flickr
TARD1S not TARDIS by yksin, on Flickr
Extensions by Marcin Wichary, on Flickr
Pomodoro Technique (illustration) by Michael Zero Mayer, on Flickr
img_0054 by Zlatko Unger, on Flickr
flossers by nooccar, on Flickr

Recently I was interviewed by Make Magazine for their series Meet the Makers. You can listen to the podcast here. What follows is some extra links, photos, and resources that help illustrate the projects I mentioned in the interview.

I was incredibly flattered when Mark Frauenfelder asked me if I wanted to be one of the makers interviewed for the MAKE Podcast. I jumped at the chance. Now, having concluded the interview just a few minutes ago I wanted to share some links to the projects I mentioned, offer up a little further reading, and provide downloads for the open source designs I alluded to during my chat with Mark.

Here is a picture of the metal rod tensegrity structure I mentioned. Here’s a photo of the load bearing one that was a class project way back in college.

I talked for a bit about Smooth-On, the company that makes a whole bunch of mold making and casting projects, and how they had a tutorial on getting a metal look using cast plastic and metalized powder. I’ve found the relevant section inside one of their Youtube videos here. You might also want to look into the SFX powder pigment Pearl-Ex for playing with adding cool colors and effects into your casting/sculpting projects.

If you’d like to find out more about my huge mobile pipe organ project, The Anywhere Organ, you can find pictures up on Flickr, a running record of the progress I’m making up on its Tumblr, video of it in action here, and downloads for the design on Thingiverse.

I also had a chance to talk about my Bokode at Home project. It’s a derivation of MIT’s Bokode project which was done through Ramesh Raskar’s Camera Culture group. The files I developed, some laser cut plans, and some Bokode patterns I drew up are all available to download off of Thingiverse. The project I mentioned that used film as a way of making tiny tiny printed codes is on Flickr here. Look through that photostream around that same date for more details on the method.

The silver TARDIS ring I designed is available to buy on my Etsy store. I’ve got some documentation on how it was made and the different versions I designed here and here. The company I use to print my high resolution jewelry and cast the metal is called Best-Cast. They’re very quick with turning digital files into finished jewelry pieces, but sometimes communication is a problem. I’d recommend them if you’ve already had some experience in metalsmithing and really know what you’re looking for. I’ve also used JR Casting for projects like the Bioshock Belt Buckles and my Laser Cut Leather goggles. They were really patient with helping me design my pieces and getting the best possible quality castings when I was just starting out.

You can find more detail on the Fairytale Fashion project I worked on with Diana Eng on my site and over on the official Fairytale Fashion site. The handcuffs I made are available for download on Thingiverse and you can catch a video of them in action here.

My own company, Sleek and Destroy has two branches. I love manufacturing methods and ideas. I love taking a problem or concept from the theoretical stage all the way to the point where I’ve got a working physical product. So, on the store I sell a bunch of jewelry and objects I want in my life. If you have a similar nerdy bent as I do, I think you’ll appreciate them. However, I’m also a consulting designer; a hired mercenary swinging in to tackle challenges and right the wrongs of a cruel and capricious world. If you have an ipossible seeming project in need of a gunslinging do-everything maker, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a line through sm.rah@m

Learn more about me and what I do over on the About page and be sure to follow me on Twitter (@gianteye).

Leader photo and goggles by Mike Estee.

So, guilt is a powerful motivating force in my life. I’m pretty adept at performing complex mental ninjutsu on myself to weasel my way out of things I should be doing, that are good for me, but I’ve got no burning desire to do. Take flossing, for example. It’s a trivial task that has a pretty substantial benefit in terms of reducing the guilt I feel about generally boycotting my teeth after losing my retainer some time towards the end of high school, and reducing the number of days per week brushing a bit too hard yields slasher fiction levels of upsetting sink imagery. Yet, there’s a routine I’ve developed to work myself around and out of the desire to floss. It’s like taking a mental detour around my sense of duty and pragmatism which usually arrives at the junction of dorking around on the internet and checking my email.

This is why I create structures outside of myself for enforcing the things I want to nail down, and shunning the stuff I want to get rid of. The way I see it, the distance between an action you want to perform and the final result is a kind of switchboard. Some of the terminals are in your brain, some are in the outside world. Your own willpower is one of many factors influencing what can actually get done, and it’s a fragile, fallible, and prone to fatigue, as one famously counter intuitive study proved. Relying on it alone is a mug’s game.

Say your goal is to accurately store a long string of numbers. You could try and do this in hundreds of ways. You might write them down so you could retrieve them later. You could create something like a PAO reference system to store the data mentally by converting fairly meaningless digits into imagery that sticks easily. You could try and extend the mental tape you write numbers on, called digit span, by temporarily cross wiring it with bits of your brain that manage remembering things you hear: repeating the numbers to yourself out loud. Interestingly, people who have damage to Broca’s area, a part of the brain that is associated with forming speech, are often rendered mute. However, they are often able sing what they’re unable to say. There’s a pretty detailed article on the effect up on PubMed.

My favorite system for getting my “me” to do things I want to have done but don’t want to do is to inject a new flavor of guilt into the mix. I seem to have become immune to my “you should really do this because it’s good for you” vector, but seem to have no such antibodies for the “other people are counting on you” strain. Therefore, committing to do something with a group of people who all help enforce a reasonably strict framework of deliverables and deadlines makes the motivation problem pretty trivial. I feel compelled to do the thing because letting other people down is much less palatable than letting myself down.

