Last Post

This will be the final post for this incarnation of the ArchaID blog. All the posts have been ported over to a new Wordpress blog at www.archaid.org - see you there!

Finished!!!

Linked Research Question

Acknowledging that there is a transition in information from physical to digital, how can the curation of digital artefacts and the mapping of research adjacencies tell a personal narrative that constitutes towards the representation of self in both physical and digital space?

Michael Smith

The Now Tangible Table

The bodies of both my tables are finished. Just the painting and security points to go... Despite being unfinished both already perform the beverage support role admirably.

I've also been working on the graphics for the table top explaining my project.

InfoVis and a Shameless Plug

I wanted to let everyone know about my first gallery show which starts at 6pm on Friday (18th November) at the Biscuit Factory – a commercial art gallery in Newcastle. The exhibition will be unusual for the gallery which is predominantly focused on craft based work as my work consists of digital prints of ‘Data Portraits’. Data Portraits are information visualisations consisting of node and link diagrams representing hyperlinks from a given URL. The images make use of force directed graphs to organise the nodes into a pattern where related nodes (i.e. pages with links between them) gravitate together and unrelated nodes spring apart. A series of them can be seen here.

As well as being a commercial enterprise the underlying motivation behind Data Portraits is to understand the limits of self representation. It’s intriguing to me that people do identify with these graphics even though they are far removed from what they represent. The notion that a web site is spatial has a long history traced back to the idea of a hyperlink as a means of ‘navigating’ information and we are now surrounded by network graphics on everything from News TV intros to the cover of Computing Textbooks. This is only one possible conceptualisation for what the web it and how it works but it has become of framing our interactions with it and one of the dominant schemas of the 21st century.

Prototype 12: First Working (ish) Prototype

Here is my prototype working (well sort of). I have managed to successfully export the mesh as a STL and import it into appropriate software. A quite interesting accident happens when you press a personality and apply it more than once.

Further work to do

I need to add the option to create more shapes but I think that it is important to iron out some of the more major bugs first.

Bugs to fix

1. The shape variable slider does not work, I will have to hard code the variables to change the size. This is ok for a dodecahedron as there is only one variable but for other shapes, this may cause problems. I want to have it so that you show the space and then as you change variables, the variables of the shape change.
2. The personalities teasing and secretive work but not very well. I want to try and make twist work better. Also, these two seem to rotate in the viewport when around a global axis rather than a local one
3. The way the all personality sliders work is not that great, you have to select a value and then press the button to generate. I want to have it so that you can alter them in real time so that you can see how the values affect the shape more easily.
4. The reset button does not work – I have no idea how to do this yet… I am still thinking about it.

Applet download

Open Processing link

The Applied Anthropomorphic Language

This series of images demonstrate how my chosen personalities can be mapped onto the Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts. I am proposing that each personality has a button that initiates them and a slider which controls the scale of each personality.

Base Shape: Dodecahedron

Personality one: confrontational Modifier: extrude

Personality two: nagging Modifier: noise

Personality three: teasing Modifier: twist

Personality four: friendly Modifier: catmullclark

Personality five: divided Modifier: planar subdivide

Personality six: secrative Modifier: skew

The Best Laid Plans...

OK, so I haven't built my tables. I have all of the materials, I have the templates drawn, just haven't made it that far. Fortunately, also haven't had meeting to discuss deployment yet, so I have another week. This is the exploded Axo. of what I WILL be building this week.

PK

Draft Research Question: ourParkour

Kevin Lynch defines an environmental image as a bidirectional and iterative process between the built environment and those using it; whereby ‘public images’ are the “common mental pictures carried by large numbers of a city’s inhabitants”. By documenting the movements of Traceurs and drawing upon other spatial and environmental theories, this project aims to investigate their sensory experience of space and analyse it against Lynch’s definition of the general public’s environmental image.

Jennie

Draft Research Question

With the evolution of internet shopping the high street is beginning to change. The act of purchasing goods is being removed from the physical environment, but what else does the high street provide? Autonomous agents are being developed to aid the shopping experience, primarily focused on making it easier to consume. Can an autonomous agent reflect the realistic challenges and provoke similar emotions that the high-street incites?

Balancing at Sandgate

Balancing at Sandgate from Jennie Webb on Vimeo.

Just a quick example of one of the videos I shot last weekend.

Definition of a Research Artefact

Research Artefacts as visualisation

A Research Artefact is an object that serves as a physical (and tangible) visualisation of a set of data values (researcher’s ideas, knowledge, information on a subject, wants etc…) that are personal to the researcher. It visualises a data set of the researcher in a form that is meaning full to them and can be categorised into three types.

Type One: An object that serves as a reminder to pursue and idea, find out more about something.

Type Two: An object that represents the process of an idea as we develop more about it.

Type Three: A representation of something achieved – the end of an idea.

Researchers fill there rooms with these artefacts and the location is not necessarily static. The location of the artefact is important and plays a fundamental part in creating the visualisation of the artefact to the researcher.

