Getting Simple

By Nono Martínez AlonsoSociety & Culture Education Arts Self-Improvement Design

Getting Simple episodes

December 20, 2018#14: Craig Long — The Unexpected Life Plan
Craig Long on how life is in the moments you didn't expect, quieting your inner intensity, helping others achieve complex goals when they don't know where to start, remote working, and disconnecting from technology.

Craig grew up in the mountains of Wyoming wanting to be an architect, and studied architectural engineering with an emphasis in mathematics at University of Kansas. He currently works at Autodesk, Boston, developing software for other designers that — like he did for several years at Zahner — heavily rely on computers to build intricate designs.
After knowing Craig for a few years, I couldn't agree more with Kevin Rooney's description: "Craig is the mentalist. He can tear apart a problem to its root core to reveal the best opportunities. He can move easily between general ideas to technical execution in order to make [things] happen. He is also an incredibly kind person."
Connect with Craig at (@craigalanlong).

Favorite quotes
"Life isn't always a deterministic process you know ahead of time."
"[Listening to podcasts on my commute] became this empowering and centering force."
"Part of growing up and growing older is learning that life is in the moments and things that you didn't expect."
"If I looked at the logistics and analytics of how often I pick up my phone there would probably be very disconcerting information. So that's what I'm trying to be. More attentive [and] intentional about turning off those those stimuli and being more present."
"Find what you love and do it to the best of your abilities."
Links
Zahner
Arup
Experience Music Project by Frank Gehry
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao by Frank Gehry
Stata Center by Frank Gehry
De Young Museum by Herzog & de Meuron and Fong + Chan
Grasshopper
Dynamo
CATIA
.NET Rocks podcast by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell
C#
Scala
This American Life by WBEZ
Radiolab by WNYC Studios
Slack
Zoom
ShopFloor
Google Earth
Snowcrash by Neal Stevenson
Alto's Adventure
2048
Chapters
00:00 · Intro
00:53 · Craig Long
05:24 · The plan
08:44 · Challenges
12:03 · Starting a project
16:09 · Manual vs. automated
17:38 · The fun moments
20:48 · Zahner
28:16 · The last man
33:23 · ShopFloor
36:20 · Things you miss
42:57 · Commute
50:02 · Remote working
54:55 · Helping others
57:04 · Yourself
58:08 · Creativity
59:39 · Your best ideas
01:01:17 · Disconnection
01:02:42 · Email
01:04:09 · Flow
01:06:14 · Habits
01:08:37 · Finding what you like
01:09:59 · Digital workflows
01:12:50 · Work-in-progress
01:14:48 · Clutter
01:20:51 · A comfortable user interface
01:21:48 · Simple & intuitive
01:22:46 · Success
01:26:12 · One sentence to the world

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Show notes, transcripts, and past episodes at gettingsimple.com/podcast.

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1 hr 30 min
November 19, 2018#13: Ben Fry — Co-creator of Processing
Co-creator of "Processing" and founder of Fathom Information Design — Ben Fry (@ben_fry) — on the beginnings of the Processing programming environment, the use of information design and visualization to understand complicated data problems, and his approach to design, life, & work.

Ben Fry is founder and principal of Fathom Information Design, a studio in Boston focused on understanding complicated data problems. He holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory and is a Lecturer at MIT. Fry has authored and co-authored multiple books and develops "Processing" — the programming environment he co-created with Casey Reas used by artists, engineers, scientists, and students all over the world since 2001. His work can be found in museums, feature films, research labs, and the portfolios of Fathom's clients such as Nike, JP Morgan, DARPA, and National Geographic. In 2011, Fry was honored to visit the White House to receive the National Design Award for Interaction Design.
Connect with Ben at Fathom.info, benfry.com, and Processing.org.