That’s why a group of friends (@waaronw, @ohthatnumi, and myself) created #blogclub. Essentially we all agreed that we were bad at writing. Not that we are having trouble getting our thick Cro-Magnon foreheads around grammar and syntax. More, we’re bad at the finer art of fluently expressing what we intend using the written word. We all want to get better at conveying, committing, and knowing when to stuff the inner editor that tells you you’re crap down into a hole with poisonous snakes. Also, we all want to be able to share our perspective, what we’ve learned, and what we’re excited by. We figured the best way to get better was to bite the bullet and get some practice in, hopefully generating some sophisticated pieces in the process. So, every Thursday we each post a substantial piece of writing up on our respective blogs and alert the world via twitter.

It can be intimidating having a finely tuned sense for the skill you want to posses, but lacking the expertise and practice to pull it off. That’s what caused me to neglect writing for so many years. I new what I wanted and it only reinforced how far behind my own work was. Ira Glass has some beautiful advice on closing the gap between your taste and your skills without editing yourself into the ground.

I find that touching base with incredibly motivated, productive people helps replenish my will to get shit done. I find that setting weekly goals, planning out my time in advance and putting it on my Gcal, and keeping a constantly updated list of pending tasks to filter in when the biggest and most pressing stuff has gotten tackled helps keep me moving forward and keeping my momentum up.

Having someone to do progress reports with is also incredibly useful. It helps me be honest with myself about what I can actually get done in a week. I have the habit of imagining I’m about twice as smart and productive as I am, but when I’ve got to give a summary of what I’ve accomplished in that time to another person I’m much more realistic about my goals. The intimidatingly talented and productive @willowbl00 has been an enormous help on this front.

After you’ve set up a system, plumbed the depths of your character for all the little nubs you need to rub to get the most out of your various strengths and nuances, and set off on a trajectory of maximum productivity, it’s important to remember that you’re still human and will inevitably screw up. You need to plan on what you do when stuff breaks down. You need to add in padding for when you get sick, get struck with a bad case of slack, or completely misjudge a project and the whole thing balloons out of control. Don’t let the past failures weigh around your neck like bricks in the swiftly rising tide of doubt. Let them be little promises to yourself to keep moving, to keep building, and to never let failure swamp you. Make them count. I find that going back to failed projects and publishing them, warts and all, helps lift the weight off of me. They become less haunting specters and more avenging angels, beating back the tendrils of suck that can drag me down.

Once again, I’m going to leave you with Ze:

Let me think about the people who I care about the most and how when they fail or disappoint me  I still love them, I still give them chances, and I still see the best in them. Let me extend that generosity to myself.

Urban spelunking, urban exploration, or building hacking (whatever you prefer) is absurdly fun, intensely rewarding, and just a shade dangerous. It’s simply finding isolated, unexplored, or abandoned places, and taking a look. I don’t think the adventure is complete without taking photos to share what you’ve discovered, but it isn’t essential to the process. I’d like to take a moment to try and convince you of the incredible potential of actually stepping inside that abandoned insane asylum you pass on the highway every day going to work. I’m also going to give you a primer on how to get in to these spots, what to do once you’re there, how to keep yourself safe, and the kind of tech you’ll want to bring along if you’re intent on gathering some fantastic photos.

I got my start in urban spelunking as a kid, exploring a plot of abandoned lots that were once going to become suburban homes. I can recall making up stories about the strange stuff the gaggle of kids I rode bikes with and I found while poking around trailers and peeking into the dark houses that skirted the railroad tracks. There was a bare patch of ground in a glade that had charred and melted bits of tracksuit welded to the dirt in places. We all thought it clearly outlined the shape of a body, that of a kid our age. We spun that one up into wild tales of suburban pranks gone wrong, bottle rockets up butts, and spontaneous combustion. It was intensely fun.

Now, I’m a bit more methodical about peering into abandoned places, but no less enthusiastic. I’ve got better tech, better tools, and am pretty good at climbing a fence or picking a lock when the situation requires. I’ve completed a few dozen successful spelunks and have come out the other side unscathed.

Do your research.

Start your urban spelunking adventure with some research. Gather info on the location you’re scouting out. See if other folks have visited it, what the location is like, what kind of security is around it, and how to get in. Although it may seem that abandoned sites are unloved and unvisited this isn’t the case for most of the places I’ve explored. Chances are someone’s given it a look and posted the results online.

If you see a spot you’re interested and have a little time to check up on it, take a look at its coordinates on Google Maps and see what’s nearby. This might give you the name of the location you want to search for. Also, search for “urban spelunking” along with the town name of wherever your intended site is. Chances are there’s a few locals who have blogged about it, or that it’s listed on a local culture site like Weird NJ.

I’d also recommend searching Forbidden Places, Talk Urbex, and Opacity.

Scope out the location.

Don’t blunder into an abandoned spot before giving it a proper check. Doing your reconnaissance right can save you a lot of trouble, and might even save your life. Do a sweep around the place first looking for fresh tire tracks, food containers or refuse that look pretty new, security personnel or other signs of life.

