Just found out about the How Stuff Is Made project, a collaborative effort among Yale University, NYU, UC Berkely and others to provide a wiki-driven compedium of materials, manufacture, labor, etc. Mind-blowing stuff. I took my first step, registered with Twiki, and fixed a typo.
Posted by mastr at May 27, 2005 11:17 AMThis is a very cool project, run by an unbelievably creative person named Natalie Jeremijenko, formerly on the Yale faculty, now at UCSD. The original concept for the project was to develop a curriculum for engineering departments around the country, through which engineering students would develop these photo essays and dump them into the Twiki. (This accounts for the primitivism and uneven character of some of the photo essays; a lot of this stuff is just college students armed with digital cameras and a lot of initiative.) It's social activism + an academic perpetual motion machine. There was talk, too, at one point, of connecting the results of the whole thing to Google's Froogle service.
Link to Natalie J's site:
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/njeremij.htm