Came up with an excellent new use case for
It’s an excellent way to organize a complex descendant of the lab notebook/equipment logs etc. The Ribbonfarm Junkspace lab is getting its act together.
Conversation
I was wondering what to call whatever the hell I’m doing here and decided to call it a Junkspace Lab, inspired by, but not entirely in harmony with, the Rem Koolhaas essay. If Roam releases fpermission management features I’ll consider making this public (possibly paywalled 🤑)
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Projects organized into programs, of which repair/replace is the soul of the party. The equipment/infrastructure side is as important as the projects. I’ll maintain a biography for major pieces of equipment and instruments, tracking their evolutionary use. “How equipment ages”?
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For example, the Celestron telescope which @Ralph90397024 donated to the lab is named “Ralph”. The used soldering iron Ryan Hume just sold me is named Ryan (hasn’t arrived yet). Equipment will be True Named as and when (and if) it acquires a story.
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This should be fun. Getting slightly organized and plugging this activity into my other stuff should help make it sustainable.
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The design of this is partly inspired by Pablo Neruda’s house in Valparaiso, which I toured a few years ago. Every piece in it has a story attached. That, but with a postmodern Junkspace aesthetic. And an engineering research space rather than literary embodied memory.
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Though I’ve spent over a decade working in university/industry labs, I’m not much of a hands-on lab guy. I was usually doing theory, modeling and simulation on the margins (though I did do *some* lab work and TAed a lab course in the late 90s for 3 semesters).
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But this is not a traditional lab. Or a maker space. Or a hobby. Or a hacker space. Or god forbid a design/art studio 😬
I’m thinking of it as “stack research” 😎.
Projects and equipment are as much the object of research as the means.
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If it outgrows the 20 sf I can spare in my home office... who knows, I may lease a bit of lab space in post-Covid dystopia of cheap commercial real estate. 😇
This has also been retconned into project. That story for another day.
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Thanks to @Ralph90397024 etc for inspiring this escapade. Let the hapless hackery commence.
Replying to
Hate to use the phrase but there’s a “critical practice of materiality” aspect here, and some inspiration from STS folks like
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Forgot to mention among inspiration sources.
Everybody I acknowledge/thank as this project evolves will also be on the blame list if things go wrong 😆
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Realizing I need to organize software/apps I use for this stuff at least as much as hardware and physical space.