Examples of artefacts as visualisation

Researcher A(1) places a temperature sensor in his room. He puts it in his keyboard on his desk to remind him to look and find out how to use it better. In this scenario, the data is participant A wanting to find out more on how to use the temperature sensor and the visualisation is the sensor (as a physical object, not it functioning) and its location in his research space. The artefact is of type one and is providing an indexical representation to the researcher.

Researcher B’s (1) books are placed under categories that form the creation of a book proposal that he is developing. The data is that he wants to read a book called x because of y and the visualisation of this is the post-it notes and physical forms that sit in piles. This artefact is of type 2 and is again is an indexical representation to the researcher.

Objects serving as research artefacts do not usually represent all of the types presented above but, in rare cases they can do. Take for example a book. Looking at the physical object of the book, not the information inside it (the words) it can be a research artefact for all of the three type catagories presented above. In the context of type one, it could represent an artefact as the book object just being in our presence serves as a prompt to read it. In the context of type two, the book object could represent an idea that a researcher is perusing. Finally, in the context of type three, it could represent a project written up and published.

Primer focus

The type of artefact that I am choosing to focus on in my Primer project is Type one through developing symbolic representations. I am interested in looking at a research artefact as a representation of more than one thing, a representation in relation to a series of things.

My next step is to decide what the appropriate mapping would be that I would apply to the research artefact that I am creating. I would like to see this research artefact as an extension of the spatial probes that I have been developing in my linked research project in a sense that the software/artefacts that I create could be used as probes to deploy to the researchers that I have contact with.

Hypothesis:

Abstraction of visualisation is something that is representational only when the methodology is organised and conceptualised by the user. Fundamentally choice and customisation play an important role. I think that I will find that the tool used to create research artefacts may offer an appropriate visualisation for some people but not all. This is down to not everyone being able to relate to everything.

1. Smith.M. The Researchers Archive, Linked Research Project. 2011

Tele-Presence in Architecture

My Linked Research project is slowly progressing. I intend to exploit a predisposition of students to make marks on the world around them as a means to facilitate greater interaction between anonymous students. Part of the ritual of mark making is the place these signs are left. I am not aiming to develop an online message board that can be ignored or forgotten about. Instead I will seek to integrate with the physical place that students are already using as a canvas, asking the research question;

"How can telepresence and the act of mark making be used to link unfamiliar students of architecture together, and encourage meaningful interaction across the peer group?"

Setting out to investigate this, I have previously put forward three questions that I need to answer in the process of designing an installation. These were;

• How can I provide a window of time in which students will feel free to reflect on their work and progress?
• How can I encourage them to use their time for this end?
• What new knowledge can I impart to them in order they better understand the purpose of reflection as a practice?

There is a maxim that says “any task invariably enlarges itself to fill the time available in which to complete it”. I intend to provide a window for my reflective activity by integrating the publish, comment, feedback process into the current act of mark making. It is worth remember to consider the immediate nature of the marks that students are making, as the success of my proposal will probably rest in is instant availability and clarity.

Students will be encouraged to contribute by the social nature of the activity, and by the fact that the installation will integrate into the space occupied by their culture. Overtime the intention is the installation will be subsumed and appropriated into the studio culture in the same way that the walls have been already.

The final question is the hardest to answer, however I hope that by offering them the opportunity to reflect on their own work, individual students will be able to see value in the activity for themselves.

How mark making can be used to links students together is the design challenge that I have been and will continue to narrate on these pages.

Autoethnography Hurts!

After interviewing my Traceur volunteers and then videoing/capturing their movements last Saturday, I was then (quite easily) persuaded to join in with them at a training session at Dynamix Skatepark on Sunday morning. Along with approx. 12 or so young children, one teenager and one other adult I was taught a few key moves of Parkour by both Hollie and Lee in a one hour long session.

The moves we learnt were:

• Wallrun - Learnt in two parts: the beginning 'run' up the wall and the subsequent 'pull up' on to the top of the wall (in this case a half pipe).
• Roll

It was a really interesting process and I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing how they taught Parkour. I noticed that the level of concentration I needed to maintain during the moves was really high and as the session went on I began to appreciate the level of self-awareness that everyone else seemed to have.

I really enjoyed taking part and I hope to join Hollie and Lee out and about in town next weekend. I really hope that by that time the muscles in my body, that I clearly never use, will have stopped hurting!!!

Tangible Research Artefacts: Implementing Choice

After exploring the Hemesh processing libraries, I have been experimenting with creating forms and then modifying them. The image below is a screen shot of a sketch that I uploaded onto open processing:

A lot of visualisations, like the one below and those seen in Moere, A.V. and Patel, S. paper (1.) are abstracted representations that require a level of explanation for their meaning to be understood. A researchers connection to his ‘things’ is very emotional and personal, bound by complex relationships so in the context of the Tangible Research Artefacts, the researcher needs to understand what the form means and its representation for it to be a rich resource for them to use. A researchers connection to his ‘things’ is very emotional and personal, bound by complex relationships. I want to make the form transparent in its meaning to the researcher and they can choose to share this meaning with other researchers or hide it to themselves. Therefore, there needs to be some connection between the variables that drive the form and the artefact that is produced. The researcher needs to have a role as being the maker as well as the consumer.

