Design History Mashup

Relocating

2010-03-05T13:29:00.000-06:00

Newer design history posts can be found on http://designhistorylab.com

The Design Process of the Radical Map - Amrita Adhikary

2009-12-03T08:37:00.016-06:00

American art historian, Roy Rosenweig, in his book The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, explains that people assemble their experiences into narratives which influences them and allows them to make sense of their lives. In mapping these experiences it helps to come with an approach that honors the individual’s perspective but gives a clear and distilled overview.
In simple words, there are layers of information that can surface through mapping rather than direct experience. The mapping can uncover hidden meaning and derive inferences from simple data. So a map can exhibit obvious data but mapping probes and derives conclusions and nudges hypotheses.
Mapping according to James Corner is ‘uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds’. The possibility to stretch your mind by comparing and synthesizing various data opens up a realm of possibilities and expands your frame of mind. It uses the information from the x and y axis to construct the z axis.
The Operation of Mapping in the New Global Environment
In the move toward globalization, public life is scheduled more through time than according to place. Events in this space occur with such speed and complexity that nothing is certain. Overdose and accessibility to vast information has changed our perception of it making the shocking seem normal and the far, reachable. Mapping in this scenario helps find connections between disconnected information.
So if the act of ordering creates order and mapping creates the map, it is worth considering that mapping as a design process makes explicit, things that are likely to remain hidden until they have been mapped. Mapping according to James Corner has three parts. Field is the graphical system over which the observations (extracts) will be organized. Extracts are the observations that are selected and pulled out from the mileu and plotting incorporates drawing out of new connections among the various extracts within the field. The possibilities for plotting can only be limited by the imagination and curiosity of the designer or investigator of that mapping process.

The Genealogy of Influences
An Outline

In presenting a genealogy of maps which were used as influences for my radical approach to mapping the UT commute, the starting point was Peter Sloterdijk’s The Theory of Spheres. According to him we all exist in separate spheres trying to make connections with other spheres of our lives such as family, school, travel etc. which makes the global. Noting the emotional and vehement tone of the respondents of the UT mapping also connected to the Emotion or Bio-Mappings (TheStockport Emotion Map) by Christian Nold and Julie Mehretu’s Maps of my Life/Sounds of my World.
A Text Cloud, which is a visual depiction of user generated tags or words of a site or activity presented a way of quantifying the common concerns, suggestions, and random thoughts that were expressed by participants when responding to the problems of the commute. This added another facet to the Transparency Map, by Kerry Mitchell which graphed the appearance of the word ‘transparency’ in The New York Times for the last 19 years. The beauty of the Transparency map was the representation of hard data as visul art. Derivations from the UT survey suggested that problems and solutions coexist, which led me to my final influence, the Mandala, a cosmic diagram that represents our relation with the universe.

Mapping
1. Bubble Map
The UT commute was assembled in a collaborative online document entered by interviewers recording the concerns and suggestions of the participants who were students of the University of Texas, at Austin. On analyzing the data, “potholes” and “mean drivers” jump at you. It makes you stop a moment and think about the bubble that we live in.
In my understanding of Sloterdijk’s sphere theory, each bubble has to connect. In these connections, potholes and mean drivers play a part in making the bridge connecting us to our commute bubble smooth or strained. As I look at it, each participant had his own story which is his point of view. These rants, ramblings, and composed thoughts expose more about how we connect with the other bubbles or spheres of our existence. These connections are also emotional which leads me to my second influence, The Stockport Emotion Map.