Links
Processing
Netscape
Fathom Information Design
Arduino
OpenFrameworks
Open Render
acu by Ben Fry, Jared Schiffman, and Tom White (1999)
acWorld by Tom White, Jared Schiffman, and Ben Fry (1998)
acWindows by David Small (1996)
OpenGL
C++
Bad Windows by Bob Sabiston (1988)
Visible Language Workshop
Aesthetics + Computation Group (ACG)
Design by Numbers
Human genome project
NYU ITP
Valence by Ben Fry (1999)
Valence in Minority Report
National Air and Space Museum
Star Wars
Star Trek
NASA
MIT Media Lab
Valence in the Hulk
On needing approval for what we create, and losing control over how it's distributed by Ben Fry (2010)
SGI Octane
Photoshop
Sentinel typeface by Hoefler & Co.
National typeface by Klim
Fabriga typeface by Lux Typo
Ringside typeface by Hoefler & Co.
ProPublica
MacRecipes by Fathom
Rocky Morphology by Fathom
Books
The Information by James Gleick
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
Movies
Big Hero 6
2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick
Alien by Ridley Scott
Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames
People mentioned
John Maeda
Casey Reas
Daniel Shiffman
Andres Colubri
Tom White
David Small
Bob Sabiston
John Underkoffler
Tom Cruise
Jose Luis García del Castillo y López
Jack Dorsey
Charles Kingsley
James Gleick
Walter Isaacson
Chapters
00:05 · Intro
02:05 · Ben Fry
06:00 · The beginnings of Processing
15:42 · Information design and visualization
16:33 · The human genome project
18:27 · Casey Reas
19:03 · Daniel Shiffman
22:02 · Valence
27:00 · John Underkoffler
27:44 · Valence in the Hulk
30:20 · On needing approval for what we create
40:17 · Building your own tools
45:57 · Your favorite user interface
47:36 · Typefaces
49:22 · What you look for in a design
52:21 · Fathom
59:07 · Projects that spread
01:01:32 · Is your life simple?
01:03:34 · Daily habits
01:04:26 · Non-work activities
01:05:06 · Boredom
01:05:51 · Social media
01:07:53 · Disconnection
01:10:44 · Technology
01:12:33 · Ads
01:16:31 · Success
01:18:28 · A message to the world
01:20:30 · Book recommendations
01:23:39 · Side projects
01:24:06 · Simplicity

I'd love to hear from you.
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Show notes, transcripts, and past episodes at gettingsimple.com/podcast.
Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.

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1 hr 30 min
October 10, 2018#12: Jiyoo Jye — The Challenge of Art
Artist, designer, and educator Jiyoo Jye on the struggles of making art and choosing your projects; education at an innovation school as a creative; when to share your work and the role of feedback; media consumption and technology; and her approach to a simpler, greener life.

Jiyoo is a visual artist, designer & educator. She works at NuVu Innovation School, where students learn within an architectural Studio model and create multi-displinary & collaborative projects. Ji has a Master's in Design Studies from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor's of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University, School of Art. She has previously worked for Area9 Lyceum, a physician-led software company specializing in adaptive learning technology. While finishing her graduate study, she worked with the Harvard Fogg Museum's, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art in creating an online archive for the American sculptor, Christopher Wilmarth. She has also been an editor & co-author for the Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure and a Communications fellow for the MIT Office of Sustainability.
Connect with Jiyoo at Sweetish Segment
and at @sweetishsegment on Instagram.

Links
Sweetish Segment
Harvard GSD
MIT Office of Sustainability
Harvard Fogg Museum
NuVu
Hydroponics
Arduino

Books
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

People mentioned
Christopher Wilmarth
Christian Boltanski
Susan Sontag
Marlene Dumas
Anthony Burgess
Gaston Bachelard