My proposed system for the processing software is to create an environment that associates certain modifier functions (from the Hemesh libraries) to certain attributes of the documents. For example, twisting a shape to represent secrecy. For simplicity, I am first going to focus on just pdf files in the development of my prototype and then build on this complexity.

To create this level of customisation I have been experimenting with creating a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The aim of this is to enable the researcher to quantifiably apply their emotion or feelings to the artefact.

To implement this GUI I have chosen to look at the ControlP5 libraries and I have uploaded some of my experiments onto open processing, an example of which is above.

Refrences

1. Moere, A.V. and Patel, S. 2010. The Physical Visualization of Information: Designing Data Sculptures in an Education Context. In Visual Information Communication, Huang, M.L. et al (Eds.). Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

tanagble research artefacts

Through conversations with academics in my linked research, physical artefacts in research are things that are personal to ourselves that serve as reminders of ideas to pursue, a representation of our current train of thoughts, our ambitions for the future, our achievements of the past amongst many more. How can this narrative seen in these physical artefacts be told of digital artefacts (artefacts being images, e‐books, pdf’s, music) through the creation of a generative physical artefact?

Many people have tried to explore the notion of taking data and representing it through visualisation. Through his work, Dragulecu (iv.) asks questions about how your own personal documents can be translated into “…inhabitable objects…” and even “..transformed into a small Cubist city.” Dragulecu uses his project Spam Plants (iv.) to demonstrate this, where data inputs were translated into variables that drive the creation of petals. The limits of this project however and still the confinements of a screen, relying on visualisation to demonstrate their meaning. A V Moere and S Patel (ii.) propose the concept of a data structure that is a mapping of data in a physical form. However, I feel that their definition of a data sculpture is limited to the context that they experimented in. Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts differs from that which A V Moere and S Patel (ii) propose through the metaphorical representation of the data structure. Whereas the Moere and Patel’s data structures tried to open the black box, my Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts embrace the secrecy of the data structure they create. The secrecy of a researchers artefact can sometimes be what creates its beauty in the researchers eyes. Participant A (iii.) talks about how an attractive feature of his book case is that only he understands the indexical relationship of his books. I want to capture this emotion in my artefact and the poetic nature of this. The narrative of this connection can be portrayed through the personal selection of data sets and the element of customisation within the artefact. The artefact is the researchers own, they created it and it is personally important to them.

To create this secrecy outlined above, personal ownership needs to be present in the mapping of data in three dimensional form so an understanding of the difference between data and information is key:

“…data is the raw material of, its substrate; information is the meaning derived from data in a particular context.”

For Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts to create connections, they need to be able to have a meaning derived from them by the researcher. Can the researcher create an emotional connection with his digital artefacts? Can they express hierarchy of attachment towards digital files in a certain way? In the context of Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts meta data can secretly store information about our associations with information and a system could be used to create a hierarchy of importance and attachment.

Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts are interested in the combination data types that serve an indexical link to the researcher. This could be text, photos or a combination of the two and customisation of this is vital is the researcher is to form an attachment and sense of belonging with the artefact. Looking at the notion of data from empirical science, “Only (data) when organised and contextualised by an observer does this data yield information, a message or meaning”

The Artificial Reality

Paradox: a seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well founded or true.

Oxymoron: a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction. Literary oxymorons are crafted to reveal a paradox.

After initially being interested in technology, it’s effect on human behaviour and the future of human behaviour, as a basis for my thesis project, I have undertaken a Primer project where I have been learning to program using Processing computer language.

I have been looking at Ray Kurzweil and his theory of Technological Singularity, in his book ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’, I accidently on purpose came across an abstract from an episode of The Twilight Zone. An abstract that highlights the paradoxes in human behaviours; it’s human nature to want to solve problems, but it also human nature to not want all problems solved, we are essentially more attracted to the problems than the solutions. I think we need to consider whether technology is creating solutions for us too quickly or according to Burnham is it forming a realistic fantasy of creating more questions, he states ‘I recently heard an astronomer mention in a talk that we know approximately what 3 percent of the universe is, what it consists of. Just a few years ago that number was 5 percent’.

M.C. Escher, 1953

It is obviously no secret that as a young architect, problem solving provides the most fun for me.

It is this human paradox that has led me to the main idea behind my primer project. Taking the oxymoron (which can be crafted to reveal a paradox) and re-writing The Twilight Zone abstract to be a paradox filled with genuine imitations of paradoxes or the oxymoron, I want to make a visual comparison between the original and adapted version of the texts.