If there’s security on premises spend some time figuring out their routine. At the decommissioned naval base on Alameda Island the security would make their rounds at sunset, driving from building to building shining their search lights into every window facing the street. Before and after this sweep, though, they’d only ever come around for the occasional drive-by inspection every few hours unless someone called them in specifically. I was the victim of such an inspection one day while trying to learn the limits of my car’s emergency brake on one of the base’s vast stretches of uninterrupted tarmac (a test which, I’m certain, saved my life one icy night taking a blind turn on a darkened highway ramp). This meant that if you showed up just before magic hour you could have three hours of uninterrupted shooting with the sun pouring right into the windows making everything visible without the need for flashlights. Unfortunately if you’re around at night making your way through a building with flashlights will make it super obvious you’re in there to anyone looking from the street.

Squatters are another recurrent issue with your average spelunk. Real estate is expensive. Chances are this abandoned building is going to be valuable to someone. Every place on earth that promises at least a half hour of uninterrupted privacy will have been occupied by necking, drug smoking, beer quaffing teens at some point in the last ten days. Drug paraphernalia, beer cans, graffiti, and burnt things don’t necessarily indicate there’s anyone living in your spelunking destination. Food containers, clothing, furniture dragged from many rooms into a single spot, human effluent, and bedding are all signs of long term squatters who don’t usually take kindly to eager photogs tromping through their living room. If you spot a human nest, stop for a while and just listen for people. If you hear anyone but your friends moving about, it might be time to regroup and make your exit.

There’s always a chance that your chosen destination is, in fact, frequented by spelunkers such as yourself, as was the case for me when I visited Spreepark. If you encounter them be friendly, offer advice on the spots you’ve seen if you get the chance, and warn them if you’ve seen anyone else around the place. If you haven’t been sneaking around like a silent film villain or living out your Scooby-Doo fantasies things should go pretty amicably.

Always walk carefully, especially when walking above the ground level, and test your footing. I nearly fell through a rotting boardwalk that looked fairly solid on a recent adventure. Once a building has started to collapse there’s no telling where the next weakest point is. Your footsteps could send it over the tipping point, and it sucks to be on top of a hundred tons of sliding concrete. When muck and debris pile up it can easily obscure cracks or holes in the floor or hidden snares. Don’t try to photograph and move at the same time. Pick one or face the wrath of tree roots poking up from dirty linoleum catching you by the foot and introducing both you and your fancy camera to a delightful pratfall.

Bring the right tools.

Comfortable clothes that offer a bit of protection from the elements are the order of the day. I’m usually in jeans, a tshirt, and a dark hoodie with some army boots on to keep my feet from getting waterlogged just in case I end up in a puddle. Wear something you can run in that you wouldn’t cry over if it got cut up on some exposed rebar.

If you’re going to photograph the site, make sure to pack your gear in a bag that will be comfortable to wear while jumping over fences, getting caught in brambles, picking your way through broken window glass, and extricating yourself from knee high muck. I’d recommend packing a bag that you’d happily wear during a ten mile bike ride that won’t be bouncing wildly against your hip as your leg it away from the fuzz.

In keeping with this theme, reduce your camera gear to the fewest bits possible. Don’t bring along your charger, a dozen lenses, the tripod, and some light umbrellas. I tend towards bringing a 50mm lens for close up stuff and a telephoto lens for things I can’t get to. I bring some cloths, a spare battery, a spare memory card, and sometimes a ring light that fits on the end of my lens. I nearly never shoot on location with a tripod. If you know what to do with it and can get it out and break it down fast, I can picture it coming in handy.

You probably also want to bring spare batteries for your cell phone (mine doubles as my flashlight), snacks, and water. I once turned a quick dip behind a fence into a five hour exploration marathon. Plan for your adventure to get interesting.

If you do meet the authorities.

In my experience, security guards aren’t there to arrest everyone who comes trespassing on their turf. Chances are their job is to show you the door and get back to watching the place. It’s also pretty likely that spending the next six hours down at the station giving a statement while the police book you wasn’t what they wanted to do with their night.

If you do end up getting caught, be polite, tell them you didn’t think that the place was private property, and that you’re there for some reason other than arson, drug use, or ritualistic torture. This is where holding up your fancy camera comes in handy. Do your best to avoid meeting up with them by pausing to listen for engines, keeping on the lookout for flashlight beams pointed at you, and the beeping noise of walkie talkies. However, you can pad your chances even more by researching your site, finding out if it’s guarded, and doing your homework on the pattern of security.

What to take back.

Please take only pictures. Leave only footprints. Abandoned sites only last so long before they end up being ground into pebbles and turned into something ordinary. They’re only around for a brief window and it’s your job to make sure other spelunkers have the opportunity to get as much out of their adventure as you do out of yours.

If you plan an art project that integrates the abandoned structure, more power to you. Enhance the experience for another person by leaving something tangible or installing something captivating. However, if you simply have to take that broken porcelain doll you found in the bureau up on the top floor of an abandoned women’s boarding school, please don’t. Leave it for someone else to stumble on and appreciate just like you did. If you suck away the magic from these places and squirrel it away at home it makes urban exploration less magical for every person who comes after you.

Document your experience. Take lots of photos. These sites change drastically year to year as nature and neglect take their toll. It could be that the cool cascade of light falling down over the tiles of a army barracks shower will be a pile of rubble and soot next time you visit. Let the pictures stand in the place of the awesome loot you might otherwise have plundered.

