Tag Archives: China

China

QSL Card

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As a teenager, and with a parent in the broadcasting industry, I was fascinated with radio and television. A hobby of mine was collecting QSL cards from around the world. I collected QSL cards from AM, FM and shortwave radio stations. The other day, I was looking in my archives for something else, and I found the QSL card from Radio Peking, posted on September 30, 1972. The letter, typed on onionskin paper and in perfect English, invited me to listen to some of its special programs, which included “Selected Readings from Mao Tsetung’s Works”, and “Selected Readings from the Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin”. Later, I received some English-language magazines. My progressively liberal parents, who were young adults in the early 1950’s—during the ‘red scare’ era—tended to look a little askance at these deliveries.

Google Images has a collection of QSL cards.

Arduino, China

Seeed Studio Visit – Shenzhen, China

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(Wuhan, China) On Monday I visited Seeed Studio, a small but growing tech startup in Shenzhen. They specialize in open source hardware, and are known for the Seeeduino, an Arduino microcontroller board. Seeed makes open source “brick” addons that allow sensor and actuator connections to the Seeeduino without soldering and they provide economical starter kits that are perfect for our students at NSCAD University.

They generously provided me with a sample Seeduino, and two kits: the “Electronic Brick Starter Pack” and the “Catalyst” kit that they have prepared for Make magazine for my lecture at Shenzhen Polytechnic that afternoon. I’ve used their bricks before and find them very convenient for learning how to use the various sensors, motors, LEDs and other actuators, though I have to admit that I broke a light sensor early on when I plugged it into the brick the wrong way around. Apart from that silly mistake, the brick system is robust and well-designed.

Two of the principals, young engineers Eric and Fan, were my hosts. They showed me a beta version of their soon-to-be-released DSO nano, a small handheld digital storage oscilloscope for people like me. It looks like an iPod Touch, but with a button rose at the right. They tell me that they would like to use a complete ‘glass interface’ like the iPod with their next version of the product.

Eric brought out a development prototype of their Rainbowduino called the 3D RGB Cube, a 3D matrix of RGB LEDs that connect smartly to the Seeeduino. With this system there are no worries about current requirements, all you need to do is plug it into the microcontroller and ensure that you give it enough juice.

Now, off to Beijing!

China, design

Return for Regrooving

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I am employed as a design professor at NSCAD, a small visual arts university in Halifax, a city that hangs off the edge of eastern North America. The global economic downturn has disrupted, to say the least, many of our dreams and aspirations. In education, this means that belts need to tighten because some schools were using stock market investment income to cover operating budgets. NSCAD University, as a public institution that had not kept up with endowment giving, did not fall into this trap. Our problem is that the construction (and shortcuts taken at that time) of the Port Campus several years ago has resulted in a serious budget shortfall.

In April, our President, David P. Smith, established an ad hoc “task force” to look at ways the university could save money with as little impact as possible upon the student experience. I sat in the meetings and while many of the suggestions brought forward were good, and everyone understands the profound difficulties facing us, I could not help but wonder if how different our discussions would be if, instead of try to patch a system that has been running for 122 years (with all its patches, grafts and compromises), we were given a budget and a mandate to start fresh and build a school from scratch?

Shanghai Institute of Visual ArtsLast October, during my swing through China to promote NSCAD and our Master of Design program, I visited the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts (SIVA), with the help of a recent MDes graduate, Feichen Wong. SIVA is a new university affiliated with Fudan University, one of China’s top ten schools. To establish the school, the central government gave Fudan about 60 million dollars for capital infrastructure. The result is three postmodern buildings in suburban Shanghai’s University Park. I met with Zhuang Liang Xiao, Executive Vice-President and Zhang Tong, Dean of School of Spatial and Industrial Design.

Prof. Zhang told me that he enjoyed having the opportunity to re-envision a new school; they tried to design the institution with fresh eyes and with a knowledge that graduates will be faced with 21st century challenges. SIVA is organized into a number of Colleges, Academies, Departments and Institutes: the College of Communication Design, a Digital Media Institute, the College of Space and Industrial Design, the Fashion Institute of Design, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Departments of Performing Arts and Fine Art, a Graphic Information Center, and a Management Training Center. I was not able to determine why one area was an “Institute” and the other an “Academy.”

I left SIVA with a sense of envy, and it made me wonder what it would be like to be given a blank sheet of paper: could I do better? Granted, it’s one thing to rebuild with a $60 million cheque in your pocket, compared to owing a million or more. And I do not for a moment think that the money given to my Chinese collegues is in any way unencumbered; I am not sure which is better, to be rich yet loaded down by thousands of years of educational practice that merits copying over originality, or as NSCAD is, impoverished yet embued with a tradition of spirit of creative optimism—perhaps NSCAD is better off in the long run?