2. Emotion Mapping- Stockport
Mapping the intangible is fascinating and important. In 2007, over a period of two months in Stockport, UK, about 200 people took part in six public mapping events. This map collected together and mapped the results of two activities, Drawing Provocations & Emotion Mapping. People were asked to sketch their responses to a variety of serious and humorous provocations about their daily lives such as what really annoys them about Stockport, where they meet their friends, as well as who are the most important and dangerous people in town. All the drawings were geographically positioned where people mentioned them. The second activity involved people walking freely through Stockport equipped with a special device that measured their emotional arousal in relation to their geographical location in the town.
Usually views and opinions are never recorded and forgotten because we think of them as trivial. This map aimed to record the trivial and seemingly meaningless conversations and events of our everyday lives and allowed us to see them all simultaneously.
When we talk about issues, our responses are guarded and neatly packaged, but responding to things is freer. When a thing becomes explicit or public, it becomes an issue and therefore requires a different response. This mapping captures our response to daily things before they become an issue. The student data of UT lends itself to this mapping as the opinions and suggestion are vehement, meaningful, and heartfelt. Perhaps mapping these emotions would expose latent issues of greater importance than just the commute.
3. ‘Map of my life/Sounds of my World’
Map of my life/Sounds of my World’, is a mapping led by Julie Mehretu, where the artist asked the students of East African origin to record the sounds of Minneapolis, where they lived, to draw connections between the home they left behind and the home they inhabited now. The interface was an interactive audio-visual collage of sound bites and photographs contributed by the students. Similarly, in his book ‘Presence of the Past’, Roy Rosenweig, studies how deeply ordinary people are engaged by the past but alienated from history. It is felt that the past is viewed in a very complex way mainly emphasizing the individual’s interpretation of his and his family’s past and ignoring the interpretations of those in other communities. This ‘privatized’ version of their past reinforces barriers. Selective memory can be the bane of communication and peace efforts by resisting rather than promoting change. As in the India - Pakistan conflict, as also in the Middle-East crisis, it is difficult to move away from the atrocities committed against your own group. A rational approach or a middle ground is hard to reach when each group’s private memory is so raw, vivid and imbalanced. In mapping, it would be helpful to come with a view that honors the individual point of view but gives clear and distilled overview of all the stakeholders. This hypothetical map would ideally make your presence visible to others. As an idea it guided the objective of my radical map where one’s input featured and made a difference in the outcome.
4. Text Clouds
Text Cloud is one of the many data visualizations created by scientist and mathematician, Mike Wattenburg. Through his experimental website, Many Eyes, users can upload the data they want to visualize and generate interactive displays. A text cloud is a visualization of word frequency as a ‘weighted list’. It has seen a rise in popularity in analyzing political speeches. The text cloud of President Obama’s inaugural speech made by CNN highlights his main refrain ‘new nation’. Used as a tool it can effectively sort data and remove redundancies to enable a map that does not just exhibit obvious data but probes and derives conclusions. The importance of a tag is shown with font size and color. I saw potential in using it as a tool to substantiate my analysis of the data.
5. The Arrival of Transparency- Kerry Mitchell
Data is represented strikingly in this interactive map which was at the back of my mind for the sheer visual character. Access to infinite information has changed our perception of it and made the bizarre, normal, perhaps heralding a new normalcy.
This visualization that appeared in NY Times, captures instances of the word “transparency” in the Times articles from 1990 to 2009 and is a radial or timepiece graph. The first mention of “transparency” is at the 1 o’clock position. Each ray represents a month; the months proceed clockwise into an explosion of instances of the word. In concept it is similar to the tag cloud or the text cloud.
6. Mandala -The pattern of creation
The Sanskrit word "mandala" means circle. It is seen as a model for the organizational structure of life itself. It represents a cosmic diagram that reminds us of our relation to the infinite. Most mandalas have four concentric circles symbolizing the enlightenment which the meditating person must gain before she can enter the illuminated palace (centre) through the outermost circle, which is the purifying fire. Mandalas are a powerful tool for bringing the mind to a place of quiet and the soul to a place of connection to the Divine. Meditation on a Mandala may have the potential to change how we see ourselves, our planet, and perhaps even our own life purpose. The harmony of the mandala influenced my final representation of the commute as a spiral where the conflicting directions of the problems and suggestions still show their interconnectedness but disappear, or seem to emanate from one singular point.