Be good, be safe, and have adventures.

If you’d like to take a look at some shots from my urban spelunking expeditions, you can find them here, here, and here.

Early on in my days as a maker, I really struggled with documenting and publishing projects. Almost everything I make starts life as something I wanted to build, something I wanted the experience of playing with. Most often I build because building things is gratifying in and of itself, and the other aspects (recognition, money, internet fame) are ancillary. However, only ever being beholden to myself made for some pretty shoddy documentation. I have few if any photographs of my projects from college and my record of things before that is more or less nonexistent. Over time I’ve discovered that a huge motivating factor for me getting things well documented, taking time out to photograph a project in progress, and updating my records, is having other eyes on me. Having other people witness my work validates it, gives it context, and creates a network of fascinating relationships and interactions that help fuel the next piece.

I don’t think I need to emphasize how important documentation is. Objects have a nasty habit of being pretty solid and aren’t often seen hurtling through cables at the speed of information. I know, Thingiverse is neat, but if you truly want to convey the awesomeness of something to another human, it’s infinitely more likely that they’ll extrapolate the fact from a picture than take the time to print and assemble your design. So, if you want the world to feel the impact of your handmade steam powered arduino based self balancing stainless steel unicycle junkbot, you’re going to have to show them… by force if necessary.

How do you get the motivation to properly photograph every step of your process when you know it’s only going to be another message in a bottle thrown into a sea comprised of messages in bottles? How do you spend all the extra time when it’s being poured out into the land of wind and ghosts, never to be reclaimed, precious hours of your finite and fleeting life glugging down the swirling drain that is the dark sucking void called the past? You start by just doing it. Let me enumerate.

Pick up the Camera

One thing that’s been cool in my career as a person who puts stuff together is that as I get more people looking at current projects I can direct them to older ones that I’m especially charmed by. It’s really rewarding when I get a message that someone made their own version of Bokode @ Home or got their modded their guitar hero controller to light up. I still get them from time to time. My early projects built the foundation of readers and fellow makers that provide advice, attention, and support that fuel my current projects. I couldn’t have built The Anywhere Organ, which got an infusion of funding from a Kickstarter grant a few months ago, past the initial sketches without the good folks over at The Awesome Foundation looking at my body of work and determining that their investment would be put to good use. My first forays into photographing and publishing my projects have really paid off with a long record of my history as a maker. They also helped me build up the chops, techniques, and tools to make the finished documentation prettier and less painful.

Just break out that camera. Hit record on that webcam. Can’t stop every couple of minutes to take shots of what you’re working on? You can take timelapse from just about any usb camera using Dorgem. Each time you photograph and publish your results you’ll find yourself wishing you’d taken something a different way, stopped to set up your project so everything could be seen clearly, or any of a hundred little things that would have made the resulting pics more clear. Don’t let it discourage you. Just file those dogging suggestions away for the next time and then implement them.

Look Around You

There’s more to getting the making>publishing>feedback synergy loop going than knowing how to use a camera and having an Instructables account. Take a look at your peers. Take a look at people who both have a really good running record of their projects and produce really polished descriptive displays of the final product and copy them tenaciously. Chris Eckert is one of the best people I know for this. He produces beautiful prototypes, his methods are really lucid and understandable, and the final product is always astounding. Chris tends to remain outside of the view of the camera. His photographs are mechanical, descriptive, and do a very good job of showing the level of detail and consideration that goes into his work. Missmonster is another of my documentation idols. Although she doesn’t have as much of a central feed to specifically document her progress on projects, you can easily pick it up from her twitter pics. Also, she’s very good about posting consistent updates, talking about upcoming projects, and publishing awesome final product photos with good tags and links. She’s also much more involved in her photos, appearing on camera, having friends shoot her with her work, posing with her newest creations. I feel that this gives the viewer a sense of her personality along with her work, which can be good for developing a long term devoted fanbase, which she definitely has.

Find Peers. Assimilate Them.

When you’re starting out it’s helpful to become part of the conversation to start getting people interacting with your work. If you’re just another voice in a sea of voices you can get lost in the noise, but if you get engaged with a community you can start meshing yourself with a network of other folks all helping one another rise above it. I still have friends from my days as a teenage forum lurking illustrator, asking for crits and offering up detailed advice with the folks at the now defunct eatpoo. It was like a micro internet, where I honed my skills, learned to take both the good and bad comments with grace, and figured out how to convey myself online. As a maker, you might look to the Adafruit forums, which are always super responsive and friendly, and the comment threads over on Instructables.

Bite off Manageable Chunks

I’ve made enormous projects. I’ve made enormous deals of documenting them. I’ve turned the whole resulting morass into enormous tutorials and enormous websites. But, no matter what I do, there are still projects looming over me that have been completed, are in the can, and are just waiting for the proper writing/editing/composing to get out there into the world. There’s this enormous weight, all the elaborate plans I have for how exactly the internet will see them, that it keeps the original ideas from seeing the light of day. This should be avoided at all costs. Release early and release often. Play with new tools like video editing or Make: Projects as a way of getting better information to your audience, but don’t let it heap up until the point where you’re starting new projects to avoid publishing the old ones. You can always go back and write the definitive guide to everything once you’ve gotten the ball rolling.

