The Awesome Foundation

Hello, New York!

Happy New Year! The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is thrilled today to kick off 2010 by announcing that we are officially launching a new chapter of the Foundation in New York City.

Additionally, we’re honored and seriously pumped to be welcoming a simply stellar cast of micro-trustees steering this project and forwarding the interest of awesome in the universe, including:

* Catherine White

* Caterina Fake

* Chris Dixon

* Sam Lessin

* Clay Shirky

* Colin Nederkoorn

* Jesse Chan Norris

* Douglas Repetto

* And, AF-NYC’s Dean of Awesome, the Honorable Lee-Sean Huang

Since it’s January 1st, this means that applications are open once again on the main grant submission page. And if you’re in New York City, this means that it’s officially open season to grab a chance to become the city’s very first Fellow! Grants close once again promptly on January 15th, so it’s worth not delaying and submitting your project ideas as soon as you can.

You might notice that we’re short a few of our micro-trustees (the usual board is ten, to create our $1,000 grant). We’re still sorting out the details with the remaining slots, and we’ll be announcing them as they confirm in January! Stay tuned, dear readers.

Boston Fans: A Dean of Awesome Is Needed!

Based in Boston and want to be involved the Awesome Foundation?

Want to participate as a micro-trustee to the Awesome Foundation but don’t have the money?

Want to serve the interest of promoting and protecting Awesomeness in the universe?

Well, now you can! I’m glad to announce today that the Boston Awesome Foundation is seeking a Dean of Awesome to team up with our existing Boston board of 10 micro-trustees.

The Dean will participate with the rest of the trustees in reading/voting/choosing a winner each month (and will undertake the same Oath of Service), but will be completely freed from the usual obligations of being a micro-trustee in contributing $100 a month to our monthly fellowship award.

Instead, the Dean will take on the responsibility of managing and creatively expanding our monthly award event logistics, the chapter’s online presence (blog/twitter/etc), community building with our past fellows, and other scheduling for Awesome Foundation Boston.

If you’re interested in participating as the Dean, please drop a message describing your interest and what awesome things you’re involved in to tim@awesomefoundation.org by January 8th. We’ll be doing interviews then. Let us know if you have any questions!

Boston December Awesome Fellow: Lauren McCarthy

I’m happy to announce that Awesome Foundation Boston has chosen its December Fellow! This month’s grant goes to Lauren McCarthy, who specializes in the development of Tools for Improved Social Interacting.

What does that imply? Lauren writes, she’s working on a series of “various wearable devices that use simple technologies to condition the behavior of the wearer to fit better with expected social behaviors” These include:

A Happiness Hat (built) - which drives a metal spike into the head at a pressure inversely proportional to how much you’re smiling (seeing it in action is out of control - check out the video)

An Anti-Daydreaming Device (to be built) - a scarf that contains a heat radiation sensor that detects if the wearer is engaged in conversation with another person. While the wearer is engaged in conversation, the scarf will vibrate periodically to remind the wearer to pay attention and stop daydreaming.

And A Body Contact Training Suit (to be built) - a suit that requires the wearer to maintain frequent body contact with another person in order to hear the world around her. If the wearer stops touching someone for too long, all the surrounding sound will fade to static.

We’re glad to announce that she’ll be coming from L.A. out to Boston in January to debut her work and run a workshop/interactive event on social interaction technology. Stay tuned for details!

In the meanwhile, Lauren will be documenting and logging her progress online here. There’s also more details on how this stuff will work technically and more sketches available there as well.

Updates on the Eco Pod Armada!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Excited (and thankful for the emerging awesomeness): The Boston Awesome Foundation has just got word from Lee Altman, our November Fellow, that she’s made an initial experimental pilot launch of the pollution-cleaning phytoremediation pod in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

As with most experiments, still some details to be worked out, but things are coming along. The tentative date (they’re still waiting on approval from the city parks dept) for the next prototype launch, if you’re interested in attending and meeting Lee, will be on Sunday, December 6th. For updates and details on this Sunday, Lee’s set up a Facebook invite so you can keep posted on what’s going on. If you’re in town, definitely drop by!

