The Art of a Book

My French class this semester is about literature and 19th century childhood in France. As a project, each of us is writing, illustrating, and binding a children's book!

This past Tuesday, we spent some time in Wellesley's Book Arts Lab (yes, this exists!) to learn about how we're going to bind our books and to study different types of printing.

 We're going to accordion fold our books, so we talked about how to format the documents we type, and then we started talking about binding. Our books will be accordion folded. Using an accordion fold allows the book to be read like a normal book, but it also allows us to pull out the pages so that they can all be seen at once. We'll all have multiple sheets that will need to be attached, and that's done with a type of Japanese tissue paper that has the right kinds of strength and durability. We practiced folding and attaching sheets using colorful pieces of paper! We also got to use some really interesting tools, like bone folders.

A yellow sheet and a pink sheet attached with a strip of tissue paper. That little bag is basically a paperweight, but evidently it's standard in book binding. The bone folder is to the left of the scissors.

We talked about different types of printing and looked at some examples of each, but the best part of our trip to the Book Arts Lab was printing a poster on a press! One of the first works we read was Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile, in which Rousseau repeatedly manipulates his student so that the student will learn, so we chose to print "Keep calm and manipulate Emile" on our poster.
This phrase has five Es in it, which is a lot for something like this where the font should be large. This was one of the only large types that had five Es. Each letter is called a sort, and with most of the other types, we would have been out of sorts. (That's the origin of that phrase!)

The inked type for our poster!

The press we were using was a 20th century press, so it had one motorized part. This was a really fascinating machine, and it was so much fun to figure out how various bits of it work!

All photos are by Becca, who has been awesome in working with us on this project. In the picture is Katherine, who runs the Book Arts Lab.

Mittens to Oliners: Choosing Olin

Olin admissions decisions come out this week!
We have nicknames (of varying popularity) for the different stages of the admissions process. Students start out as prospies, short for prospective students, which isn't a very Olin specific term. People who come to Candidates' Weekend are candidates, or candies. After that, some candidates become admitted students, also known as mittens. People who choose to come become Oliners.

I've been thinking back to two years ago when I was a mitten, so here's a list of a few factors to consider when making the decision to come (or not) to Olin. Some of these are based on what I took into consideration when making my decision, and some of them are related to what I've observed since coming to Olin.

Changing the Curriculum

Next year, Olin is changing the first year curriculum. (Again.)

For the past few years, there have been two semesters of circuits classes. Modeling and Control, or ModCon, is in the fall, and Real World Measurements, or RWM, is in the spring. They're each 3 credits, though 4 credits per class is standard at Olin. RWM in something like its current form was first run in spring 2010, so this is its fifth year. It's also its last.

This week was Course Fair, which means that we all got to see the probable list of fall classes (and a really tentative list of spring classes). There had been rumors going around about changes to the first year curriculum, and the course booklet confirmed them. Next year, the first years will only take a circuits class in the fall, not the spring, and it will be 4 credits. Why the change? Well, RWM has been successful, but a lot of people find ModCon pretty frustrating. It's not really a circuits class; the point isn't to learn how to analyze circuits, and everything in lecture is pretty abstract. The content really is about modeling and control, but a lot of students don't come away with a good understanding of control. What students do learn, though, is how to build a circuit neatly and how to debug. The other issue has been that neither RWM or ModCon has really been a 3 credit class. They took nowhere near 9 hours per week for the average Olin first year. There will be content cut in moving to a single 4 credit class, but the credit count will be more accurate, and maybe mixing ModCon and RWM will result in a course with the right amount of abstraction.

For now, the new class is being listed as "New Combined ModCon/RWM Course," so goodness only knows what anyone will call it. I also know nothing about how it will be structured. Will it have the half-semester RWM team project? How much of each current class will it cover? Where will the topics that are no longer covered in the first year curriculum end up?

Beautiful Wood

Yesterday, I took a quick trip into Cambridge with my FBE team! I've been spending a lot of time off campus for projects recently, but most of those trips have been user visits for UOCD. We've been in teams for The Entrepreneurial Initiative for about a week, though, and my team needed to go to a woodworking store.

The Entrepreneurial Initiative is a required class, and it has changed a lot over the years; it seems like Olin has never been sure quite what form it should have. We shorten the name to FBE (pronounced 'fib-ee') because the course used to be called Foundations of Business and Entrepreneurship, and the acronym stuck. In its current incarnation, the class is focused on starting a business in teams of about five.

All the students came up with product/project ideas, and we pitched them to each other. Based on those pitches, we formed teams. My team was formed from the merging of two project suggestions that were both pitched with the idea that we would make a simple product, not spend too much time on design details, and focus on learning basic marketing and finance.

After our first meeting, we decided that we would make wooden coasters. Part of what we're working on this week is design, since there's still some involved in the project, so we needed wood for prototyping. Three of us went into Cambridge to Rockler Woodworking. I didn't know all that much about wood, and I'd never been to a wood store before, but I enjoyed the trip a lot more than I expected I would. The employees were really helpful, and we got some beautiful wood for prototyping:

From left to right: white ash, zebra wood, padauk, walnut, and Bolivian rosewood

My favorite is the padauk, which is the red wood. Another wood I really liked (though we didn't end up buying any of it) was bocote.