The only caveat I’d like to add is that you want to provide GOOD information. Blurry pictures, dark crowded rooms full of random electronics, and long rambling rants about your project won’t exactly stun the masses. Aim for short, sweet, and descriptive. Chances are people will find you through other folks blogging, tweeting, and putting your stuff on Facebook. Blurry pictures are better than nothing at all, but strive for things that make it clear what your work is about. It sucks to have BoingBoing do an article on your hand cranked expresso maker hewn from a single knotty pine stump and not have a nice leader picture for the top of the post.

Choose your Format

Text isn’t immediate. If your project needs lots of text to properly convey your concepts, consider condensing what you can into diagrams & graphics. Break monotonous blocks of text up with photos that demonstrate what you’re after. Chances are a long and detailed text description can be made into a short chalkboard lecture video. Your goal is to convey. Create what elements are necessary to easily guide the viewer to understanding you. Tutorials can give people a rich sense of how much work you put into something, the brands of problems you came across, and how you solved them. Don’t be afraid to show your failures. Documenting them will help other people avoid them. You might save your audience hours of eyestrain by taking a concept that would be multiple pages of text, links, and graphics, and making a video instead. This brilliant Astronaut Ice Cream tutorial by Ben Krasnow is an excellent example of something that could be a long series of posts condensed into a quick and engaging video. Avoid the one-take dark Cloverfield shaky cam demonstration and narration video. Don’t take a camera, talk at it, and then point it at a circuit. Take some time to plan how you’re going to demo your creation and shoot video that supports it, not makes it look like Zapruder footage.

Make it Central

Taking an occasional photo or transcribing shop notes into a blog post are leagues better than nothing, but chances are your entire audience is online. Your conduit from your project to your viewers will likely be entirely through the web. Even when you showcase at Maker Faire or a gallery space, thousands more people will be viewing your work through the media these venues generate. Consider the web part of the medium of your piece and documentation as central to its process as prototyping or construction. Your work is alive when it’s in the minds of others. It lives through the memeplex of ideas that people toss between one another. If your goal is to impact that memeplex, you’ve got to convey your ideas clearly. This means planning ahead and taking the time to document right. Amanda Wozniak has a passionate talk on such matters here.

Call it

This all leads to a risky proposition. Eventually, you’ve got to let go of your project. You’ve got to call it done. You’ve got to take it out of the warm amniotic shop space and into the light where rowdy children and unruly Youtube commentators could rip it apart without even absorbing a wit of your intentions. I’ve faced this huge wall of daunting uncertainty and have decided that it’s easier to keep something close to my breast rather than have it suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. This has always been a mistake. Don’t peel away just before the good part. Sure, your project could crash and burn immediately after takeoff, but if you never let live out there in the wider world, then it has no chance to live at all.

When it’s hard to keep pushing forward and making stuff, I turn to Ze Frank:

When Duchamp wrote this [The Creative Act] in 1957, for most people that made things, spectators weren’t that easy to come by. Since then things have changed a little bit. For many of us that publish words or pictures or videos online the idea that the audience has a role to play seems very natural. That’s why I like eighty percent. When your eighty percent done, you have most of your work behind you. The end is in sight, but you’re not done and you can still hold onto the hope that this one will come out just right. At eighty percent I also start to become aware of the spectator. Start to become aware that what I made will soon be in someone else’s hands. And in the time that’s left I get ready to flush.

Bye-bye, doodie. Bye-bye.

Ceramic 3d printing exists. Every so often I’m reminded that I live in the future and that it is AWESOME. It needs some work, but egads is it great. As an experiment I printed a recent design, the foundation for some organ themed knuckle dusters, in Shapeways’ ceramic. It was remarkably light and very pretty but a bit on the flimsy side. My dad took a shine to them when I was showing them off around the workshop and he, meaning to look like a fifties gangser, donned them and then brought his knuckles into his palm. Cue crunchy noises and falling bits. Alas.

After some loving care and a bit of epoxy they were as good as nearly new. All in all they’re not the super durable porcelain I’d like them to be, but I’d definitely use the material again. I’ve been considering making some parts for a drink pouring robot in ceramic and this has not deterred me, though it has informed how I’ll pursue the design.

In other news I found out that the official bronze infused knuckle dusters that were a reward for backers of the Anywhere Organ Kickstarter got refused by Shapeways on grounds of being illegal in the country where the actual printing would take place. They were nice enough to send me a photo of the finished product in an email informing me the print would have to be chopped into little bits, jumped on, ground into a fine powder, sealed in concrete, the concrete block placed inside of a lead lined foot thick steel vault, and the vault fired into the heart of the sun. From what I can tell they came out nice, though.

I ended up getting some replacements printed through Ponoko. They seem like nice folks. I’ll have to wait and see what comes in the mail.

You can see more photos of the ceramic knuckles on Flickr.

I sit here, one of three folks all crammed on a futon, laptops steadily warming our laps, headphones plugged in, all persistently writing. To my right is designer, business owner, and furiously talented metal fabricator Danielle Hills. To my left is arch art director and wig stylist supreme Numidas Prasarn. The three of us collaborated to bring you these photos from Danielle’s most recent show, in which she exposed her brand new fashion line (The Executioner) to the world for the very first time.