You can follow the continuing updates on the Eco-Pod Armada project (and check out more images as the project comes together) on the handy dandy website that Lee has set up here.

Boston November Awesome Fellowship: Cleaning The East River with Eco Pod Armada

Sorry for the delay, this month’s granting process ended up taking slightly longer than originally expected, but, for reasons that will become obvious in a few weeks, we’ve been swamped, cooking up some upcoming things that will hopefully do well by forwarding the interest of Awesome in the universe. It’s gonna be great. Stay tuned.

Today, Awesome Foundation Boston is tremendously excited today to announce that they are awarding their November Awesome Fellowship to Lee Altman, an architect and urban designer working out of New York City.

With a team of scientists, Lee has plans to assemble a complete armada of remote-controlled pods, and set them loose with a series of pilots into the notoriously polluted East River of New York City. The pods will carry a net of plants to trail behind them in the water, specially selected to perform phytoremediation — naturally filtering water through the root mass and the absorbing the toxins from the water. Her hope is to build these launches into a regular community event with plans available online that will allow anyone to build one themselves (the designs are great and lightweight: initial calculation suggests that each ship can be made for $110) Our funding will go to making the initial fleet, of eight ships, possible. We’re thrilled to have her on board as a fellow — congratulations to Lee!

Friends in Providence will be announcing their grant award this month pretty soon as well. And, as per usual, we’ve got our awards ceremony coming up next week. Watch this space as the details come on out.

Lee’s complete grant and description, after the jump:

Read More

Welcome, Awesome Foundation Providence!

The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences has been talking for some time now about expanding and opening up chapters in different locales and specialized in different arenas. Many of you have gotten in touch, and we’ve been thrilled by all the people volunteering — but we’ve to date held off, getting the formula right, and figuring out how to start building outwards.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce today that we take the first, critical step in changing that by announcing the official formation of Awesome Foundation Providence!

Headed up by Owen Johnson and TJ Sondermann, they’ll be joining our Boston branch in forwarding the interest of Awesome in the universe. AF-Providence will be involved in administering its own $1,000 grant each month to projects, which means two grants coming out every month, and generally more excellent schemes going down.

They’re also currently in the process of assembling their group of micro-trustees, so, if you’re interested taking a serious oath of office and funding projects, be sure to drop them a line at owen AT existence.com, and tsondermann AT betaspring.com.

Fantastically enough, they’ll also be participating in the November grant cycle! So, if you’re interested, be sure to drop your idea on our grant site by midnight at AwesomeFoundation.org.

October Fellowship Awards Party

Hey there! As per usual, we’re having an awards ceremony/party this coming weekend. Won’t you join us?

Thx,

Mgmt.

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***NOTE: THIS EVENT IS IN A DIFFERENT LOCATION THAN IT USUALLY IS***

The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences and The Information Superhighway Cordially Invite You To…

COTTON CANDY CANNON: THE WEAPON OF THE FUTURE
An Awards Ceremony & Party for the Awesome Foundation
September 17th, 2009, 7:00 PM - 12:00
Betahouse, 13 Magazine Street, Cambridge MA (Central Square)

A venerable institution founded in June 2009, The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences gives monthly $1,000 fellowships to projects that advance the interest of Awesomeness in our universe. There are no requirements for applying, no definite criteria for deciding the winner, and no limitations beyond the necessity for being awesome. The winners receive the money in cash, check, or gold doubloons.

This month, we are extremely proud to award our October Awesome Fellowship to Josh Gordonson (http://www.instructables.com/member/T3h_Muffinator/), whose plan is to construct a handheld cotton candy cannon that can “coat a rotating human in a cotton candy cocoon in one-three minutes.” Need we say more?

You can read more about the proposal here: http://j.mp/5KKow

Come celebrate with us, meet the fellow and our micro-trustees, and hear about the plans to set the scheme into motion. We’ll talk and answer any questions about how you can apply for the next round of Awesome grants coming out in October. And we’ll also be giving the latest update on our previously funded Awesome Fellowships.