Synthesis of the Influences
Radical Map depicting the UT commute
In Mapping the UT commute as a visual depiction of user generated data that quantify the common concerns of the participants and their suggestions for improvement, I also wanted the participants to matter and the mapping to reveal latent issues of the group. There were two directions that I wanted to explore with mapping the commute. The first was a Static map that would represent the concerns over a period of two months which was the time of the data collection. Being true to the data, I wanted to deduct what the main concerns were. Using a text cloud online software (www.wordle.net) as a sifting tool, I was able to get an idea of keywords that were mentioned frequently. As discussed earlier, text clouds resonate the idea that is most explicit. Although there is room for error if care is not taken to enter the data correctly so as to minimize noise, a general idea is obtained easily. Using the text cloud as a guide I then went ahead and manually sorted the information to classifying the data as keywords under problems and suggestions. Each problem that was mentioned twice or more was in one category, while a concern or suggestion mentioned more than four times was in another category. The intent was to highlight each concern or suggestion by size and boldness based on the number of times it appeared in the data set.
Outcome of the Synthesis
Depicting Harmony in Conflict-Static Map
Mapping an activity like the UT commute could manifest itself into a map that reflects the feelings regarding the commute and the aspects of it that they love or loathe. The first reflection is of discontentment with the roads, its potholes, and the manic drivers. A lot of emphasis is placed on mean drivers. My map like the Stockport Emotion map or the Twin Cities image/sound map puts value to random thoughts that could actually be plotted to have consequential meanings. Problems and their solutions are integrated and co-exist and gives reason to believe that understanding the problem opens up the pathway for its resolution. The idea of mandala reflected in a cyclone form, where the extreme low pressure at its centre and the counter-clockwise movement of the wind in the Northern Hemisphere brings high winds. Conversely, anti-cyclones bring fair weather because of the high pressure at its core. Together, these spirals represent the positive and negative forces that balance each other. Using this metaphor to represent the UT commute that problems and solutions emanate from the same point, the problems were represented in the counter-clockwise cyclonic movement of the spiral while the clockwise spiral depicted the suggestions in a positive light. I wanted to highlight the positive nature of the suggestions and therefore the brightness of the text was featured.
For the purpose of clarity and perhaps to obtain an overview so that the viewer may make logical deductions from the data, I found the need to précis the information and use it as extracts to plot on the field of the entwined spirals. In the Mehretu map, a similar rationale was used to balance the individual emotions and to distil them and present them as an apt overview. Using the Text cloud as solely a sifting tool to help substantiate my manual analysis of the data to quantify concerns and suggestions, I designed a system where frequently mentioned concerns or suggestions were bigger and bolder and stood out to the viewer. If a map is a depiction of data then this would inform the viewer of the problems and suggestions on the mind of the majority. As a static map, it would be used as a poster of a set of 4 to depict concerns that would presumably differ by the seasons. Placed as a timeline it would reveal a pattern of what really matters in the lives of the students with regard to their commute over the year. Perhaps, like the emotion map it would also uncover latent information that would coax some changes in fields not related to commute. (behavior, all night classes?). Like the mandala, it interacts between entities.
Next Steps
Dynamic Map
Taking the same idea that problems and solutions are interconnected, I wanted to use the medium of real time to depict the relation of problems to solutions as a dynamic map. Users of UT website would be asked to enter information on a site that caters to the commute. Users would be encouraged to enter their concerns, limiting their input to one or two words that best reflect each concern. If it were more than a word they could be separated by a hyphen so that they were perceived as a single word for ease and accuracy. These words would appear on the spiral ranked by the number of times similar words were entered until then. The tail of the spiral draws the most attention and is also most visible. The most mentioned concern would take its prime place at the end of the tail while the ones which were lower in quantity would move down the spiral. Based on the cumulative volume that the word receives, it would be bolder and also occupy a prime place at the tail. Diminishing quantity of entries on that word would move it down the spiral eventually making it disappear. This interplay of information would make the map radiate in a spiral. Words that have seen a peak and are not a concern anymore reflect a resolution or a short memory span. The incentive for the students to participate in this live visual depiction of data is instant realization of where their concern ranks in the mileu. If it is not the main concern, they could also see it trickle down the spiral to take its rightful place. There could be another overlay of information that quantifies concerns that have hit a maximum count into issues needing immediate attention.
Conclusion