Episode notes
Intro. [0:00]
Jiyoo Jye. [0:55]
What is NuVu? [2:37]
How does your day-to-day look like? Learn about the tools and projects Ji is invested on daily with her students at NuVu. [2:50]
What are you taking from your day job? [3:49]
Was your experience studying as an artist at an architecture school? [4:34]
Educating adults vs. teenagers. NuVu's model teaches students core skills in an interdisciplinary space, avoiding pressures where students need to excel in specific areas. [5:16]
Hydroponics. [9:00]
Your time at Carnegie Mellon School of Art. A maple tree, a dripping system, and more. [9:44]
Challenges of being an artist. Learn about how Ji makes time to make art, the role it places in her life, and how she finds a place for art as a creative professional. [11:07]
How do you choose what projects to focus on? "The kind of art is the one that can reflect the voice of that particular time." [12:57]
Ji's current projects. Morphology series—a constant flow of movement of formations. [13:25]
Activities and hobbies. [14:09]
Would you consider your life simple? [14:36]
How to share what you make. Ji thinks about finding ways to show your work in ways that go beyond an exhibit. [15:43]
The role of feedback. (And having something for yourself.) [17:23]
What is art? [18:14]
Advice for new artists. [19:01]
Who supported you? Learn about Ji's circles and her harshest critic. [19:55]
Artist toolset. [21:12]
Art mediums. [23:10]
The ideal art session. [24:58]
Daily routine - Ji tries to make something different from the previous day—might it be a change on the way she works or her schedule, to find ways to stay engaged in her day-to-day. [25:41]
Commute. [26:28]
Habits - Perfecting your head stand. [27:04]
Compassion and isolation. [27:51]
Boredom. [30:06]
When you get your best ideas. [31:50]
Social media. [32:43]
Disconnection. [34:29]
Media consumption - Learn about where Ji gets her media from. [35:32]
Healthy relationship with technology. [36:23]
Technology in art and design. [37:15]
Book recommendations. [37:58]
A successful person. [38:31]
Clothing - "A fun and creative outlet for self-expression." [38:49]
A cheap, positive purchase. [39:14]
Favorite app. [41:00]
Sustainability - Ji is (and always will be) invested in the green movement. [41:35]
One sentence to the world - "Eat the sweetish segment or spit it out." [42:30]
Unnecessary complexities. [43:25]
Digital & physical clutter. [43:54]
Cleaning rituals. [44:54]
Spirit animal. [45:26]
Nature. [45:57]
Books on slow & simple living. [47:07]
A question to Nono. [47:36]

I'd love to hear from you.
Submit a question about this or any previous episodes.
Join the Discord community. Meet other curious minds.
If you enjoy the show, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps.
Show notes, transcripts, and past episodes at gettingsimple.com/podcast.
Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.

Follow Nono
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52 min
September 04, 2018#11: Nathan Melenbrink — Who Decides What's Important to You?
Researcher Nathan Melenbrink on his research on simple robots, teaching, his efforts to bring news neutrality to the internet, liking new things, acquiring taste, and much more.

Nathan is a Fellow in Computer Science at the Wyss Institute, where his research focuses on swarm robotics for construction. He has taught courses related to design, computation, robotics and CAD/CAM at institutions such as MIT, Virginia Tech, and the University of Hong Kong, and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Northeastern University. His industry experience as an architect and computational designer includes offices such as UNStudio, Playze, and ECADI. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech and a Masters in Design Studies in Technology from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He is a Doctoral Candidate at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction at the University of Stuttgart.
Connect with Nathan at nathanmelenbrink.com and at @_n804 on Instagram.

Books
So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
Links
TheRecord.org
Harvard University
Harvard GSD
Wyss Institute
Self-Organizing Systems Research Group
ICD, University of Stuttgart
NuVu
Swarm robotics
ROB|ARCH conference
UNStudio
Expat packages
Zugzwang
Romu: A Robot for Environmental Protection
Wyss Institute lays some groundwork to protect the environment with robots

People mentioned
Saeed Arida
Saba Ghole
David Wang
Rhadika Nagpal
Justin Werfel
Mark Zuckerberg
Cal Newport
Michael Jordan
Barry Gabay
Jiyoo Jye
Elon Musk
Jordan B. Peterson
Nathan King