So thinking out loud, I imagine the point at which the texts are different, where the oxymoron has been added, to be highlighted visually, like a nodal point, similar to the image below; these nodal points can then be moved around the page, i.e. to another nodal point, where it will take that position in the text, as a permanent substitute. To then produce an obscure overall text that will be presented as an initial conclusion.

The outcome will be individual but synchronized animations that are interactive. The user unconsciously manipulates the text, by knowingly moving a visual representation; the new text will then be represented to the user at the end.

My presentation is highlighting this world of paradox. I am essentially giving people a problem to solve, whilst never allowing a rational solution.

So in a preliminary conclusion, maybe my project hasn’t been made completely clear throughout this blog, this explicit ambiguity, is part of the ‘problem’ that is so intriguing for me to solve, maybe the extraordinary element is that I may never have a solution; the consistently inconsistent lucidity.

Occupy Twitter

My primer project has developed into a comparative study of different viewpoints. I've signed up for a Twitter Developer account, and managed to return a list of all followers IDs for a specified user. I'd really like to try to query users profiles, and as a starter create a geographic mapping exercise with this data, but haven't managed that yet.

I would also think that it would be really interesting to try and track tweets and re tweets with #OccupyLSX and draw nodes representing opinion leaders. Again, perhaps I will be able to query these in terms of geographic distribution.

However far I get, it should then be easy to modify to track others sources of tweets. Hopefully the comparisons between the data network underpinning movements like OccupyLSX, and big banks media feeds, should be interesting.

List of my Traceurs' moves

During the discussion we had on Tuesday, Hollie and Lee made a list of the moves that they use the most in Parkour.

• Precision jump - standing 
• Precision jump - running 
• Cat Pass (kong, monkey) 
• Arm jump (cat leap) 
• Laché 
• Strides 
• Speed vault 
• Lazy vault 
• Wall run 
• Tic-tac 
• Roll 
• Dash vault 
• Reverse vault 
• Plyometric 
• 180 arm jump 
• Climbing 
• Balancing 

I hope that by familiarising myself with these moves I will be able to identify them correctly whilst out and about with them this Saturday.

Questions for Traceurs

I interviewed my Traceur participants on Tuesday morning and these are the 10 questions I asked:

1. What are your motivations for doing Parkour?
2. What are your Parkour aspirations?
3. Would you say Parkour is competitive?
4. Where is your regular training ground?
5. What characteristics make a space interesting for Parkour?
6. How aware are you of people who have used a certain place before (in relation to the Parkour moves they may have done there)?
7. Do you plan out the 'Parkour route' beforehand?
8. How are your moves informed?
9. Do you always plan to practice Parkour or is it ever an impromptu act?
10. How often do you see something and think that would be good for Parkour?

The interview lasted just under an hour and yet I'm still transcribing the recordings!

Shiny Toy

My first projector has arrived, and I have secured PCs to run my installation. I'm going webcam shopping tomorrow and am trying to schedule a meeting with the students running the parenting scheme in stage 1 to drum up some support. I am still experimenting with means of running the feed, whether it is best as a live video or a series of stills. This latter option does have the advantage of giving me a ready made set of time-lapse data to compare to subsequent interviews, but requires a more complex software set up to make it work including a possibly a processing applet to read something like a flickr feed.

Either way, I'm setting a deadline for both tables for be complete by the 11th of November, 10 days from now.

Another Day, Another ArchaID

As the scope of Architecture and Interaction Design expands, I'm now taking part in a primer project prior to my stage 6 thesis. This project, centered on learning to sketch in the programming language "Processing", will hopefully lead into a study of the financial sector and how space is structured in and around its institutions.

I have been interested in the role of banks as a black box, and how interaction design can generate architecture that is a data visualisation. Reading around the recent financial crisis, there are two slightly more specific areas worthy of investigation. "Moral Hazard" and "Double Agency". The former refers to the incentive for traders to gamble to gain short term gain, as they are not ultimately accountable for losses which are likely, even certain over the longer term. Similarly, most of the money staked by traders is borrowed, not belonging to the institution they represent. It is borrowed from pension or hedge funds, or other banks, and ultimately belongs to private individuals not the funds managers. Where in that chain is the person who will take responsibility and say no to a risky investment?

There is an interesting history of public space in the proximity of financial institutions, with Fosters HSBC building in Hong Kong a relatively contemporary and particularly well known example. The current "occupations" of these public spaces in both London and New York, right next to these black box institutions is another angle that I may be interested in investigating.

a plan for implementation

The first task this week was to put our research question into one sentence:

Acknowledging that there is a transition in information from physical to digital, how can the curation of digital artifacts and the mapping of research adjacencies tell a personal narrative that constitutes towards the representation of self in both physical and digital space?

We were also asked to think about the final outcomes of our linked research project and develop a timescale for now until the end of the submission. Since then, I have been thinking lot about what my final design outcome should be for the project.

