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.