Intro: Liz Courts

Hello all! I’m Liz, and I am a Fine Arts major with a minor in Arts Leadership and Business. I am in my senior year and I’ll be focusing on graduate school applications this fall. I am fortunate that my parents influenced my art and my studies. My mother is the artist, fantasy fan, and all-around voracious reader, while my father has always been interested in science, technology, and computers. (My sixteenth birthday present was a computer that we built together.) In a prior career, I was a sys/network/web admin (basically if it plugged into a wall I was responsible for it in some fashion). The first programming language I learned (beside BASIC) was Kylix, a Linux-focused derivative of Delphi, itself an interpretation of Pascal. I mostly use Python these days, as it’s very versatile to everything that I might want to do, and I don’t wanna gum up my brain (anymore than it already is) with additional programming languages if I can help it.

This particular class grabbed my attention because I was fortunate enough to be in a summer workshop at the Hand & Machine Lab with 3d printing ceramic forms based on grayscale image mapping. I have always been a huge proponent of using technology to work smarter, not harder, and I want to find ways to include design elements in my traditional art pieces. I find myself often frustrated at the design tools available, as the learning curve is steep and the interface is often dense and confusing. In my role as an operations technician (and future arts educator), I’m often thinking about ways to reduce friction between the digital and analog worlds. OpenSCAD might not be the most feature-rich program out there, but I love the programmatic approach. I am looking forward to using Rhino along with Grasshopper, as that is often used in modeling jewelry designs for fabrication.

I am fascinated by Voronoi diagrams–I find them aesthetically pleasing without being overly rigid in their results. The Fibonacci sequence is an old reliable standard when I’m at a loss for how to design something, and the history of paper manufacturing is a whole interesting rabbit hole of ratios and measurements.

Computational Design Project: Ditto

One of the projects that perhaps is not a design project in a mathematical sense, but a project that fulfills a niche need for fabric designers. At its core, the Ditto is a pattern projector, a straightforward concept. What makes it different is that it can customize patterns based on your measurements, a fairly daunting task even for experienced sewists.

Scaling patterns up and down isn’t linear, especially with more complicated patterns. Having the means to do that through a software interface, along with customizing details (v-neck vs. crew neck for example), without all the fussiness of easily torn pattern paper, and being able to size up and down, would be a wonderful addition to any studio space.

What isn’t entirely clear is how open the app is–can I reuse patterns infinitely? Can I store different model sizes? Can I add my own patterns and customize them as well? One of the things that I’m always asking when I look at new technologies is how extensible it is, and how locked down the interface is. If I can’t use my own designs, no matter how neat the technology is, its value is reduced.