Episode notes
Intro. [0:00]
Who is Nathan Melenbrink? A brief introduction to Nathan's career. [0:32]
Teaching gives Nathan an immediate satisfaction of imparting students with knowledge of some kind, and enabled him to do robotics at a more advanced level. [3:21]
What is NuVu? Learn about the teaching model of this innovation school, how its founders conceived it, and how it is growing. [5:42]
Teaching international robotics workshops to young students. [9:45]
Nathan's academic research on swarm robotics as part of the Self-organizing Systems Research Group (SSRG) at Harvard University ran by Professor Rhadika Nagpal and Justin Werfel. [11:34]
What's role of swarm robots in design automation, architecture, and the built environment? [13:10]
How will automation, artificial intelligence, and better software affect our work life? [14:32]
"Robots replace tasks, not jobs." How are the tasks that compose professional jobs are going to change? [17:01]
What tasks have already been replaced by software? [18:21]
Is automation (say, consumer robotics for off-loading tedious chores) going to have a transformative impact on our lifestyle? [19:46]
Who is going to profit from automation? Nathan's main reason to be interested in technology is its promise to make people's life better, but he argues something is wrong with the current model and what we could do to improve it. [21:39]
Great minds to farm clicks and likes. [23:09]
A universal basic income. [23:43]
What would you do if you didn't have to work? [25:20]
Do the way you earn money and what gives meaning to your life need to be the same thing? [26:28]
"The passion hypothesis." [26:54]
Why is Michael Jordan the best basketball player that ever lived? Learn about Michael Jordan's "Love of the Game Clause." [30:16]
How does Nathan understand success? [32:04]
How are we consuming news and media feeds? [33:10]
Neutral and verifiable news: "We don't want to let some algorithm decide what's important to us, even if that's influenced by what we say we like." [34:26]
How can blockchain technology help news neutrality? [36:48]
Why do we check the news? "The human beings throughout history who were most adept at gathering acquiring information from their environment were more likely to reproduce and have fertile offspring." [39:35]
Learn about Nathan media consumption habits. [43:15]
What's your relationship with social media? [44:19]
Living in China versus the US. [47:01]
Habits (and frugality) in China. [49:22]
Learning Mandarin - Nathan's immersion in the culture and language of Shanghai. [50:29]
Meditative moments Nathan uses to disconnect. [52:47]
The ideological Turing test: Can you give the position of your political adversary so well to make us believe you have that position? [55:58]
What if you received suggestions of things you are supposed to dislike? [57:41]
Can you force yourself to like new things and acquire taste? [1:01:56]
A purchase that recently influenced your life. [1:05:13]
An object that makes your life easier. [1:05:44]
Something you are dependent on. [1:06:11]
Being slightly unprepared when you are traveling abroad is.. [1:06:17]
What do you say to yourself when you wake up? [1:06:43]
A sentence to the world. [1:06:49]
Clothing. [1:06:56]
Money. [1:07:16]
Self-imposed restrictions. [1:07:37]
How do you picture a healthy relationship with technology? "A relationship where it's easy for you to imaging spending a considerable amount of time without it." [1:07:50]
Boredom. [1:08:01]
Do you consider your life simple? [1:08:11]
Nathan's organizational tools. [1:08:29]
Open source versus private intellectual property. [1:09:50]
Other people's habits (and the car culture of America). [1:10:25]
Book recommendations - Get to know Nathan's efforts to expose himself to other political views. [1:11:24]
Find Nathan online. [1:12:11]
Art. [1:12:51]
How does Nathan understand simplicity? [1:13:56]
How much information can we get? How much information do we need? [1:16:06]
Outro. [1:22:13]

I'd love to hear from you.
Submit a question about this or any previous episodes.
Join the Discord community. Meet other curious minds.
If you enjoy the show, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps.
Show notes, transcripts, and past episodes at gettingsimple.com/podcast.
Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.

Follow Nono
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Facebook.com/nonomartinezalonso
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1 hr 24 min
August 15, 2018#10: Nono Martínez Alonso — Who's Up Next?
Host Nono Martínez Alonso gives a brief overview of what's new and what's coming to Getting Simple over the next months. Discover who's up next on The Getting Simple Podcast in September, October, and November 2018.

This month's interview features Ian Keough — The Father of Dynamo — who shares insights on working remotely full time, getting started with a startup, the flow state, and a lot more.
New interviews are already underway, listen to this mini-episode and discover who will be on The Getting Simple Podcast in September, October, and November.