After researching probe methodologies, some probe studies like the trash can (see previous post) use the probes as the start of a long conversation between the researcher and the participants. One solution would be to carry on this conversation by creating not a solution but something that challenges themes that I gained from the interviews with my probe participants. So, I would be extending the conversation and giving them something back to challenge my ideas.

If I had more time, this is something that I would like to do, however I have more of a desire to produce a proposal as opposed to creating an extension of the probe. So what could this be?

Due to the amount of time left, I think that it may be unrealistic to have the ambition of creating something, but I am not going to rule this one out yet. Another option is to do something in processing. I would like to build on some of my processing skills that I have been developing in my thesis primer but I have no idea what this would produce yet.

Could it be a graphic representation of the researcher, this black box of which little people understand. This could highlight conflicts, insights etc… and ultimately creating a narrative of the individual through graphical representation

If this is going to be a graphical representation, I could make this interactive and display it somewhere to test and see what the response is.

Plan for completion: download

Submission outcome: download

Dose of Reality

I have begun to story board out my idea for my shop front. I have decided on a number of experiences that the high street provides, apart from the purchasing of goods, and have began to think how my shop front could replicate these.

Amazingly, I have been given the opportunity to try this in-situ with the ‘On Site’ team based in Culture Lab. The shop is on Forth Street by the station. Now that the shop front has to work in the real world there will inevitably be revisions to the original idea. Suddenly I have hit by practicalities and have to accept what it is realistically possible for me to achieve.

A Table

Just a quick update, my proposal in its current guise as a table that I will be able to test in a variety of locations within the school. Just waiting for the projectors to arrive!

Introduction to Linked Reseach for Prospective Stage 5 Students

The group meets every week during term to discuss and develop ideas around the relationship between architectural design and the emerging field of interaction design.

Each student chooses their own project to develop and must, in the first semester write a small project proposal with clear research questions and methods.

Projects are then developed throughout the summer and through the first Semester of Stage 6.

Outcomes can vary significantly from person to person but a good project should include:

1. Development work which demonstrated extensive reading around the topic chosen and develops a clear research question/questions.

2. An object or set of objects designed with the explicit aim of testing and gaining a greater understanding of an existing context and a proposal for an intervention into that context.

3. A research paper which pulls together the work completed with and evaluation of the intervention. This year we hope to publish in the international CHI conference.

4. A project diary consisting of collected blog posts which show how your ideas have developed.


Who should do the ArchaID Linked Research

If you want to explore emerging areas at the edges of your field.
If you want to learn new ways of thinking about design.
If you have an interest in digital technology (but not a fetish).
If you are self motivated and want to shape your own learning experience and, potentially, make and original contribution to the world.


Health Warning

Linked Research is not the easy option. In ArchaID we expect you to be self motivated, very well organised and while you are guided and supervised the ‘teaching’ of this module is very light touch. We expect you to actively contribute to the conversation and help the ideas of the whole group develop. Think carefully about taking this module!

Take Two

This slightly more ambitious version on the tangible forum is something that I have been working on over the last week or so, however requires more technical expertise and time than I can really spare.

However, I am now planning to design a smaller portable version of the same system, and am working on a set of activities to test the system in collaboration with the school's Architecture Society and the parenting scheme that I have referred to previously.

The Tangible Forum

Reviewing some of my initial proposals, my concepts have continued to evolve. "The Tangible Forum" is the latest iteration of my thinking. At present students are prone to pinning up work in progress, and generally writing on the walls of their work space, the idea behind the tangible forum is to take an image of this W.I.P., and transmit a live feed into a public space within the school. A corresponding feed picks up annotations over the top of this and feeds back to the student via another projector.

Oh My God, They Killed the High Street…..YOU B******!

Thinking of different mediums to address issues with the future high street, I have decided that animation is a powerful tool which I should consider.

Animations such as The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park, commentate regularly on topical, social and political issues.

Various academics have noted how animation contributes to the effectiveness, cultural currency, and longevity of many animated series. Reading “Taking South Park Seriously” Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock explains how animation is used. He explains how “viewers approach cartoons with suspended disbelief, and in the process absorb significant social commentary”. Animation allows serious and even controversial issues to be treated under the guise of being ‘just a cartoon’.

Below is an example of South Park addressing racial stereo types with a black character called ‘Token’. Click on picture for video

Creating a digital shop front that encorages interaction between the public and an animated character could encourage dialog that would be revealing and entertaining.

Virtual Surfaces

Researching "I'm Visible" I came across a few installations for generating Graffiti Digital that I thought might be of interest. "Your Wall" works using a spray can that emits infra-red light onto an optical tracking screen, and apparently also features on the new series of Dragon's Den.

Also, this interactive shop front unveiled in New York this week may be of interest to Hannah.