The timing of this is pretty interesting. Because a lot of my UOCD users are people who design or make mechanical puzzles, I've been around a few woodworkers, and they've all talked about types of woods and how they choose them. If you'd asked me a month ago what I thought some themes of this semester would be, I would never have said wood, but it's been a really fun surprise.

A puzzle designed by one of my team's UOCD users. There's a lot of symmetry, including color/wood symmetry.

Do-Learn at Olin and French Philosophy

Yesterday, for my French class at Wellesley, I read an excerpt of a book called Le Maître Ignorant  by Ranciere, and the excerpt focused on a French professor, Jacotot, who, after the restoration of the monarchy in France, moved to the Netherlands and taught there. However, he spoke no Dutch, and his students spoke no French. Nevertheless, he was able to teach French literature by giving the students a bilingual copy of a book and having them read it and write about it. The essay then goes on to analyse the role of teachers in various manners of teaching, and it argues that explaining material should not be part of a teacher's role.

I found this reading particularly interesting because it's closely related to my experience at Olin. Some phrases that people use to describe the learning experience at Olin are Do-Learn, Just-in-Time, and project-based. These all imply a greater focus on learning from trying something than on a lecture model. Do-Learn is what it sounds like: learning from doing. Just-in-Time generally means that students are working on some project, and when they reach a point where they need information or a skill they don't have, then they learn it. Project-based is a term we usually use to contrast our classes with problem set courses, and it implies that the course is organized around the projects, not just theory. In reality, most Olin classes involve some amount of lecture or explanation on the part of teachers and/or NINJAs, but it's often less than in the vast majority of engineering, math, and science courses elsewhere.

One Reason I Love Olin

It has snowed several times this week, so Facilities has been working really hard to keep the pathways and parking lots clear. The first Candidates' Weekend was this week, so that was especially important. This means we've all gotten used to getting emails from Facilities asking students to move their cars to certain lots so that it's easier to remove snow. When I woke up on Friday morning and saw an email from the facilities director, I thought it would be about parking, and I very nearly didn't read it, but the title was "Snow Removal Thurs. Evening," which seemed odd.

The Facilities Snow Removal Team had been out late on Thursday clearing snow around campus. When they were done, they went out to the parking lot to dig out their own cars and go home. Upon reaching the parking lot, though, they discovered that a group of students had already dug out their cars for them. The email was a thank you.

User Oriented and Collaborative Design

The only time at Olin after first semester that every member of a graduating class takes a course together is spring semester of sophomore year, and that course is User Oriented Collaborative Design. In UOCD, we're split into teams of five or six, and each team designs a product or experience for a specific group of people. (The classic user group example is bike messengers.)

The whole point of UOCD is that engineering design should be for someone. Design should happen with the user in mind. In the first semester, Design Nature is meant to be a class in going from ideas to a final prototype, but UOCD focuses on earlier steps in the design process. We start with a group of users, and where we end up won't be much beyond ideas. The final deliverables are "design representations" (often foam models) as opposed to functional prototypes.

The most important part of UOCD is the user group. It took us about a week to get sorted into teams based on user groups. Over the weekend after the first class period, we all went out and talked to someone in a group we thought would be a good user group. Some of the user groups that were suggested were amateur blacksmiths, elderly swing dancers, door-to-door evangelists, and suicide hotline volunteers. We wrote about our conversations, read each others' write-ups, and voted on a few user groups that sounded interesting. There were a couple of rounds of voting to narrow down the groups, and then the profs put us into teams based on our preferences. The user groups that made it through to the end are volunteer physicians, blacksmiths, mathemagicians, people who refurbish old cars, drag queens, and people who commute on public transportation.

My team's user group is mathemagicians! We've been especially focused on people who make geometric puzzles, but they're generally interested in recreational mathematics more broadly. The first phase of the project involves meeting a handful of people in the user group and getting to know them. So far, my team has talked to one mathemagician in person and one on the phone, and we have a few user visits planned for next week. It's been a lot of fun talking to mathemagicians so far. They really love math and showing other people why it's beautiful and cool, and it would be hard to not get excited when we're around them.

The classic image of UOCD is a room whose walls are covered in butcher paper and sticky notes, and that has already begun. This is my team's process diagram, where we listed everything we want to do in various parts of the first phase of the project. We have another piece of paper with our schedule on it and yet another with all the information we gained on our first user visit. We're not quite to "Undergraduate Opportunities in Coloring and Drawing" yet, but we're getting there.

The team is the other really important part of UOCD. Everyone says that having a good team is much more essential in UOCD than in most other project classes (which is a little unfortunate, given that the teams are somewhat random). This is because teams are the same through the whole semester, and we just start with a user group, so it's really up to the team where to go from there. My team is fantastic. There are five of us, four Oliners and a Babson student, and we're all really excited. With a good team and an interesting user group, I think it'll be fun semester.