You may recognize Danielle’s work from her previous collection, The Surgeon. She brings a unique, organic texture to her objects, while maintaining fairly simple geometries. The closest comparison I can think of offhand is Nervous System, but seen from a handcrafting perspective. You can view the whole series of shots I took of the event over on Flickr. There’s also some more coverage of the night here and here.

So, what does this have to do with cultivating style? Danielle’s work varies in materials, tools, techniques, and aesthetic choices. Although she works primarily in metal, her work ranges through a myriad of design languages while still feeling like part of a larger brand or ethos. How does she manage to knit a common thread into a wide range of work?

I feel that, like memory, strength, and grammatical acumen, having style is a matter of exercise. I mean that having a distinct artistic taste (something that you can apply to everything from the clothes you wear to the design of the packaging your company uses) that can be applied in a concerted and intentional way is a matter of practice.

I’ve always been a cynical, critical person. I spent hours as a kid going through reams of illustrations, trying to tease out the elements I liked in my favorites. I sketched, and tried to incorporate those brands of line use, those ways of conveying space. I would print out line drawings and trace over them, and then use my traced sketch as a reference to try and recreate the original freehand. I tried to turn the huge network of things that made me fall in love with a drawing into a discrete series of steps.

When you go through the world trying to separate the valuable and good from the worthless chaff that makes up the rest it’s important to turn that inner critic on yourself. Why is this pretty? Why is this good? What (and here’s where you fire up the petulant art student) exactly do you mean by beautiful? Over time you’ll learn how to discern different kinds of dislike, different kinds of love.

If you’re looking to get better at pinning down what style logo fits the handmade shoes you make out of recycled leather scraps, start saving up logos you like and compare them to their respective companies. Do it with lots of logos and make a habit of looking at your big pile of images daily. Over time you will become a connoisseur of “how logos fit their companies”.

A few years ago I decided I needed to have more focus on my personal style, on the elements I choose to integrate into the pieces I design. I felt that, even though I’d learned to use a whole bunch of techniques to make things pretty, the best possible design wasn’t simply a mashup of everything I’d learned all at once. I created a Tumblr, Pink Noise, specifically for things that are my style. They’re not necessarily things that are inherently pretty or things that have immaculate execution. They’re all images that make me feel how I want looking at my own designs to make me feel. Through collecting all of these images in once place, I’ve come to realize my own aesthetic is actually very different from the one I’d imagined I had, or what I end up drawing when left to my own devices.

When I had the chance to step back and get some perspective on my own taste, it made me think about what my taste actually was independent of the techniques I’d learned to execute.

Many of you will be familiar with the tall, elegant Sapporo steel Sapporo can pictured all over this post.  It’s a lovely tapered pint glass shape, with subtle creases every half inch along its surface. You might be curious as to why cans are almost never this shape, how the standard beer can is made, and what sets this one apart from a manufacturing perspective. In this post, I’m going to hunt through the clues left on the can itself to diagnose how this thing was made, and how the manufacturing process elegantly dictates the product’s final form.

The story of the standard aluminum can is fascinating. It goes from a simple disc of aluminum metal to a fully formed can in a scant few steps. How It’s Made has done a very complete diagnosis of the process, and The Engineer Guy has a brilliant video describing the function of the pull tab. However, the process for making one of them has almost nothing to do with the construction of one of these steel cans.

When an aluminum can is being formed, a press pushes incredibly hard on a disc of metal, forming the bottom of the can and causing a thin wall of metal to come shooting up the sides of the press’s cylinder. This is why all aluminum cans have such a regular shape. They’re more or less extrusions. This isn’t the only way aluminum can be formed. There are aluminum bottles, which are most often cast and welded or made via metal spinning, and hybrid can bottles, which are formed through an extreme case of the necking process that’s used to put the lids on your standard pop can. However, the utterly ubiquitous aluminum pop can is the most common by far.

The manufacture of the Sapporo steel can has much more to do with a soup can than it does a beer can. Soup cans are made from flat sheets of steel that are rolled into shape, fused at the seam where the rolled cylinder meets itself, and then capped top and bottom. You can tell the steel Sapporo can is made in this fashion because it has a raised seam at the back that’s made from a slightly different metal than the body of the can. After everything’s rolled and fused the can gets necked down on the top and bottom. You can see this in how the ridges disappear at the point where the diameter starts to reduce just before the top and bottom seams. This implies that a couple of rollers squeezed down on the can as it was turned, drawing the metal out and shrinking the can as it passed between them.

The ridges that you feel along a soup can provide strength, preventing the metal from oil-canning. I’m sure you’re familiar with the crimp-a clunk-a noise you hear if you lightly squeeze a pop can once it’s been opened. Soup cans are rigid and strong. If you have the chance to squeeze a Sapporo can, it’s pretty beefy, but it’s not because of the ridges. The fact that the shape contains two simultaneous curves, the curve of the cylinder and the curve of the profile, gives it boatloads of strength.

So, why are the ridges there? Are they some kind of aesthetic decision? Are they some remnant of the original metal stock? Are these lines delineating latitude on some lilliputian Koreshan world? This is where, I feel, this design goes from being a fairly pretty but unremarkable mass produced object, to being a truly excellent example of aesthetics meshing with manufacture. The ridges are a hyper-efficient way of getting the metal to bend.