NOTE: the price for this event is free. You can expect beverages, food, ideas, cool people, and a big ceremonial check.

To submit to be the Awesome Fellow for October, please drop us a line by the 15th at: http://awesomefoundation.org.

For all you completionists, we’re also cross-posted on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=149371407606, as well as Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4572513/

October Awesome Fellowship: The Cotton Candy Cannon

This mean-looking badboy is the brainchild of Josh Gordonson, close to a decade in the making. It is, indeed, the first working prototype of a rugged cannon that deploys an entirely new kind of ammunition. One that is likely to change the face of battlefields and fairgrounds forever.

Specifically, it shoots cotton candy.

This is huge, people. Absolutely huge.

The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is proud to announce today that Josh is the winner of this month’s Fellowship. Specifically, we’re funding the production of a handheld blaster that will be able to, quote, “coat a rotating human in a cotton candy cocoon in one-three minutes” (that’s verbatim, from the grant) and will feature “Three buttons [that] will dispense food coloring into the sugar just before it’s extruded. Color mixing should be possible, giving the artist machine-gunner a full palate of tooth-decaying paint.”

And best of all, the plans will be made available, online, at Instructables. We’re also planning a public debut of this project, once it’s all ready to start shooting.

SET PHASERS TO AWESOME!

We’ll have more details about the awards ceremony, coming up ASAP. Stay tuned, kids.

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More about Josh (from the man himself):

Josh Gordonson is a homegrown maker from the suburbs of New York.  As a child, his parental units introduced him to the world of DIY by raising him directly above a subterranean PHS (personal hacker space) and growing the highly inquisitive mammal (HIM) on an incredibly widespread informational growth medium. Once of age, Josh pursued his interests in making things via the shop below him, with the help of his equally interested cousin Ari and motivation from nearly all of those that surrounded him. Josh has since interned at Instructables and has been deeply immersed in the incredible DIY community.  He’s the first to document a functional high-output homemade cotton candy machine on the internet, a goal sevenish years in the making, and is now pursuing… well… bigger things.  Nowadays Josh spends his hours learning the inner secrets of analogue electronics at the Massachvsetts Institivte of Technology, but still scrounges for time to make everything he dreams up in his sleep.

The September Awesome Grant: Forty Days of Dataviz

This month’s Awesome Fellowship goes to Greg Kapfhammer, whose project is to hold a forty day data visualization contest, what he calls the Forty Day Visual Feast Project. Prizes to include a good deal of cold hard cash as well as quality large-scale reproductions of the winner’s visualizations.

So get to reading Flowing Data again, get your Processing dusted off, and your volumes of Tufte all ready to go. Plans are still coming together and details for the competition will be announced on this blog. If you’re interested in keeping posted about this, join the project mailing list or drop an e-mail to tim AT timhwang DOT org. More details about the project available here.

Greg describes:

Have you ever seen a visualization of a data set, process, or phenomenon that took your breath away because it effectively explained a difficult to understand concept? The Forty Day Visual Feast Project (FDVFP) will support the creation of forty exciting visualizations that are designed to inspire and educate both scientists and artists. Upon its completion, the FDVFP will showcase forty images, a description of the steps that you can take to construct them for yourself, and a commentary on their strengths and weaknesses. The FDVFP site will include an informative page for each visualization and a beautiful wall-sized poster highlighting each of the designs.  Of course, the FDVFP needs your help in order to complete these final deliverables!  You can learn more by visiting http://www.cs.allegheny.edu/visualfeast/.

Inaugural Grant Winner: The Big Hammock

The Awesome Foundation is extremely proud to award its first ever grant to Hansy Better Barraza, professor at Rhode Island School of Design and all around architect extraordinaire. Based on her interest in “bringing people together through design of public art and objects”, Hansy plans to design and build a huge hammock in Boston Common.

The Awesome Foundation and Information Superhighway are co-hosting an award ceremony and party on Friday, August 7th in Cambridge, MA. Details are posted on Upcoming and Facebook.