Episodes mentioned
Ian Keough
Nathan Melenbrink
Jiyoo Jye
Ben Fry

I'd love to hear from you.
Submit a question about this or any previous episodes.
Join the Discord community. Meet other curious minds.
If you enjoy the show, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps.
Show notes, transcripts, and past episodes at gettingsimple.com/podcast.
Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.

Follow Nono
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Instagram.com/nonoesp
Facebook.com/nonomartinezalonso
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5 min
August 01, 2018#9: Ian Keough — How to Make Better Decisions Faster
Hypar's Ian Keough on automating the generation of the built environment to help stakeholders make better decisions faster, writing code from his garage.

Ian Keough (@ikeough) is the founder of Hypar. He writes code from his garage to automate the generation of the built environment to help stakeholders make better decisions faster. Trained as a fine artist and architect—and known as The Father of Dynamo—Ian believes efficiency breeds quality and automation yields better, higher-quality products. This episode uncovers the Ian Keough beyond Dynamo—including his life habits, tactics to get into the flow state and avoid distractions, and his new adventure to disrupt the architecture, engineering, and construction industry.
As a sculptor, Ian built big commission artworks for artists in New York—rationalizing them with a pointing machine—with the help of early versions of AutoCAD.
Before Hypar, Ian worked in the automation of building information modeling (BIM) workflows at Buro Happold, developing tools for the construction industry at Vela Systems, and developing Dynamo at Autodesk.
He is surprised that the technology we envisioned years ago is not here yet and that, instead, all sorts of sophisticated and complicated technologies solve problems we don't have.
I had a lot of fun talking to him. You can get a sense of the topics we discussed in the episode notes. We talked about daily habits, how he reserves time to exercise selfishly (and tries to run up to five times a week and surf at least once), his amazing commute, having a garage as an office, his use of social media, how he understands success, and a lot more.
You can find Ian on Twitter at @ikeough and @HyparAEC, and at Hypar.io.

Episode notes
Who is Ian Keough? [00:43]
Hypar is Ian's new adventure to automate the generation of the built environment to help stakeholders make better decisions faster. [2:07]
How would you define yourself? [2:40]
Diller Scofidio is an interdisciplinary design studio that integrates architecture, the visual arts, and the performing arts, based in New York City. [3:24]
Ian's experience as an artist. [5:58]
Drawing with a "CAD station." [7:15]
"La macchinetta" or the pointing machine, is a machine used to accurately copy physical models, by registering three-dimensional locations in space. [9:15]
How does your day-to-day look like? [13:30]
Commute. [14:58]
Work. [16:08]
The flow state: Getting uninterrupted time to work, and doing email two days a week. [16:55]
Dynamo is a visual programming language that Ian started while working at Buro Happold around 2010—to automate Revit workflows—an open source tool now maintained by Autodesk and a community of contributors. [18:37]
A picture of the grid-shell ETFE roof of the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center by HOK and Buro Happold in California. [19:09]
Stephen Elliot, from North Eastern University, spent a summer as an intern at Autodesk developing what would become the second version of Dynamo. [21:48]
What's your current involvement with Dynamo? [23:44]
Open-source in architecture, design, and arts (and the appearance of "super-users"). [28:29]
Does visual programming help code beginners? [29:57]
Processing is an open-source computer programming language and development environment commonly used for creative endeavors such as live installations and digital art. [31:06]
GenerativeComponents is parametric CAD software developed by Bentley Systems first introduced in 2003. [31:50]
Explicit History was one of the early versions of Grasshopper, a visual programming language developed by McNeel that ships with Rhino.
DesignScript is, in words of his creator Robert Aish, a programming language "at the intersection of design and programming," used as part of parametric and associative modeling workflows in architecture, engineering, and construction.
"They had to have a language." [31:16]
What is the mission of Hypar? [35:31]
"That's not design." [36:57]
What is the role of the architect or designer in this process? [38:40]
What is the role of automation in our lives? [41:03]
Daily habits. [47:20]
Meditation. [51:04]
Finding focus in the flow state. [52:30]
How do you disconnect? [54:39]
Do you ever get bored? [58:52]
What's your relationship with social media? [59:42]
Melinda Keough (@melinda_keough) is a creative and art director, and illustrator, based in Los Angeles. She has worked in advertising with companies such as Apple and Pepsi. [1:02:30]
What apps and services make your life easier? [1:04:30]
Are there any mobile apps you don't install in your phone on purpose? [1:08:04]
"Technologies that solve non-existing problems." [1:12:16]
A user interface you enjoy. [1:17:00]
Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax, which is frequently used to generate HTML. [1:18:58]
Unity is a cross-platform game engine used to create indie games, mobile apps, and interactive three-dimensional, augmented reality, and virtual reality experiences. [1:19:02]
Revit is building information modeling software for architects, engineers, designers, contractors, and other professionals, developed by Autodesk. [1:19:37]
"All of human emotion is flattened into a couple of possible responses: I like this thing or I retweet this thing." [1:25:11]
"Mall art." [1:28:23]
A purchase of $100 or less that makes your life easier? [1:31:15]
What do you use to sync your data to the cloud? [1:34:00]
"Efficiency breeds quality." [1:45:22]
"Quality comes from the reproducibility of a process." [1:46:07]
"Automation can give you a better, higher-quality product." [1:46:17]
pix2pix is a generative adversarial neural network (GAN) able to learn a mapping from one style of image to another from a training set or image pairs. [1:50:51]
Katerra "is on a mission to change [the global construction industry] by optimizing every aspect of building design, materials supply, and construction." [1:51:44]

