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.