Virtual Landscapes, Talking Walls and the Pocket Universe

For a while I have an idea that I have hesitated to put forward, driven in part as it was by my own preoccupation with 3d modelling. It also sits slightly uncomfortably between the two design objectives I have set myself, drawing on and contributing to both, but achieving neither without significant extension.

Originally the idea derives from the fact I am a huge fan of the 3d buildings layer within Google Earth. Contributed by individuals, they change not necessarily how you to use the software but how you understand the space that it represents. Via a couple of different plug-ins the Google Earth is available as a canvas on which individuals can work, and in terms of architecture, place their buildings into a roughly representative context.

This is of very little interest to me - and I am categorically not proposing building a Second Life game with students Sketch Up models. What I have wondered is could this familiar method of visualisation, (in a similar way to already proposed in Project Cartography), could not also be useful for mapping projects? Essentially this is just a more visual representation of a computer file structure, the important interaction would be the one between different students virtual landscapes.

Recently however, I have been reading some slightly odd texts (looking a a thesis project), relating to depictions of different geometries from different frames of reference. Now I am wondering if it would not be possible to extract from this a proposal to build a "pocket universe" as a means of visualising a students stream of conciousness, that would exist within an overriding framework or multiverse. The idea would be that each student would exist only as a starting point, their networks of ideas and project would grow outward in inter-mesh with others. Lines of enquiry could be seen branching off, some ending in dead ends, others refining down to ever finer levels of detail.

Herein lies the problem. Whilst an interesting exercise in conceptualisation, the system described lacks an engaging interaction. Thinking this over, the concept has begun to merge in my mind with another embryonic idea originally titled "If These Walls Could Talk..." Very briefly, the idea was to set up an augmented reality within the school that would function as a virtual exhibition of past work and references. The environment would demand exploration in a physical manner, and could be different things to different people encouraging comparisons between the virtual world as it was visible to different students.

Now, why could I not expand upon this? I propose the creation of a virtual world behind the physical, filled with past and present examples of projects throughout the city, movies playing on the side of buildings, and signposts erected to guide explorers. Such a world could be used as a canvas as much as a portfolio, with students able to leave observations or jokes as graffiti, that only other members of the community would ever be aware of.

The Writing’s on the Wall.

Since collating my research on the high street I have started thinking about what I would actually like to design and which methods I would use. I hope to create an interactive digital installation that comments on my findings. To find inspiration for this I will return to look at the streets.

When walking down the street, looking past artistic displays in the windows trying their hardest to make you depart with your money, there is a long established urban art scene that is continuing to grow.

Graffiti is still constituted as vandalism and is therefore illegal. There are some artists who argue that advertising is just a form of paid legal graffiti, which I completely agree with. On a daily basis I would say I’m far more offended by awful adverts than I am with graffiti. Who needs this on your way to work?

Jeff Ferrell in ‘Urban Graffiti’ quotes a street artist who says “he tags for the respect of other taggers, who cares about adults?” Ferrell describes the tagging as an alternative system of public communication.

I liked this because it reminded me of not only what I think of the high street as being a place of public communication, representation of status etc., but also of a lot of my girlfriends opinions on fashion. I have heard many girls say they don’t care about what guys think of their outfits but it’s the like minded girls who they are out to impress and whose respect and approval they seek to gain!

Many artists use characters time and again in their work. I would like to create a character just like these famous graffiti artists who would help me develop my own story.

As for it being illegal, I can say if woke up and someone had done this to my flat in Newcastle…..I’d be nothing but impressed!

I'm Visible

At the outset of this project I was extremely interested in the use of sketch books, and this interest evolved as I came to understand them as a productivity tool having read the "I lie to myself that I have freedom in my own schedule" paper by Leshed et al. One of my initial ideas was that an electronic pen system could digitize the information recorded into sketch books automatically without any need to syncing and serve as the input for a system promoting reflection and collaboration, such as the shooting gallery.

However, during the course of my research I became concerned that not everyone used sketch books in a way that would be conducive to such a system, and that the information recorded under such a system was likely to be lacking in detail, especially in the later stages of a project.

However, the graffiti scrawled throughout the studios caught my attention. A desire to record what I will call shared suffering, has lead a number of students to create a number of informal notice boards of the walls of their studios, including several "Crying Tallies", an "It Could be Worse" board, and a list of "Things You'd Rather be doing". Whilst humorous in nature, their is clearly something in creating these which is supporting the authors moral whilst under pressure. They are accompanied by a large number of quotes, and a huge volume of material relating to projects pinned to the wall for reference.

I began to wonder what would be the outcome if you were to record the input, the act of writing, but move the output, the visible made sign. I'm Visible uses digital pen technology to record writing on a surface, and transpose it elsewhere in the school. Many of the graffiti motifs have responses scrawled beneath them, this system takes the same principle and opens it out to the entire school.

This grants students scope for expressing their frustrations, and enables them to form new interactions with a degree of anonymity. The system could evolve to form dialogues across the school, or even be used as a message service, with students posted requests for help or appealing for ideas relating to a specific field.

The Shooting Gallery

Belonging to the second thread of proposals outlined in my previous post, The Shooting Gallery is a mechanism for prompting students within the SAPL to pause during the course of their day.

The basic idea is simple, that a continuously changing series of images cycling on a screen, projector or other imaging system placed in a public location within the school, can serve as a source of spontaneity, prompting new reflections and interactions amongst passing students. The source of the images is a critical component in making this work, as inclusion needs to carry sense of pride. Likewise, a targeting of the images relevant to certain passers by can only increase the chances of successfully achieving my aims.

Taking the first of these points, how do I generate content for such a system? It would be easy to reduce the system to an archive of past work, but I do not believe there would be any point in this as it would become background noise instead of something relevant to students immediate work. Without this immediate proximity to their current priorities, I do not believe that the gallery would hold a students attention. It occurs to me that images could be submitted by students themselves, or by tutors, or by a photographer, appointed secretly and at random. Smartphones could easily submit images taken in tutorials or of a model completed at 3am that a student happened to by proud of.

The idea would be that other students through interacting with the display would be able to comment, post links etc on the images as the play through, which would feedback to the originating student.

Phones could similarly form part of a targeting mechanism for the gallery installation, scanning for Bluetooth devices with specific names or running a back ground app, and upon detection showing an image relevant to the phones owner. Relevant information could just be an image from their last tutorial, including tags, links, precedents or comments recorded by others, or alternatively images of the people offering feedback.

Project Cartography

I have referred before to the split nature of my project. This has now in my mind resolved itself into two distinct threads to be pursued simultaneously. The first thread will examine ways to record students work in a manner that will allow them to refer back to ideas and interactions in retrospect. The second thread will look at promoting wider interactions between students. The junction between these two threads holds a great deal of crossover, and will doubtless be plastic in nature, with outputs from the first thread modifying to feed the second and visa versa.

My first proposal belongs to the first group, and aims to create a system cataloging students work and interactions within tutorials. Many students are already familiar with the idea of site mapping, and of overlaying historical maps, diagrams and other mapped data-sets in order to gain insight into the context of a project. Project Cartography applies the same thinking to a students work in an ongoing project, creating aerial photographs of students work in progress, which can then be browsed, overlain and worked over in a similar fashion to resources from Google maps etc.

360° of Inspiration

Today, as you do on a Monday as an unemployed gal around London town, I went to Round House in Chalk Farm to see Ron Arad’s Curtain Call.

It was absolutely brilliant example of digital art. It is an interactive 360 degree installation that show cases over 12 different pieces of work by different people from Paul Cocksedge to the Royal College of Art.

I walked in and was suprised by the sheer scale of the piece. It instantly made you feel like you were entering a different dimension. I walked through the curtain whilst being serenaded by 'plinky plonky' music and staring a pretty patterns. Everyone was either sitting or lying on the floor just taking it all in so I joined them. A minute later the artist changed along with the tone. The music got louder and faster, the beat dropped, the animation got more aggressive and it felt really trippy because you are surrounded!

I spent an hour there in total being taken on a world wind trip through different artists minds. It was awesome and I definitely recommend you go and experience it if you get the chance.

Great thing about it is you pay what you want to get in! So I emptied out my purse and donated 1 moth, 1 Tesco receipt and £1.36 for the pleasure! What a bargain!

Its Simple Stupid - Part Deux

Another slightly off topic post from me, but came across this article via Zach Kron's blog. Dealing with the design of user interfaces in a professional environment, it kind of reminded me of my own little rant about 4 months ago. Essentially a counter argument, it proposes that once a critical mass of people adapt to a crappy user interface, functionality is more important than intuitiveness.

I agree, but maintain that new users, certainly when dealing with new technologies, will overwhelmingly choose a shallow learning curve and immediate results, ahead of the potential of future benefits through greater functionality.

I have for instance recently had to amend a site plan for a project at work, then a fortnight later, remake the SketchUp model to match. Another job, same scope, same client, in BIM was half the work. But, only only because the job started on my desk and I've adapted to the softwares foibles.

Its something for me to think about again as I start designing potential systems and installations.

Skate Pinball

Considering this was only constructed for the purposes of a Mountain Dew advert and a competition, this skate park has had a lot of time and money invested in it. What interested me about it was the combination of technology within a street sport to record a score which is based on physical movements. It's pretty gimmicky though and I don't think it could easily be transferred to a external skate park due to maintenance issues. What I would like to take from it, however, is how the sensors have been used to measure movement and then to try and consider this within a more subtle context.


MOUNTAIN DEW SKATE PINBALL from Jae Morrison on Vimeo.

Tactile Software

Post from Autodesk Labs looking at the application of surface interfaces within design software that may be of interest.

Wonder if they'll accept payment in Kidneys?

Arduino Cencership

It is hard to find the point of this project but it made me think about some of the censorship and anonymity subjects that Hannah has been talking about. Also, its a little fun project that has been done with an Arduino so I though I would share it.

The Importance of Location

When conducting research into location based technologies and their place within society, I came across The Mobile City, who are a group interested in the interaction between digital media technologies and urban design. In particular Michiel de Lange's paper on Moving Circles:Mobile Media and Playful Identities caught my attention. I think his explanation of the five typologies of Locative Media clearly breaks down the categories of current location based technologies:

1. Wayfinding: Cartography - e.g. Google Maps, etc.
2. Sensing & Visualization: Non-visual information displayed cartographically - e.g. Air Traffic Movements, Travel Patterns, etc.
3. Annotation: e.g. Geotagging, Augmented Reality
4. Social Networking: Locative media for social purposes - e.g. Foursquare
5. Pervasive Gaming: Locative media for gaming purposes - e.g. GPS based game Tourality

It strikes me that these types can then be translated through to the mapping of Parkour.

1. Wayfinding can map (generally only in 2D) the route of a Traceur; 
2. Sensing & Visualisation could add information to this mapping (who is it, their vertical height, etc.); 
3. Annotation could add verbal/visual geotags of the movements the Traceur is making; 
4. Social Networking could highlight the Traceurs activities to a specified social audience; and 
5. Pervasive Gaming increases the 'challenge' nature and the story of the mapping.

I would like to find out the following:
Which locative media type is used the most at present?
How can each locative media type be translated into an interaction relative to Parkour?
Is there a desire, from the Traceurs, for links to be made between their practice, digital location technologies and the urban environment?

Dirty Little Online Secrets.

In the past 2 weeks I have been practicing my probes on shoppers in London. From one of my studies I discussed window shopping with Charlotte Web. Charlotte is a 24 year old young professional who is very much into her fashion and is not shy of shopping. She told me that she does not window shop when she doesn’t have money because she finds it frustrating but does browse online. She continued telling me she had online wish lists full with thousands of pounds worth of clothes and accessories on various websites!

I found this so interesting and it got me thinking about the difference between window shopping on-line and in real life. The ease of being able to virtually visit top designers some people would never have the guts to visit in person or may not even be allowed in! The ability to add a ridiculously expensive dress into you ‘basket’ without clicking and committing to buy.

What other secret shopping habits do people have online that they are reluctant to advertise to the rest of the world?

Anonymity and online community by John M Grohol discusses the ramifications of being able to sit at a computer and avoid face to face communication. We feel free and uninhibited when we are online.

My thoughts turned to this future digital high street where shop fronts would know, from your smart phones, your buying behaviour and would invite you in if they had what you want! But how would they distinguish between what is and isn't your secret behaviour you don’t want people knowing about? What if everything didn't stay so anonymous?

A trip to the high street could become a real life nightmare!

Probes: A Critique

The idea of a ’Cultural Probe’ was initially coined by William Gaver as part of an EU research project investigating how elderly people can increase their presence in a community (i). I have chosen to adopt the probe methodology and when doing so I have understood that the method does not transfer straight away to my project and in fact this raises some questions.

One:

The participants in the Gaver study were provided by the Presence Project. Therefore, one of two assumptions can be made. First of all, the participants were being paid to do the study. Or (and most likely) they volunteered to take part in the probe study due to a strong personal interest. In my case, the participants in my probe study are people who I have selected. With people who are volunteers, there is an essence of self-motivation which I do not have in my participants. This problem also made me think of other probe work that I have seen. Jane Wallis has frequently adopted probes and again, it is in her clients best interests to complete the probes. So this brings me to my first challenge. How can I engage people to complete my probe tasks. My probe needs to be short and engaging. Not too difficult so that no answer or just a generic one is produced. Finally, in Jane Wallis’ probe “dress pattern” the participant spent a whole afternoon looking through old dress fabrics that she used to wear. The reason for this commitment to the task was because of the great willingness of the participant due to the gain that they were going to get from the project.

Two:

The context of Gaver’s original probe was Amsterdam which is both a known location and in the context of an individual, is something quite impersonal. This made it easy for Gaver to produce mapping tasks and make comparisons with (such as the ‘if Amsterdam was New York’ task). However, my probe is going to be deployed into an unknown, personal research space which immediately raises too problems.

1. It will be difficult to come up with something that all the researches can compare their rooms too as they are all going to be unique and individual.

2. I have no real idea what each of the participants rooms are like so I can’t provide maps to each participant to ask them to draw on. A solution to this would be for them to draw maps of their won rooms however this can be time consuming and may limit the quality of the results gained from the study.

Challenges

1. What can I provide to people to motivate them and make them want to complete the probe tasks?

2. How can you capture peoples spatial environment in ways other than drawing?

3. What do you need to know about an unknown environment to create a full picture?

4. How can you map something in an abstract way?

i. Gaver, B. Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E. 1999. Design: Cultural probes. Interactions 6(1). ACM, 21-29.