Project 3: Social Networking in Portugal

In my research for Social networking in Portugal, I was surprised by what I found. I am used to and grew up living in the internet age- We no longer have to wrack our brains to remember an obscure name of a movie character from our childhood, one of our friends just whips out their iphone and retrieves whatever answer in a few seconds. Similarly, maps, and even the more modern version mapquest, no longer are necessity because all of the new smart-phones have built in GPS...the information is at our fingertips. Most people my age can not imagine what life would be like without the internet.


In a survey taken in Portugal about internet use for any reason, more people answered that they did NOT use the internet than the ones that said they did; only 5,168,800 out of 10,735,765 answered yes, that they did use the internet for email or any other reason. I also found some statistics about facebook in Portugal: only about 30% of the population uses facebook, which is just unheard of for us. The most common forms of social media in Portugal include television, magazines and a different social networking website, OLX.

sources: http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/portugal, http://www.cies.iscte.pt/en/linhas/linha2/sociedade_rede/index.jsp

Color Week (project 2)

Light Box; First project of spring semester

The first assignment of the semester was to take a 12" x 12" x 18" cardboard/foamboard box and use only cut-outs and skewers to create 4 separate spaces within the box. Sounds simple right? No, actually it doesn't even sound simple because getting light to do what you actually intend for it to do is pretty challenging.

As an object aside from the purpose of the project I don't necessarily "like" this design. It was supposed to be simple and I imagined it as an extremely large and powerful space, maybe a grand train station or something public and massive.


I started this project by just jumping right in with my xacto knife and just making cuts and seeing what the light would do. I ended up with a first version that looked like a psycho had carved coded messages all over a box. Then I thought it would be really cool to just have one cut somehow because the most obvious solution had been to cut two lines intersecting or three parallel lines.
so, that is how I ended up with an S-shaped cut out. If I put the light in the perfect location, which maybe only happened once, you actually could see 4 sections along the floor and the back section extending up the wall some. I put 3 skewers in the middle-right because this is where the s shape met the wall and section off the first three areas. There are two up on the wall where the 4th is supposed to hit. The curving cut-out let the light move and guide you through the space.