People mentioned
Elizabeth Diller
Matt Jezyk
Stephen Elliot
Anthony Hauck
Zach Kron
Melinda Keough
Marie Kondo
Elon Musk
Robert Aish
Peter Boyer
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
Isaac Asimov

I'd love to hear from you.
Submit a question about this or any previous episodes.
Join the Discord community. Meet other curious minds.
If you enjoy the show, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps.
Show notes, transcripts, and past episodes at gettingsimple.com/podcast.
Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.

Follow Nono
Twitter.com/nonoesp
Instagram.com/nonoesp
Facebook.com/nonomartinezalonso
YouTube.com/nonomartinezalonso
1 hr 54 min
July 01, 2018#8: Saurabh Mhatre — Space-saving Deployable Mechanisms
Saurabh Mhatre talks about the simplicity behind deployable systems, the chaos of taking pictures, mindful photography, material science, social media, productivity tools, and more.

Saurabh grew up and studied architecture in Mumbai. He holds a Master in Design Studies with a focus on technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he currently explores how flat deployable mechanisms can morph into three-dimensional shapes with minimal actuation, to enable ephemeral uses of mundane items and facilitate their storage and shipment, as part of his research at the Material Processes and Systems (MaP+S) Group.
He enjoys working with people from different disciplines, ranging from biological engineering to material science, and works across multiple material scales, from the nano-scale of medical devices to large form-factor of deployable shelters.
Saurabh also shares with us his love for photography, how he interacts with social media, and what productivity tools help him keep track of his work.
You can find Saurabh on Facebook, his photos at @sm8928 on Instagram, and his most recent work at saurabhmhatre.com.

Episode notes
The Material Processes and Systems (MaP+S) Group, led by Professor Martin Bechthold, is a research unit that promotes the understanding, development and deployment of innovative technologies for buildings. [2:00]
The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is the engineering school within Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and applied sciences. [2:35]
The Wyss (pronounced /viːs/ "veese") Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering is a cross-disciplinary research institute at Harvard University which focuses on developing new bioinspired materials and devices for applications in healthcare, manufacturing, robotics, energy, and sustainable architecture.
Saurabh's current research on deployable mechanisms at different scales, flat objects that can morph into three-dimensional shapes with minimal actuation. [06:10]
What other projects would you like to work on if you had the time? [12:45]
Are there new materials or mechanisms (widely known in research labs in Cambridge) that will hit the market in the next years? [13:23]
Masala Chai is Saurabh's morning to-go drink. [17:08]
Differences between living in Mumbai and living in Cambridge. [18:45]
"The way photography for me started." [21:35]
Adobe Lightroom is a photography editing desktop app part of Saurabh's editing workflow. [22:45]
Evernote is a note-taking app. [31:45]
Toggl is a time-tracking tool. [33:08]
Digital toolbox. [36:10]
Visualizing Architecture by Alex Hogrefe. [36:24]
Contact staff and flow arts. [40:05]
Meditation, reiki, and art of living. [40:40]
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty's soundtrack by Jose González, who is also the singer of Junip. [45:45]

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48 min
June 16, 2018#7: Julia Hayden — How You Affect the Planet
Julia Hayden talks about how our actions affect the planet, ways to fight our throw-away society and minimize waste, her love for tiny houses, and a lot more.

