: GEP - Viewing Profile

Presentation and differentiation.

You can put a child's finger painting on your fridge with a magnet, and it is a child's painting. Or you can surround it with a wide white matte and a handsome frame, and someone might mistake it for modern art. Does your art festival display look like a professional display, or an amateurs display? Does it look like you think your work is important, or like you think your work is silly? It really matters. Also important, in order to get your work into the venues where you can charge higher prices, you need to have great photographs of your work. It's another area where presentation matters. When I see so-so work at a high-quality show, I think "they must have great photographs."

Differentiation means that your work is more valuable if it is unique. Not only must it be unique, you must know exactly what makes your work different, and be prepared to explain it to your customers.

Mea

The thing that sticks out to me is that you just had some parts replaced on your vent. Then suddenly the problem appeared. I feel like this must have something to do with the changes made to the vent. If there is a problem with the structure of your kiln, it would have happened over time, rather than suddenly. I don't think a downdraft vent is supposed to remove heat from the room, but maybe in your case the vent was doing that before the repair. Was there a hole in the duct, or anywhere else in the negative pressure zone? Honestly I'm not sure if that explains anything, just wondering.

Although this scenario is different, at the studio where I teach, the kiln room gets very hot, even in the winter. We have three kilns (with downdraft vents) in a room about 250 sqft.

In my own studio where I had only one kiln* with an overhead vent hood, which does remove heat from the room, in the summer months the room gets uncomfortably hot, close to 90 degrees. This is in a basement that otherwise keeps itself at about 70 degrees when the kiln is not heating it up.

Mea

*until this past weekend when I got a second kiln ... woohoo!

OffCenter, on 18 May 2013 - 10:25 AM, said:

Put your reading glasses on Jim. What we NOW call "the internet" existed in the 70s, it had other names back then.

OffCenter, on 18 May 2013 - 10:10 AM, said:

We started calling it "the internet" in the 80s. The infrastructure existed long before that, including things like bulletin boards, as Stephen mentioned. You are referring to the commercialized form of the internet, which came into existence in the 90s.

Just want to add one more note .... if someone has seriously offended you on the forum, if you feel the need to do something about it, by far the best thing to do is tell that person directly that they have offended you. You can use the PM (private message) function if you don't want to do it publicly. Written words on the internet have their limits, sometimes it's just a misunderstanding. Sometimes a poster just needs some education about what is offensive to other groups of people.

But what really doesn't work is to generalize the problem as a forum-wide problem. I know this from working in a community studio with about 100 potters. If there is a behavior problem, you cannot just tell the entire population "somebody is causing a problem" because everyone will think "it must be somebody else." You can only correct the problem by directly telling the problem-causer what they are doing wrong.

Mea