Take a look at this paper jellyfish lamp I tutorialized for CRAFT a couple of years ago. The 3d form is made from a flat sheet by adding in curves. Those curves are made by reducing the surface area using pleats. The same effect can be achieved in metal by squashing and stretching the metal along ridges. Metal spinning is an energy intense process that results in smooth forms with an uneven wall thickness. The same complex forms can be approximated, maintaining an even wall thickness, by adding ridges to a flat sheet.

What likely happens start to finish is that a flat sheet of steel is fed into a machine that cuts it to size, slams a sine shaped press into it at half inch intervals, gathers the two edges up as the form starts to turn cylindrical, joins them with a seam, spins the shape and necks it down, rolls on the top and sends it off to be filled and capped.

So, only one question remains: Why use steel? Well, steel stands up to the slam dance much better than aluminum. It has the kind of tensile strength that will let it bend and stretch without tearing even when very thin. The downside to all this is that it needs to be coated to resist oxidation and tainting its contents. So, you’ll notice that the inside of your Sapporo can has been coated with a plastic layer that separates the beer from the metal.

There you have it. An object that can be mass produced at a fairly low cost and adds heaps of value in terms of keeping the product safe, looking fabulous, and not getting all dinged up in transit. What’s elegant about it is the simplicity of manufacture, how the process of forming the steel stock into a cylinder leaves artifacts on the object’s surface that are not just inoffensive, but beautiful. I want, in my own work and in the greater world, to see things that think to use the machines by which they’re made to earn their poise, achieve their design, and realize their value.

Title photo by Brett Clarke on Flickr.

Continuing on from last week’s post, I’m here to bum you out, go on about how strange brains are, and hopefully offer some insight on how to start solving the divisive disease that is depression. The same caveats apply as before.

So, I find the pattern of punctuated equilibrium cropping up again and again. In brief, it is a way of thinking about the speed at which things change. Specifically, some things will spend a long time in a stable state, not changing much at all, and then suddenly leap forward in a giant generational shift. It can be a little bit of deviation creating a huge watershed, or a little energy added into the system bumping things out of their stable rut. You can observe the phenomena in everything from evolutionary biology to organic pathfinding.

It might help to think of this in terms of a game. In game theory, systems can stay stable for long periods of time before taking a wild shift to a different stable mode. In the classic game Hawks vs Doves [mildly technical video] you have two groups: the hawks will never back down from a fight even if it costs them a lot, and the doves will always back down but will split winnings evenly. If you start with two even populations of doves and hawks, you have random fights between everybody, and you kick out the biggest losers, you will eventually have a fairly stable ratio between the two groups.

Given an infinite amount of time, that ratio will be the Nash Equilibrium, or the ideal ratio between all the possible strategies of that game. It’s simple if you imagine you’re trying to maximize your score on an arcade game. You get a long series of encounters where you either get to pick hawk or dove before the encounter. Your opponent has the same setup. The ratio between the times you pick dove and the times you pick hawk to get the highest score will be the Nash Equilibrium. Essentially you’re trying to play your best strategy where you know all the possible moves, both yours and your opponent’s, like in a game of chess.

What am I getting at with all this game theory stuff? I said things would reach their Nash Equilibrium given an infinite amount of time. But, in finite time, you’ll notice stable modes in the hawk and dove populations that are not the Nash Equilibrium. These are called local equilibria. You can also influence jumps between these states by altering the payouts and punishments of the game.

I see depression as being a stable, self-perpetuating equilibrium that, once entered, takes substantial energy to escape. Do you recall the long term potentiation stuff I was talking about in the last installment? I believe that once you lay down a substantial set of potentiated pathways that encourage the production of stress hormones, you fall into the trough of long term depression.

Things stop feeling good. Neurobiology superstar Robert Sapolsy says the main symptom of depression is “the inability to appreciate sunsets”. The official term for this is anhedonia, or the inability to seek or feel pleasure. Not feeling pleasure causes people to not seek pleasure, causing them to not feel pleasure. This is amplified by the inability to get up and do anything at all, or phychomotor retardation, that is characteristic of a major depressive episode. It’s a sad irony that people on the upswing from a major depression are more likely to commit suicide than those at its nadir for the simple expedient that it’s just too much work to go about finding a knife, running a bath, and slitting your wrists.

There are many contributing factors that influence your likelihood of experiencing clinical depression. The death of a parent at an early age, having a sibling with severe depression (if your identical twin is depressed, you have a 50% chance of experiencing the same condition), the overproduction of monoamine oxidase, can all severely increase the chances of depression. [As a side note, I’d like to remark that a lot of the twin/adoption studies you read, especially the ones involving twins separated at birth, come from research gathered from the Scandinavian peninsula. The explanation I’ve heard for this is that the Vikings held a lot of stock by inheritance regardless of whether it went to their natural or adopted progeny. Apparently there have been extensive records of adoptions, christenings, name changes, and health data stretching back a few hundred years. It seems that, if you’re looking to isolate genetic factors from environmental factors by looking at two people who share a genome but not a house (eg twins separated at birth), you start by phoning up an academic in the +011-46 area code.]

Since the factors are so varied in nature (biological, genetic, conceptual) I’ve come to think that depression is a kind of parasitic meme. It’s an alternate mode on which the standard workaday mechanisms in your mind can run.

So, how do you get rid of a deleterious viral meme? The way I see it, you’ve got to bust up your rut. The effective therapies seem to retread the brain with new pathways that don’t egg on the existing tag team of stress-related chemicals sparking stress-like trauma. One of the most effective treatments for severe long term depression is a brand of shock therapy, which seems to change up the pattern of potentiated neurons in specific areas of the brain. It does have side effects, so it’s usually a method of last resort.

In the meantime, exercise, change of diet, and restructuring your life to include more small bits of happy seem to be effective therapies for avoiding depression or steering your way out of a minor depressive episode. For me, it’s been about cultivating a certain state of mind. I find that if I can cut off the thoughts that lead to depressive cycles, critically analyze my feelings, and plot a course of action that leads me to a better state of being with discrete, actionable goals, I can actually pull myself into a stable happy state.

The way it seems to work is that there are coping mechanisms for the big things in life. One can cope with a big loss because there’s a framework on which to hang the death of a loved one, or losing your house in a fire, or getting your car stolen. There’s a clear way for people to give sympathy, to help, and to grieve. It can be the little things that are more insidious. Often times state of mind is about the little things: getting passed up for a raise, stubbing your toe, having your dog go missing, all stacked together and adding up to a feeling about the state of the world. Experiments with rats, randomly shocking them over long periods of time, show that once you pass a certain threshold of arbitrary bad shit happening, it becomes the expectation that arbitrary bad shit is the default state of the world. Rats exposed to shocks for as little as five minutes showed heightened stress and anticipation of getting shocked again nearly a month later. It also makes them use cocaine, which explains some things.

So, it comes down to creating enough good experiences, enough coping mechanisms, and and a support network of people to catch you to counteract the random knocks towards the slope of depression that the world offers. Remember the lesson of Ilya Zhitomirskiy: it’s your job as a friend of someone who has suffered from depression to be their support network, to be understanding, and to overcome the social pressure to not talk about the disease. It can’t, necessarily, be conquered but it can be remediated, and it’s up to you to bust up that rut.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

I've been exploring a few different 3d print materials, lately. I've loved the glazed ceramics that have been on offer from a few different companies and thought a pair of knuckle dusters would turn out beautifully. They're pretty but, as you can tell from the cracks, they're incredibly lightweight and flimsy. Ah well. Nothing ventured nothing gained.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

I've been exploring a few different 3d print materials, lately. I've loved the glazed ceramics that have been on offer from a few different companies and thought a pair of knuckle dusters would turn out beautifully. They're pretty but, as you can tell from the cracks, they're incredibly lightweight and flimsy. Ah well. Nothing ventured nothing gained.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

I've been exploring a few different 3d print materials, lately. I've loved the glazed ceramics that have been on offer from a few different companies and thought a pair of knuckle dusters would turn out beautifully. They're pretty but, as you can tell from the cracks, they're incredibly lightweight and flimsy. Ah well. Nothing ventured nothing gained.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Pork Pie Hatters, a fantastic hat shop in NYC, asked me to design them a custom door and here's the result. This is a solid ash apothecary style door with actual hand applied gold leaf.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Pork Pie Hatters, a fantastic hat shop in NYC, asked me to design them a custom door and here's the result. This is a solid ash apothecary style door with actual hand applied gold leaf.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Pork Pie Hatters, a fantastic hat shop in NYC, asked me to design them a custom door and here's the result. This is a solid ash apothecary style door with actual hand applied gold leaf.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Pork Pie Hatters, a fantastic hat shop in NYC, asked me to design them a custom door and here's the result. This is a solid ash apothecary style door with actual hand applied gold leaf.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Pork Pie Hatters, a fantastic hat shop in NYC, asked me to design them a custom door and here's the result. This is a solid ash apothecary style door with actual hand applied gold leaf.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Pork Pie Hatters, a fantastic hat shop in NYC, asked me to design them a custom door and here's the result. This is a solid ash apothecary style door with actual hand applied gold leaf.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Pork Pie Hatters, a fantastic hat shop in NYC, asked me to design them a custom door and here's the result. This is a solid ash apothecary style door with actual hand applied gold leaf.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Here's a full view of the panorama I built for my Transmet Art Book submission. I was elated to see that they featured it as a 2 page spread.

You can find some more details out at my site.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

After some tinkering and experiments we have a brand new prototype for the Anywhere Organ. This version includes details pulled from ornamental organ facades and fretwork. Now I've got to rig up the electronics to see how it sounds.

Giant Eye posted a photo:

You'll know what time it is when you turn your wrist and gaze at these cufflinks: time to rock. The seasons will bend to your will, the tides will turn at your command, and classic 80's rock will never give way to introverted 90's grunge.

From Sleek & Destroy sleekanddestroy.com

Giant Eye posted a photo:

Now you and Jeff Goldblum can have one more thing in common. Check out these sleek acrylic laser cut Velociraptor Cufflinks at my new store: Sleek and Destroy.

From Sleek & Destroy sleekanddestroy.com

Giant Eye posted a photo:

What a virtuous convivial bon vivant. His virile visage vests vigor in vaunted vocations.

You should pick yourself up some Anonymous cufflinks at my new store: Sleek and Destroy.

From Sleek & Destroy sleekanddestroy.com