Episode Notes

Zach Kron (@zachkron) talks with Nono about how new digital tools allow designers to work (and wether these tools make our lives simpler), and about life habits, boredom, constant connectivity and disconnection, digital clutter, and more.

Zach describes his daily job as "Banging digital tools with a stick to make them break." Since 2007, Zach has been involved in the research and implementation of software that drives real world building projects and democratizes advanced design practices. Before joining Autodesk—where he is a senior product manager–Zach worked as a designer in several Boston-area architectural offices on projects ranging in scale from furniture to bridges, and has taught at Autodesk, at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture).

You can find Zach on Twitter at @ZachKron and writing at DynamoBIM.org.

Updates

2019.12.05 · Zach is now sharing his beautiful hand (and robotic) craft on Instagram at @kronzach.

Links

• Dynamo is an open source visual programming environment for design.
• Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.
• Quakers are members of a historically Christian group of religious movements. (We talk about the ability to sit quietly alone or with others.)
• Haiku is a very short form of Japanese poetry.
• Bad Monkeys is a group of design technologists spread around the world, working to change the AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) industry "one workflow at a time."
• Bread & Puppet Theater is a politically radical puppet theater founded by Peter Schumann, active since 1960s, where bread and theater belong together, currently based in Glover, Vermont.
• The Cheap Art Manifesto, Bread and Puppet Glover, Vermont, 1984.
• Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
• Shapeways is a 3D printing service and marketplace.
• Style transfer is "the technique of recomposing images in the style of other images."
• The Resistance is Handmade is a project by Victoria and printed at Albertine Pres by Gather Here.
• Designalyze is a podcast (and website) by Brian Ringley (@brianringley) and Zach Downey (@zdowney).
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
• Buildz. Practical notes for making impractical things by Zach, 2009-2015.
• We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone. —Orson Wells

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Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.