City Bolts

Gallery Blurb:
Signatures Bolts are a series of hardware that gives the power to change a nut and bolt city landscape to the people who inhabit that area. The screws and bolts have specialized heads and associated hardware are fashioned after various brands and boutiques around Chicago, which promote hip-hop and provide opportunities for Chicago youth to express themselves.

Gallery Blurb:
Hip-hop questions the validity of ideas. What makes a brand special? Is it the product, or is it the act of walking into a store and purchasing said product that gives us validation from the stores? High Commodities are a series of nails whose heads are the symbols of two popular luxury brands: Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Knock-offs of these chosen brands are the most commonly found amongst stores in the Englewood neighborhood. By placing the symbol of a luxury brand on an object as commoditized as a nail and striking it with a hammer, the piece questions the validity and preciousness of a symbol that for some, holds so much value.

Table for Two

This project was a reaction to the ill placement of infrastructure within the Englewood Neighborhood, specifically bike racks. These rack are placed as a necessity for new construction
LEED certifications, not to serve the community. Many of them are place in front of vacant lots, and various other places where one would not ever leave their bike. If this infrastructure fails to serve the community as is, how can it be altered to serve the community. I remembered this statement from KRS-1

We said I am. I have no credentials, no validation, but here’s the difference from me and you. When someone says “what is your name you say: my name is Bob. Bob who? Bob Barker” When you ask a Hip-hopper what is there name you get “Yo, I’m Dj Bobski from 125th” The difference in psychology is this. Yo man, I’m just some Bob Barker. That person is like that because they are connected… In other words, their well-being is connected to something outside of themselves. You get this low self-esteem when your well being is connected to something outside of yourself. This is the beginning of poverty right here: I want, meaning that I don’t have. What I want is more valuable than what I already have. The mainstream said “everything that you have has no value: your clothes, your furniture, everything, has no value. The only way that you have value is if you come through us, mainstream institutions, and on top of that, were not letting you in. So, look at what were up against. We’re not letting you in, but this is the only place where you can be validated. So were sitting outside ready to die, but we didn’t. We said because you’re not letting us in, cool. Keep everything you got. Were going to create our own thing over here and your not getting in this. This here we’re creating. This is the attitude in 1972.

I tried to embody this in my Table for Two. A table is something we take for granted. in a public space, it creates an opportunity for gathering and sharing. This is something that is missing from this neighborhood's infrastructure. This would not just be an ordinary table though. It would be a grand table. Though it is made from cast concrete, I hoped to achieve a marble aesthetic.


Here is my Gallery blurb about it:
Scattered around the Englewood neighborhood are a few public bike racks. There are not enough to serve the community and are often placed impractically, giving them little value. What can the bike rack be when it is more than just a bike rack? Table for Two is a cast concrete table that fits securely on the bike racks, offering an outdoor gathering space.

So, it’s about time I actually explained what these projects/objects/solutions/products are. I will start first with the piece entitled Park Bench Speaker:


These speakers were inspired by the Parkbench Subwoofer, which I posted a while ago. The difference between the two is that this speakersis a full range loud speaker and completely wireless. Park Bench Speakers inhabit the abandoned vacant lots that frequent the Englewood neighborhood. As structures, these speakers provide sitting space within the vacant lots, promoting a communal gathering space. The speakers are self-powered allowing the user to plug an audio device into the speaker. It also accepts radio signal, allowing multiple Park Bench Speakers to be played at once, fostering a larger gathering.

Layering: This projects incorporates a multitude of common practices. For instance, block parties are the last type of positive public group interaction in the neighborhoods. These speakers can be daisy chained together providing for block party style events. I envisioned these being sold as hollow shells. This relates to car culture in hip-hop and in the community. When one buys a car, they by it "blank", and typically customize it with their own audio accessories. This speaker housing has been optimized for good sound, so that the user is free to customize their speakers however they want. These also keep the speaker affordable. I tried layering user experiences with outdoor music in this neighborhood to come up with this project

Rupture: Why do we always make speaker housing from MDF? Its something we are condition to do. I used the theory that KRS-One discussed (it in my paper) "what we don't know teaches us as much as what we do know”. I ignored conventions of standard speaker building and experimented with the acoustical properties of concrete. What I found is that it had great audio properties as well as aesthetic appeal.

Photos from the show:
HIP-HOP DESIGN
Hip-hop design looks to appropriate and transform objects of little perceived value into objects of high value using principles of flow, layering, and ornamentation. Specifically looking to the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago as its stage, this thesis journeys through the neighborhood; viewing infrastructure with little perceived value and transforming it with using designed objects.

Last Day

Today is the the closing reception for my Thesis show, where I displayed to works that culminated from this blog. My exhibition was entitled Hip-Hop design. Below are a few pictures of objects in the show.

Above is an arial view of section of Englewood; the section where I grew up. The first thing you probably notice it the large quantity of vacant locks. We tend to look at these vacant lots as detractors from a quality life. What if these vacant lots were somehow made into valuable commodities? Would Englewood the be one of the most valuable neighborhoods in the city?