Self-defined environmental activist, Julia believes her studies at Connecticut College in Environmental Studies and Botany made the ways in which her actions affect the planet be present in her daily life.
She is conscious of the lifecycle of everything she consumes (from production to landfill) and emphasizes the power of communities to give away, lend, share, and repair what breaks to minimize waste.
Julia dreams of living in a tiny house, and believes in the use of community spaces and public parks as a way to take up less space in the city.

Links
Buy Nothing are Facebook groups that intend for people to avoid buying new things and be wasteful throwing things away.
Free Craigslist is a directory to browse what people around your area are giving away for free. The famous curb alert refers to people leaving free stuff on the street to be claimed on a first come, first served basis.
Queer Exchange Boston is "[a Facebook] group for Boston queers (interpret “queer” however you’d like) to connect with one another. It is intended to be a space for buying/selling/bartering/gifting, service recommendations, and a place to organize socially."
The tiny house movement is a description for the architectural and social movement that advocates living simply in small homes. According to The Tiny Life, "the typical American home is around 2,600 square feet, whereas the typical small or tiny house is between 100 and 400 square feet. Tiny houses come in all shapes, sizes, and forms, but they enable simpler living in a smaller, more efficient space."
Getaway is a startup that offers simple escapes to tiny, beautifully crafted cabins in nature, in spots spread around New Hampshire, Virginia, and New York. In their own words, their experience is built for "taking the time to rest and unplug from the daily hustle and to focus on ourselves, our relationships and the wonder of nature."
Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart.
Maps is the navigation app by Apple.

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53 min
May 01, 2018#6: Peter Boyer — Running Away from Centralized and Addictive Technologies
Peter Boyer (@ptrbyr) talks about his efforts to run away from notifications and centralized technologies toward decentralized, encrypted-by-default alternatives; and also about self-driving cars, being in relation with nature, addictive technologies, uses of machine learning for design, and a lot more.

Peter defines himself as a software engineer with experience in distributed systems, programming languages, and computer aided design on the web. Self-declared "incapable of getting bored," he believes in learning by doing and by asking naive questions, and enjoys how, in computer programming, experimentation is free — unlike in other disciplines such as architecture or scientific research.
While working at Autodesk, he built custom tools for artist Janet Echelman to build city-scale, net sculptures; was a core developer on the open-source Dynamo product; and was nominated, company-wide, for Innovator of the Year in 2016, due to his work on distributed systems with technologies like Go, gRPC, AWS, or Docker.
Previously, he built custom applied numerical optimization tools in C++ at Gehry Technologies for the fabrication and design of buildings.
While studying a Master of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Peter cross-enrolled in multiple software engineering and math courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), like Geometric Computation or Design and Analysis of Algorithms, and proposed—in his master's thesis—a system to trace the inhabitation of a building throughout its history, as a way to positively affect the lives of its occupants.
You can follow Peter on Twitter and Github.

