Tuesday, January 29, 2008

sketchup images for my sister's house



Welcome Mat

My welcome mat was based on the culture of Romania. In coming up with this mat I did research on the country to figure out how they live and how their culture is. In doing this I found that tourism is a huge contributor to their economy. It is very important over there. I also found out that the people are very friendly and our very inviting to tourists.
I decided to go with this idea of welcoming tourism to design my welcome mat. I used to colors of Romania and showed them coming together to form all three colors to show different people and different cultures coming into Romania. I decided on the shape because I was thinking of the idea of sharing and many people from different places coming to one. These were the ideas of Romania.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Davor Galic-Croatia













Interview: Davor Galic

From: Croatia
- There language is Croatian.
- 98% Catholics
- He lives in the inland of Croatia. About 4 hours from the coast.
- There are 70,000 people. “Everyone knows everyone.”
- Schooling:
o 8 years of elementary school, 4 years of middle school, and then 3 to 4 years of college.
- Occupations:
o There aren’t a lot of opportunities. If you aren’t 18 you can’t work.
- Life Style:
o Everyone and everything is very laid-back, relaxed and calm.
o “Everyone’s outside, wasting time, doing whatever.”
- Family:
o He has a mother and father and two sisters. They are 23 and 13 years old.
o Only family member to travel to America because it’s very expensive for them.
o He misses his family very much. Once coming to the U.S., he realized how important and how much he missed his family.
o Divorce rates are very low in Croatia, because family is so important to them.
- Experience:
o He came here on a basketball scholarship.
o He’s traveled to New York City and he loved it. He would like to see L.A.
o He plans to meet people, play basketball and go home in May.
o He knows his self better and he’s more mature.
o He believes it will be a great experience, not matter what happens.
o In the U.S. he believes everyone works for themselves, rather than together, and it’s a lot stricter.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Visual Communications-Roles of Computing in design today and what the future holds

Through many technological advances in the past couple of decades, computers have taken the place of many activities we used to perform, but now take for granted because of the ease of computing. An example of this is shown through design today. Most of our products that we use everyday such as cars, stoplights, elevators, and doors to public places are now being controlled by some sort of computer. This starts in the design process. We have come to rely very much so on many designs controlled by computers.
In the article when talking about the design software it discusses how computing has not advanced to where the program can “think” for us and tell us our mistakes or it cannot fully understand and develop what we want it to without us telling it to. I believe that in a sense this will never change. The computing devices are there because the human brain cannot possibly process all the information that passes through it at one time. That is why we plug the information into a computer as the information comes to us because the computer can process all the information at once. The computer will never be able to develop an idea and manipulate that idea into a finished product without our help. But I do believe that in the future computers may be able to already store wholes of information such as actual objects we intend to use and the environments we intend to place the design without us having to piece it together. Initially, it will have to be placed together, but only in the programming stages of the software. The internet may help this process because we can tell the program what type of object or what type of environment we are looking for and it can find it on the internet and place it into our design, and we can then manipulate it from there.
Technology is going to continue to advance with as many ideas that the human brain can develop, but how it will be used may be limited. I believe that technology will be pushed not to its limits but to our limits of comprehending what is actually happening and how we are to control it. We make advances in computing so that we can develop products that can control our lives and make our lives easier. This will continue to happen in the future. We may run into a problem with this in later years though, because the more we become dependent on the computing to help our lives when they do crash or freeze or just refuse to work, we will have a much bigger problem at hand because not just one thing will go wrong, a series of things will.