Busy busy

For the past month I've been busy making things for my Thesis show on June 15th. For the show I will be showing 6 objects which are inspired by the things shown in this blog. More pictures to come soon.

Realizing Urban Space

A couple of weeks ago, I picked my up mom to go shopping. When we returned, I noticed a group of teenage girls walking in the street. I wondered why a group of girls was walking down the middle of the street and not walking on the side walk. There was no snow or other obstruction blocking the sidewalk. My mother brought to my attention that due to large number of abandoned buildings lining the sidewalk, these girls probably felt safer walking in the street. This had not occurred to me. This means that in this environment, the area next to the street has a new purpose. Because of the lack of housing, this area is no longer filled with parked cars, and has become a new thoroughfare for pedestrian traffic. It is an area that can be focused on in my design.

Hip-Hop: Transforming Space

In order to make these objects as visible as possible, I chose to design outdoor objects. I spent the weekend taking pictures around the neighbor hood that I grew up in, Englewood, for inspiration (pictures shown above). One of the things you may notice from the picturesare the staggering number of vacant lots. This lot of sketches mostly dealt with giving value to things and using "ornamentation to transform a space. Here are some of the sketches:

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I was thinking that some of the ideas I talk about in my thesis; using what you don't know as a method for design (which I list under rupture) and ornamentation (which I list under layering) are similar to the ideas I am toying with in my Repair Class. The ideas on repair come from the "Cult of Done Manifesto". I am focusing on resolutions 1 and 4 from the manifesto. They are:

1. There are three states being, Not knowing, action and completion

4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what your doing, so just accept that you know what your doing even if you don't.

Here is one of the ideas from that concept. I will post more when I get them scanned in.

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Updates.

Here's a little more info about the previous sketches I posted.

I made some quick mock ups of the pendent lamp sketch.

The rock that are photoshopped in the vacant lot represent a project I worked on a year ago. It was a concrete sub woofer:

I think it fits in the categories I listed. For one it takes a utilitarian objects and makes it ornamentation to some extent. It incorporates a process that was unconventional (cast concrete) into the design of speaker. I think this easily satisfies the rupture, or the not knowing. Know one told me this would not work, so I had no reason not to try it. As far as flow, it is a return to the beginning. It takes something that is "hi-tech" and incorporates low tech processes. I think their is a lot of circular flow and equilibrium in its design.

Ornamentation

I've been thinking about the idea of ornamentation which I described in the paper below. Here are some sketches I did last night.

Ornament Sketches 1

Hip-Hop: Layering, Flow, and Rupture.

I felt that a lot of people had a lot of tie understanding my thesis. I spent the entire weekend doing research and writing this little addition. It took a critical look at what makes hip-hop culture unique. I have thus produced a rough rubric for what is hip-hop. I have distilled it into three categories: Flow, Layering, and Rupture. This paper is a rough draft. It still has plenty of misspellings and grammatical errors. It also contains no citations. I wanted to put it out there as soon as possible to give you guys the flavor of what I am going after in my designs. Please comment on the ideas in the paper since they are the crux of my thesis.

Hip Hop Design

Thesis statement and Bio

Here's the thesis statement and bio that I gave the school.

Eric's Grad Thesis Template (1)

One of the things I carried over from my winter break doodles was the idea of a bike redesigned under my hip-hop design model. I stated playing with various ideas such as materiality (covering the frame in concrete as show in sketches 1 and 2) a glass seat (sketch 2, and making it more social by adding opportunities for more than one person to fit on the bike. I slowly started to embrace the idea of accessories. sketch 3 shows a brief foray into this.

Bike Sketches

Here are some of my initial sketches over winter break:

Winter Break Sketches

Over winter break, the thesis took a slight turn. One day while foraging for diner, a friend brought up my thesis. He said that he liked where I was going with it, but felt that I was holding back. A lot of what I was talking about was black culture and how it has been stolen over a number of years. I agreed, but honestly didn't know how to address this without being clumsy. Around the same time, another friend of mine introduced me to this video:

After watching this I was sold. My thesis would be about hip-hop design. I came to the conclusion that i cannot talk about helping the youth with their identity problems while ignoring the disproportionate number of issues that youth of color face. This also could not be done, by saving punk, hip-hop, etc. from the big bad Corporation. Instead I wanted to save identity by placing markers of identity out there in the world. A person of Italian decent walks down the street of Chicago, they may see show rooms full of italian inspired furniture. When a person of Greek heritage walk down the street, they see many types of greek inspired architecture. When I walk down the street I see nothing which represents my heritage. Perhaps if Hip-hop grew into a larger culture, encompassing architecture, design, science, etc., this could change. I would like to produce things that represent an inclusive hip-hop culture.

More past stuff

Here is the accompanying Presentation I used when I presented the paper before the SAIC Thesis Critique Panel.

Binder 3

I'm going been working on this thesis for 4-5 months now. I'm going to try and get everyone upto sped by posting some of my earlier research.

Design and Its Relation to Sub Cultural Appropriation 2

The Beginning

This Blog will document my process through my thesis as well serve as tool to gain feed back from many people