blacklog

Right after I graduated in June, my friend Jhonatan -the Telmex visiting scientist in the MIT Media Lab-, invited me to work on an idea that I found interesting for a number of reasons. He wanted to know if it made sense to combine a MIT mobile technology class based on real world projects with a group of student reporters from a film college to help the MIT students report and communicate their progress, as they develop solutions to the problems they face. “I think it makes sense”, I said, and we began talking about how to set up such a thing, later to be called “Reality Courseware” by Jhonatan himself. I spent the Summer putting together an internship program scheduled for deployment at MIT during the Fall.

On the one hand, I saw an opportunity to experiment with documentary video, education, vernacular perception of technology, MIT as a narrative, social feedback systems and distribution of cultural content from a very flexible perspective. On the other hand -and most importantly- I saw the potential to bring together a team of documentary filmmakers and a group of MIT students in a situation that could reveal unexpected truth to everyone involved. Three months after my initial meeting with Jhonatan, the class taught by him and his collaborators has an additional group of fourteen film and television students from Emerson College that are helping the MIT students communicate their ideas, share their dreams, broadcast their work ahd expand their horizons.

After I finished setting up the internship over the Summer, I am now playing the roles of Producer and Creative Advisor to help put together and distribute this content. What will be the result? Only time will tell. For now, I am finding the process of leading the film students and learning from them incredibly rewarding.

We decided to structure the class website as a journal. The instructors and advisors will update it all the time news and related material: 6.976 / MAS.965 / SP.716 - nextlab I: Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users. In addition to this website, we will launch sites for each project, and the content generated by the film students will be regularly posted there, along with other relevant materials.

You can access each Project journal by following the links in this page.

Here are a few frames I grabbed from videos I’ve been shooting of the film students at work (you can see pictures of all of them in action in the nextlab flickr group).

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
Dr. Seuss in Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

I graduated today from MIT. Martini and Buza made water-jet cut aluminum PLW thingies to wear on top of our hats, and my picture made it to the MIT-Tech 2008 commencement edition. Congratulations MIT class of 2008, this has been a fantastic journey.

The last two years I watched the MIT commencement ceremony from the safety of my computer on a live video feed. Today I was one of the more or less 2600 people that walked in formation across campus in preparation to receive their degrees. We were waiting in front of Killian Court when the voice in the microphone said something like “… and now, the guest of honor, class of 2008″. The band was playing a cheesy march. It felt good inside.

This journal is almost finished.

I grabbed two pictures from the MIT-tech website and gave them a little photoshop touch to enhance the romanticism. I already feel nostalgic.

On May 16th John gave a farewell lecture to the Media Lab before joining RISD. While reviewing our theses for the last time before submitting them this morning, Mud, Kyle and I spent a few nights preparing a series of promotional posters for John’s talk.

Some time ago, after realizing I don’t really care much about running, I decided to make a web logging application in the style of Takashi’s runlog about something I would care a lot about: sleeping (and dreaming). The following graph displays my daily hours of sleep since september to the present. I am not surprised with how chaotic everything appears; this has been the best way for me to deal with life at MIT.

Bottom is early and top is late. Colors are for separating nights into the following three categories: not enough sleep, sleep just right, and too much sleep.

It has been a week already since we (Takashi, Kyle and yours truly) went to WWDC, Apple’s yearly conference for developers in San Francisco. Leopard feels great and features all kind of goodies to work and play with. As usual, Apple makes it sure to deliver cool crap, but I can’t talk about it in detail until october, because I signed an agreement of confidentiality when I signed up for the conference. No descriptions of new NSCrap here.

One thing I found most interesting is the implicit partnership between a community of software developers and a corporation like Apple. After all, an operating system, as advanced as it can be, is almost useless if there are no applications to run on it. Real world applications that solve real world programs are the only possible connection to the non technical end users. At the same time, software developers depend so much on whatever is provided to them that it’s a little scary. What will happen to a community of developers if their platform collapses? Now that I think about it, they will probably just migrate elsewhere with ease. Digital technology is approaching the time when standards will become commonsense for those who know, regardless of the platform.

Another interesting thing, this time of a statistical nature, was the male-female ratio out of the 5000+ attendees. I would say there were at least 100 men per woman. A-t-l-e-a-s-t. That was the no fun part, but its not so much of a problem when there is all this much technology around to compensate… did I just say that?

And another thing, these Apple guys do know how to treat their nerds; free candy, free cookies and free espressos all day long, everywhere in the convention center. I mean, dark chocolate m&ms? yum! The only thing they were missing were the smoothie bars =).

Some HOT Apple related topics: CoreAnimation, CoreImage, QuartzComposer, iPhone, WebKit, Leopard of course…

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