Tactile Tours at Fringe Furniture

Training with (Left to Right) Tom, Brigit, Amber, Karli and trainer Nilgun.

Kicking off the tour. This outdoor set of chairs was a great way to start.

Inside

Amber (centre) shows off her piece which is a metal / fibre tapestry in the form of a fly.

Talking and listening session after the tour which was universally well received and voted better than other tactile tours on offer in Melbourne. "Nothing was out of bounds" was a great feature of the tour. Despite conducting tours for 6 years, Nilgun is taking a prodigious set of notes. How can it be better next time? How was the transport? How could this approach be exported to other events?

More listening.

and more listening.

Hi

Over the last week I've had the pleasure of taking part in Fringe Furniture Tactile Tours.

These are billed as

"Get up close and personal with some of the most extraordinary objects on display at Fringe Furniture. Designed especially for people who are blind or vision impaired, an experienced accessibility guide will take you on an audio described tour - piece-by-piece - into every nook, cranny, curve and corner that these playful works boast."

Nilgun led both the training session and tour I attended and both were great. It is interesting to explore works from a tactile, non-sighted perspective and I was able to talk and hands-on touch visitors through the Ta-Da unveiler.  Everyone on the tour enjoyed themselves and provided great feedback. Next tour is Saturday September 28 when Tom Dempster will be speaking.

Regards  Steve Nurse

Fringe Furniture Talks

This chair from Holmesglen tafe students is brilliant, the whole thing made from one component, a boomerang shaped piece of ply, and ........

here is its blurb. Their Topographical table was shown in this recent post.

Tom Dempster's.........

retracting table was a hit at the show and here is Tom holding forth about it with exhibition organiser Brigit.

Lucas's blurb

about his CROBO seat.  Upcycled timber, formed into letters, formed into a chair.

Christine Nurse with Giorgia Pisano and Freddy Marta Mendoza. Georgria and Freddy chilling out on the Brandon Chair,.....

They exhibited this piece......

and talked about it (the hanging boards) at a Sunday afternoon session,

and here is their blurb.

Kenton Rogers is a regular volunteer and serial-offending artist at fringe Furniture. Here he is talking to Bridget about his lamp and

...... here is his blurb.

A few more of the Sunday afternoon talks,  this one by a group of collaborating designers from Habio.....

and this blue stool is by Richardson Waite, a design pairing from 2 fnal year RMIT students, here is their insta account.

Hi

As mentioned previously, some of my work is at Fringe Furniture 33.  Its a fun exhibition with lots of interesting designs and designers around, so its nice to visit.  For the last 2 Sundays Christine and I have been to the artist tours (Next and last is 3pm Sunday, September 9, 3pm, Rosina Hall, Abbotsford convent). So here are a few pics from recent talks and other visits.

New Lampshade Outside

New Lampshade Outside. The dangly bit is a vestigial hangover from the previous technology. And what else would I do with it?

Not-broken light of the same type at the front.

Broken glass and replacement led bulbs

The lamp bracket fixed up a bit and a new globe installed

Broken glass to new recycling dumpster.

At night, no flash on camera.

At night with flash on camera

Daytime

Daytime

Pic and caption from "Adhocism"

A blurb from The Age about Elon Musk and electric cars. Are electric cars fully evolved?  Maybe not if they are still being driven by people!

Hi

A few weeks ago I looked up when I was tinkering around at the side of the house and noticed a lamp guard was broken.  We happen to have the same lamp out the front of the house, god knows when they were put there.

How or when or why the side lamp broke, I don't know. But it needed fixing, or at least replacing, so I broke out one of my "tribo spirals" which had been residing on a shelf doing nothing. (The part for the spiral can be downloaded as an stl file here) And there was a dangley bit on the original lamp and I decided to put that back on the new lampshade for these reasons:
* What else was I going to do with it? It was good for absolutely nothing else in the universe that I can think of.
* It is sort of a design in-joke. :  "(Inventions show) amusing visual and verbal hangovers from the initial inception" is a quote from the wonderful design book Adhocism by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver." Of course this applies more to early bicycles and early petrol cars and current electric cars and current recumbent bikes and velomobiles which were and are in states of evolution and have quite complicated functional jobs.  Lampshades don't do complicated jobs and can be mucked around with a bit in an arty sort of way.