Links
The Lean Startup book.
GeoCities, founded in 1994, was one of the first free web hosting services. When it shut down (in 2009) there were 38 million user-built pages.
Gilbert Strang is an American mathematician with contributions to finite element theory, the calculus of variations, wavelet analysis, and linear algebra. Peter describes him as "a linear algebra guru from MIT."
Modern Operative Systems book by Andrew Tanenbaum.
Modern Compiler Implementation books by Andrew Appel, Princeton.
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools book (also known as the Dragon Book).
Foundation is a science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov.
Aldo van Eyck was an architect from the Netherlands. He was one of the most influential protagonists of the architectural movement Structuralism.
Next Door is "the private social network for your neighborhood."
Verb nurbs is an open-source, cross-platform nurbs library initiated by Peter in 2013.
Andrew Witt is an Assistant Professor in Practice in Architecture at Harvard GSD, teaching and researching in the relationship of geometry to perception, construction, automation and culture.
TypeScript is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript, and adds optional static typing to the language.
The Loop-Blinn technique is a technique to render vector art on the GPU.
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple and Microsoft in the late 1980s.
Machine learning is a field of computer science that uses statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to "learn" with data, without being explicitly programmed.
Christopher Alexander is a widely influential architect and design theorist.
Janet Echelman is an American sculptor and fiber artist.
Conway's law is an adage named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967: "organizations which design systems […] are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."
ProtonMail is an encrypted email provider protected by strict Swiss privacy laws.
Mastodon is a decentralized, open source social network.
The Everglades is a natural region of tropical wetlands in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida.
Upspin is "a framework for naming everyone's everything."
InterPlanetary File System is a protocol and network designed to create a content-addressable, peer-to-peer method of storing and sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system.
Craiglist's free stuff section features products that people want to give away for free.
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle.

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Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.

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1 hr 51 min
April 01, 2018#5: Andrés Colubri — A Personal Narrative to Bring Your Interests Together
Andrés Colubri (@codeanticode) on how he manages to do seemingly different things—such as art, computational biology, or open-source development—by connecting them around one overarching theme.

Andrés grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he obtained his doctoral degree in mathematics at the Universidad Nacional el Sur.
After living in the United States for a while, he went back to Buenos Aires to distance himself from the academic scene and revisit his interests on the visual arts, drawing, and animation. It was then when he crossed paths—and got hooked—with the world of creative coding, where art and computation join as one.
On his way back to the United States, Andrés got heavily involved with creating art with code, and became a major contributor to the Processing open-source project—what would become an international entry point to computer programming for artists and designers.
He leads the Processing for Android initiative, and recently released Processing for Android: Create Mobile, Sensor-Aware, and VR Applications Using Processing.
During weekdays, Andrés walks (or bikes) to work at the Sabeti Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a computational scientist—where he helps develop methods to detect and investigate natural selection in the genome of humans and other species, and to examine the genetic factors and signals of natural selection in pathogens such as the Ebola virus.

Links
Processing is an open-source computer programming language and development environment commonly used for creative endeavors such as live installations and digital art. Andrés has been involved in the development of its core functionality for several years now. Processing was initiated by John Maeda's students Casey Reas and Ben Fry, who built on Maeda's previous work (Design By Numbers).
Design by Numbers was an experiment to teach programming led by John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s, with the intention of offering an easy entry point to computer programming to non-programmers (such as designers and artists).
The protein folding problem is "the obstacle that scientists confront when they try to predict 3D structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequence."
Shaders are "a type of computer program that was originally used for shading (the production of appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color within an image) but which now performs a variety of specialized functions in various fields of computer graphics special effects or does video post-processing unrelated to shading, or even functions unrelated to graphics at all."
The Emotional Life of Books is an experiment that uses the emotional judgement of readers to inform how books are organized in the Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant Workers.
Processing for Android was initiated by Ben Fry and Jonathan Feinberg.
Processing for Android: Create Mobile, Sensor-Aware, and VR Applications Using Processing with Processing by Andrés Colubri.
The Sabeti Lab, headed by Pardis Sabeti, is part of the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University, and maintains close ties to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. It uses computational methods and genomics to understand mechanisms of evolutionary adaptation in humans and pathogens.
Mirador is "a tool for visual exploration of complex datasets [that was the result of a collaboration between between Fathom Information Design and the Sabeti Lab.] It enables users to discover correlation patterns and derive new hypotheses from the data."
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle.
Patrick H. Winston is Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I'd love to hear from you.
Submit a question about this or any previous episodes.
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If you enjoy the show, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps.
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Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.

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1 hr 17 min

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Conversations on simple living, lifestyle design, creativity, technology, and culture. Nono is a creative technologist and AI researcher.

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