Category: Uncategorized

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

David Squared: Structure Your Agency for Success

Friday, May 27th, 2011

I popped down to Seattle yesterday morning, where David Sherwin and David Conrad presented the last of the AIGA Breakfast Series – a considered approach to building business models (for yourself or your company) around the kinds of design work that you want to be doing. It was well timed for my post-grad self and full of charming folks. You know who you are.

There were also some especially useful notions that came up- the idea that you do the kind of work that you’ve done (so watch out for projects that don’t take you where you’d like to go) is particularly important to note as a recent grad. They also provided tools for self-reflection on your job, and the kind of work you like to do vs. the kind of work you hate.

Looking forward to seeing the slides online, so I can share them with friends who missed the event. And can’t wait to use the new Web Stencil Kit that Design Commission provided as the pleasing prize items.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Digital Disturbances

Sunday, March 27th, 2011

A while back, Lorea Sinclaire and I made a poster for an event at Emily Carr. We used an artfully pixelated alteration of the Mona Lisa to represent issues of copyright and creative content ownership in the digital realm.

I’ve been thinking more about how the digital environment can affect the integrity of images over time, whether by manual alteration or technologically driven degradation (the loss of quality over repeated saves, or interlacing in video.) I wrote a few little tools in processing to play with the aesthetic of these changes more deliberately. Here are some of the experiments:

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

San Francisco

Friday, March 18th, 2011

Over reading week, we trundled down to San Francisco, to visit with the boy’s family and to meet up with some friends. I was very excited to chat with Coyote Days at Good Vibrations, who was able to give me an immense volume of invaluable feedback about my grad project. Giant thanks to her!

I also spoke to a friend at Apple who was full of insights about working at a large company, and a representative from OPower- an extremely interesting company that is taking sensor data from individual consumers through their power companies, and providing them with meaningful feedback which will help them curb their use. Brilliant stuff.

Oh- and we checked out Teatro Zinnzani, went wine tasting, and had an exciting experience with indoor skydiving. All in all, a pretty wonderful week. Here are some photos.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Diamonds

Monday, February 21st, 2011

A little brain-break for reading week.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

An Open Letter to Industry Minister Tony Clement

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

Dear Mr. Tony Clement,
I hope that this message finds you well. I would like to bring to your attention an issue that is dear to my heart, and that will affect each and every Canadian, starting in just a few short weeks.

I recently learned that the CRTC has passed Usage Based Billing for Internet Service Providers, which I first understood to mean that the major ISPs would now be able to charge consumers for exceeding their maximum allotment of Bandwidth each month. As I read more about this issue, however, I realized that the impacts of this ruling are significantly more dramatic and wide-sweeping than I had originally imagined.

I’m sure that you are aware at this point that the new (smaller) Bandwidth limits being imposed are seemingly arbitrary- and are different depending on which province a user lives in. In Ontario, there is a new 25 GB limit on monthly use. In Quebec, $2.50 will be charged for every GB used over their limit. I hope that you will appreciate the kind of barrier that presents for development of new ideas. As people find new and more interesting ways to take advantage of the interactive capabilities of the internet, bandwidth usage will continue to grow. While it costs major ISPs around a penny to stream 1 GB data, they will begin to charge 1-4 dollars for each GB over the limits set. Capping internet consumption and limiting use by socioeconomic level will discourage online growth, and Canadian tech innovation will suffer. While some countries around the world are beginning to include internet access in their constitutions as an inalienable human right, Canada is taking a step backwards by prioritizing Telecom companies which are already some of the most profitable in the world over an online environment which is open, accessible and a hub of learning and cultural collaboration.

Beyond the relatively straightforward issue of access to information, I’d also like to speak to the ideological issues which I believe may be overlooked by the older generations. As a person who has grown up on the internet, it is in some ways a home, an abstract place where every individual has equal rights and power to express themselves, to find information and truth, and to learn and better themselves regardless of gender, ethnicity, or most importantly, socioeconomic status. The internet represents a world where the values that we hold to as Canadians are manifest in a wide variety of ways. I would be personally crushed to see this world change for the worse, and enormously disappointed in my country.

Please understand, Canadian youth who come of age are being pulled in many directions by countries which are more populous and offer more interesting jobs than are available here. Our country is very susceptible to the effects of “brain drain,” and a cap on internet use like to one outlined by these new regulations is yet one more reason to move somewhere else, for individuals and for innovative companies. I’m proud of my country and would like to work here in the future, but the industry that I belong to is heavily internet dependent. I don’t want to choose between being Canadian and being employed.

Thank you so much for your time. I look forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to contact me at this email address, or to phone me at (778) 689-0433.
Sincerely,

Rachel Ilan Simpson
http://www.rachelilansimpson.com

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »