tash wong: Archive

6 tags

Camping in the big city

School’s out for summer, so last week I spent a couple of nights camping out at Floyd Bennett Field. Floyd Bennett Field is a prime example of the fascinating nature of adaptive reuse. What was once NYC’s first municipal airport and the most active airstrip of WWII, is now a haphazard collection of hobby and activity spaces tied together under the banner of Gateway National...

May 22nd

4 notes

9 tags

Starting a coaster company

About a month ago Tom announced the start of Coastermatic. Coastermatic is a service that allows Instagram users to print their photos on to stone coasters. We’ve been working on it rather intensely for the last 5 weeks and are getting pretty close to launch. After talking about the concept and logistics with a few people who are part of the growing ecosystem of Instagram products, Tom...

Apr 8th

29 notes

4 tags

Elusive confidence

Down at SXSW, earlier this month, I had a few fantastic conversations with women who work in the digital + creative industry. I spoke with them about their work and how they got to where they are today. These talks ended up going deeper into conversations about what it feels like to be bold with your ideas. One of them said, “For a while, I never really knew what everyone else was doing, but...

Apr 3rd

9 notes

7 tags

Good ideas are not everywhere.

Strange as it sounds, this was a somewhat surprising insight. At grad school we’re constantly surrounded by concepting sessions, thesis ideas, and astounding guest lectures; so much so that I tend to forget that theres a lot of half-baked work out there. The startup mania that happens at SXSW was a rather amazing reminder of how many undercooked or just downright creepy ideas become a...

Mar 23rd

4 notes

11 tags

Toilet paper problems

I’m working on a project for my Physical Computing midterm, its called ‘tp minder’. Guri, Minnie, and I were brainstorming for small problems to solve and focused in on toilet paper notification. At the time, we though this would be a fantastically fun and silly project - a system that lets you know there’s no toilet paper in a bathroom stall. During our presentation...

Mar 15th

8 tags

SVA IxD Thesis Blog of David Bellona: Ruby on... →

svathesis: I thought it more important that I focus on communicating the idea of the coal button, rather than hack away at making a functional one. After day 2 at SXSW, I feel that this is a pretty important idea that a lot of people miss. Talked to a few people to day well entrenched in the technology they’ve developed for a half-baked idea.

Mar 11th

5 notes

9 tags

Mar 9th

2 notes

Feb 27th

1 note

13 tags

Grad school chicken pox

Grad school chicken pox isn’t physical, it’s mental. I’m coming understand this affliction as the point in time when you decide to deal with a part of yourself that’s always needed a bit of work. You also know that avoiding it any longer will only make your life much more difficult than it already is. My classmates have talked about their own experiences with this rite of...

Feb 17th

3 notes

8 tags

Take Note

Challenge Millions of people traverse, occupy, work, live, and use the city at any given time. By prospect of being here, they interact with the city constantly. Create a digital artifact that communicates the theme “Interactions with the City”. Give the publication a name, a logo, and a personality. Focus will be on using principles of design and UX. Approach NYC is an incredibly...

Feb 13th

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10 tags

Taste Home

Team Members: Guri Vensted, Tash Wong Challenge A look at ﬁnding what you need amidst a sea of information, and getting it into a form for personal decoding. Find isn’t only a function that occurs on computers. We are tasked with ﬁnding things all everyday: directions, prices, our keys, people, and more. As the complexity of information grows, we must become more creative in our methods...

Feb 13th

12 tags

Caption

Team Members: Barbara deWilde, Prachi Pundeer, Tash Wong Caption is a response to a design challenge to create a product or service that meets an unmet need around the management of time. Challenge We point our camera and take a picture, capturing a moment in time. Not long ago, film encouraged us to carefully edit our photos, and the time and money invested the photographic process drove many...

Feb 13th

16 tags

Growing Up

Team Sarah Adams, Tom Harman, Tash Wong Challenge Save isn’t only a function that occurs on computers or with photographs. It embodies our connection to information on a physical and emotional level. It can even inform how we identify ourselves to the rest of the world. Concept and prototype a way to improve a particular behavior around saving things. This could seek to alter the emotions behind...

Feb 9th

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3 tags

Getting Together: Interaction 12, Day 2

This blog post is part of a series on Interaction 12 by SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design Despartment. The original post is can be found here. Day 2 was a good day. I got up at 8:30AM, made some breakfast, then walked down to the Convention Center. During the 25 minute walk from our apartment, I got to wander and take in the sights and sounds of the Dublin morning commute. The River Liffey is...

Feb 8th

Assignment 8: Become part of the online workforce

For our Entrepreneurial Design course we are all tasked with spending some time on one of a variety of sites: TaskRabbit, GigWalk, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and 99designs, among others. I’ve always been curious about Mechanical Turk after reading about it a while back, so thought I’d give it a try to learn more. Signing up to Mechanical Turk is fairly straight forward,...

Jan 30th

2 notes

'Exploiting Users'

The other day in studio I overheard a conversation about the exploitation of users time. The context was that there’s only so much of it business can ‘mine’, so at some point we’ll run out of time to get our products in front of people. I found that throughout this conversation the way the terms ‘exploitation’ and ‘users’ were brought together really...

Jan 25th

6 notes

2 tags

Getting organized for semester 2

Jan 9th brought about the beginning of our second semester. As I slowly started getting my brain back in to work mode, I realized that I had some serious tidying to do. My inbox was overflowing both in Gmail and Evernote, my Twitter was all over the place (who am I following…why?), Tumblr rather forgotten about, then there was all of the articles and the other online reading to catch up on....

Jan 18th

81 notes

Interaction Tour of NYC: Coney Island

This blog post is part of a series of stories written by first year students in SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design. The original post is can be found here. If I were to put together an interaction tour of New York, the first stop would be Coney Island. The Coney Island of today is not a place that conjures up the wonder of Apple’s next device. In fact, I think the only technological...

Dec 1st

Back in the day

One of my current fascinations is looking back at the early days of home computing. Below is a quick write up I did on the Commodore 64 for my Research Methods class. My first computer was a C64, probably back in ‘88. I went to a funny little school that had us programming history trivia games for each other in first grade. It’s something I completely forgot about until recently, but...

Nov 14th

Nov 6th

Taste Home

Before sitting to write this post, I made a piece of marmite toast. For those of you who don’t know, Marmite is a yeast based spread that comes originally from Britain - though, I’m particular to the New Zealand variety. Its black and tastes salty, and is generally amazing. I think of it as a savory alternative to jam. For those of you who do know, don’t even start on the...

Oct 22nd

2 tags

And it begins, again

I’m back at school. When I was accepted I promised myself that once school actually started I’d be very diligent with blogging about my thoughts and work, and doing so at least once a week. We’re now headed into week 5 and I’m finally jumping in - a jump heavily influenced by the fact that if I don’t, I’ll owe someone a drink tomorrow. I’ve just started...

Oct 10th

6 notes