The broken glass bit went to the new glass recycling bin at the Roseneath St. depot, and I replaced the old incandescent globe with an (I think) more energy efficient light emitting diode model. And I think it looks ok. I will continue this ramble later with a bit more about recumbent bikes and what they could be.

(Continued October 10)

So what could a recumbent bike be and what visual and verbal hangovers are left on recumbents? How could the hangovers be removed to make them a better class of transport bike?  Some inspiration came from reading a recent review of a Dell Laptop Computer which complies with the  Intel Project Athena specification.

This spec was built around the capabilities of new Intel processors which enable a range of benefits if the rest of the laptop computer hardware is up to scratch. These specs include 9 hour battery run time and "waking from sleep in under a second and be ready to browse the web in under two seconds, download emails and grab social media updates in the background even while the lid is closed, and have the same sort of responsiveness on battery that they have when plugged into the wall. The laptop display must support both touch and pen input with narrow bezels. Under the hood, the laptop must have at least 8GB of RAM and 256GB of speedy NVMe solid state storage and the latest Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity with the option for mobile connectivity" etcetera.

So what we have is a central body (Intel) defining a spec which helps manufacturers (like Dell) make great machines. It is a mutual benefit society, the central body gaining reputation because spec-compliant products become better machines enhancing their reputation, and the manufacturers gain from having better, and presumably more profitable and popular machines.

What might "the spec" for recumbents be?

Well the first thing I would say might be that "certified" (or whatever) transport recumbents could have less than 20 litres of covered aerodynamic storage space. Safety bicycles tend to have no racking for luggage storage unless they are high end touring bikes. Even with the racking, users must then buy panniers. And even with panniers the aerodynamics are not that great!

A second spec might be to have less than 1m total of wind-exposed control cable inners and outers.  This can be achieved with a bit of attention to design, and on an aero bike, little things like this count.

A third spec could be wheel disks for all wheels, something that would again reduce wind resistance.

Regards  Steve Nurse

 

Fringe Furniture Opening

CLS\02

Light Sleeper

Topograpical Coffee Table

Ta-Da by Steve Nurse (me)

Didn't get the details  of this piece but it is a combined lampshade and coffee table complete with foldaway legs. It is raised and lowered by a slightly noisy gearbox / winch arrangement hanging from the roof.  Just right for your warehouse conversion pad.

Speeches, announcements, prizes etc. etc.

Hi

A few pics from the opening night of fringe furniture - woohoo. Brigit had done a great job of organising the event and I bumped into a few Monash Uni people I know and chatted to a few other artist / maker type people.  I'm not all that terrific with names so it was a bit embarrassing at times. Will be back at the fringe furniture venue in the next few days: its free, might see you there.

Regards  Steve Nurse

Walk home from Abbotsford

Hi

After my laden bike ride to the Abbotsford convent,  I walked back home via the Yarra River and the more-exciting-than-it-sounds Roseneath St Recycling Dropoff Point.  The walk was very pleasant, and despite living in the area for 30 years or so had never noticed the Peace Mile plaque near the south end of Gray Street. Lots of flowers out for the start of spring too.  At the recycling centre I spoke to Marcel for a while, amongst a few other changes they have a new bike tyre recycling bin which is a welcome addition. Good Job!

Regaeds

Steve Nurse

Fringe Furniture Bump-In

Hi

Today was my Fringe Furniture Exhibition bump-in day and this meant the end of quite a bit of planning and building.  The "Ta-Da" piece which I started blogging about here had been varnished by Christine and I, and 2 days ago, I started setting it up again. This was to avoid embarrassment during set up on site at the Abbotsford Convent, I couldn't quite remember how it went back together again. Anyway, by yesterday morning (Thursday) it was back together, and today I started taking it apart again.

Wasn't sure if it would go into the trike (also on show) and was prepared to take 2 trips to the nearby Abbotsford Convent where the exhibition takes place. Anyway, sometimes if you step back a bit and take your time you think of an answer, and by hooking the trike stand over the tailbox it all fitted.

The trip to the Convent was thankfully uneventful and Brigit and CC and other volunteers and coordinators made the setup go well too.  Leaving the trike at the Convent, I walked home. Official launch Party is Wednesday, looking forward to it.

2 Years ago I had a wooden trike at Fringe Furniture 31, here is my bikes blog from back then.

Regards  Steve Nurse

Regards  Steve Nurse