Lab Notes

My first year at the Shapiro Design Lab is ending at this moment, as I sit in the Lab writing this blog post during my last Open Workshop shift. I have worked on many projects, consulted a few university course teams, and attended many campus-wide workshops. Through them all, I have gained a wonderfully positive view on the Lab and its ability to bring so much knowledge to one time and place.

While working at the Design Lab, I gained a real appreciation for interdisciplinary and collaborative projects. I helped to create a variety of things that I normally wouldn’t have the skills or ability to create, and I learned a lot from others by working alongside them. Exploring 3D modelling was a really fascinating experience to me, and getting to see a physical manifestation of my explorations was incredible and really highlighted the real-world impact 3D designing could have.

Working at the Design Lab has allowed me to do “something new” on at least 3 different levels: (1) Learning how to do new skills; (2)Working as a “librarian” assistant; and (3) Cutting edge technology and topics. I never would have guessed I would be working in a library. Working as a resident of the library has opened my eyes to how much I share in common with librarians who like myself want to encourage the dissemination of information as well as culture, science, and truthful exploration of information.

Working at the Shapiro Design Lab was a valuable and unforgettable experience. I was able to explore different types of interesting projects related to both data science and our library community. It gave me an opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills you learned in the classroom to a real-world situation and to collaborate with other student developers. Mainly I participated in the AwesomeBox, an interface that shows recommended books by peers, Measure The Future, a sensor that collects information about how people use library spaces, which is adapted from the open platform of http://measurethefuture.net, and the Zooniverse, data aggregation that measuring an annotation reliability for projects with volunteers to participate in crowd-sourced scientific researches.

Discovering library technology as a student developer working on the AwesomeBox and Measure The Future projects

After a ton of failed prints, annoyed workers, and wasted filament, I managed to 3D print a single phone case.

The goals of the workshop were to understand the science and research of unconscious bias, to become our own background and its impact on our perceptions, to identify how bias and the processes of the unconscious mind can impact decisions and results, and to apply new strategies for practicing more conscious awareness so that we are better able to advocate for inclusion in our organizations.

Review of workshop on artificial neural networks and computer vision.

Review of Zotero citation management software

Review of DMC Audio 101: Introduction to Music Production and Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) at the Duderstadt.