The Website

http://www.auntspray.com/ We are artists! And what better way to communicate about the fabulous world of design and photography today than a blog? We will attempt to keep a casual dialogue about our current design/photography projects and anything we come across that is new, shiny and just plain awesome. Our company name is taken from the book La Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers (by Hillary Carlip, Barbara Green), where it is mentioned that a person actually wrote and misspelled this on their grocery list. Anyone stumbling in via RSS feeds etc...Welcome!

Saturday, April 25, 2009

The Next Generation of Computers

I have for about 12 years now, been designing conceptual CPUs. I (unsuccessfully) shopped around some "unsolicited" design concepts to companies back in 1998 that looked remarkably like a few PCs that they released years later...coincidence? ...anyway....I was years ahead in thinking and conception and figured that I simply scared them off at the time. Everything computer-related was beige or black dull textured plastic during the mid to late 1990s (and even further back). One of the focuses of my designs [for computers] back then was the sleek, 2001 Space Odyssey-ish, sterile glossy whites and blacks with chrome and clean lines. And that is where we are at the present and will be for some time ahead. I was dead-on with that design in my conceptual predictions.


So I've thinking about just the opposite lately, an organic design based on natural shapes, colors, textures AND functions. Harking in someways back to Art Nouveau with design cues from visionaries such as L.C. Tiffany and Atonin Gaudi. But of course keeping keeping with modern technologies and sensibilities. Anthropometrics absolutely needs to be better addressed with future design trends. Computer usage is wounding our bodies in ways that we are just now beginning to understand and who knows how much more debilitating in the future. Sitting hunched over a keyboard for hours-on-end, seven days a week is going to produce a generation of disabled Gen-Xers. Neck, back, wrist and eye problems will be the norm for physicians treating the "Internet Generation" unless we start seriously addressing these issues in design now. I am trending toward CPUs and peripherals that can be utilized in a seated reclined position where the head is supported and the hands using less finger operations.


An organic design focuses on the natural aesthetics, curves and movements found in the life all around us. Instead we choose to defy this with geometric designs that are simply not compatible with OUR design as biological beings. My conceptual design above does not reinvent anything, but it begins to address a design that looks and flows as an organism. I would like to see recycled plastics (preferably not styrene based) with mimetic qualities that would change colors and patterns based on the stimuli of different touches and thus commands. By simply touching an object differently is how biological organisms react, study and ultimately manipulate things. A computer should be no different. I have yet to conceive of a better input device than a keyboard, but that is where I would like to be with this design eventually.


The design image above is a very preliminary concept in the basic aesthetic concerns which is roughly taken from a Tiffany lamp, insects and reptile skin with a little Flash Gordon modernity. This is my early sketching, but really believe this where I want to continue with this homogeneous approach to computer technology and organic interface. More to come on this in the future...but.....what a way to spend a Saturday night......writing about computer designs; ultimate geekdom....

Thursday, April 23, 2009

We're up and running! .....finally

I have been destroying my mind and body trying to get the Aunt Spray website up and running on the [new] asp.net platform for months now. Though it is going to provide a much more advanced Web 2.0 type website, the process would have been much, much simpler with a traditional HTML platform. So now with that geek talk behind me, I can actually get back to doing what it is I do; DESIGNING!