There is a thought that the more detailed and life like a map is the more redundant and unnecessary it becomes. Maps, like art must have mystery to have meaning and to make sense.
So is the map only as good as the imagination of the maker? Can the map reveal things that the cartographer had not envisioned?
I believe that the map can take a life of its own once the parameters of the grid and the extractions to be plotted are established.

Reference

Corner, James. The Agency of Mapping.
Holmes, Brian. Counter Cartographies.
The Mandala Project: Home Page. Web. .
Rozenweig, Roy. The Presence of the Past.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Theory of Spheres.
"Visualizations: The Art of Times APIs - First Look Blog - NYTimes.com." First Look - First Look Blog - NYTimes.com. Web. 03 Dec. 2009. .
Wattenberg. "Text Clouds." Many Eyes. Web. .
Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds. Web. .

Aging as Data Visualization

2009-11-23T13:16:00.002-06:00

Aging as Data Visualization

All objects age.

The aging process records a history of the forces acting upon an object.

The physical manifestations of aging can be read as a type of data visualization.

By analyzing this data visualization we gain a better understanding of not only the object itself but also how the object is used and how it fits into its environment. We can begin to put the object in context.

Examples:

Public Statues:
The polished part of the bronze statute show where people touch them most often.

Game Path, Worn Carpet, Worn Stairs:
These three are all a type of data visualization for foot traffic.

Tire Wear:

Buttons // Remote Control:

The Neglected Experience of First-Person Mappings

2009-11-23T08:09:00.006-06:00

Position:

To challenge conventional mapping by utilizing the experiential qualities of the neglected first-person perspective and the authoritative nature of video. While the resulting mapping may not have a comprehensive data-base, it will offer a number of other experiential variables such as speed of travel, traffic patterns, and unique qualities of landscape.

-Discuss operations of mapping in terms of selectivity and drift.

-creation of field, setting of rules, establishment of system

-extraction and isolation

-plotting/setting up of relationships

Geneology of Influences:

C’était un Rendez-vous

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4n6c3_cetait-un-rendezvous_auto

Grand Theft Auto

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo7IPe_gh1Y&feature=player_embedded

Google Street view

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2100+Enfield+Rd,+Austin,+TX+78703&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=43.713406,69.873047&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=2100+Enfield+Rd,+Austin,+Travis,+Texas+78703&ll=30.287161,-97.765489&spn=0.011692,0.017059&z=16&layer=c&cbll=30.287253,-97.765476&panoid=vNsJQeNvFN2lYqGK-DuOCg&cbp=12,260.52,,0,5.11

GPS

Proposal:

To recreate our class commuting routes using actual methods originally traveled to make 1^st person video.

Continuous videos will be played simultaneously to make a time/distance relationship statement about the variables of each route. Layering will be employed to convey other kinds of information such as color filters to suggest method of travel.

Convergence at the ‘end’ of the video will take place when each commute video ends with a similar framing of the destination.

2009-11-12T17:07:00.001-06:00

I aim to explore how the selection and/or visual representation of text can reveal new connections between it and the location(s) it relates to.

Text as Form

strips away to bare essentials of text
no information necessary to add to the map to make it recognizable (does not mean necessarily functional)
factual & functions as traditional maps do, by naming/claiming certain areas
reinforces information from traditional maps

Layla Curtis

New York

ink on tracing paper (I believe she traced the text from an existing map)
little interest in typography; just shows text only & that it is still functional
seems very direct & trust-worthy; handwritten but not personal

Jenny Beorkrem

City Neighborhood Posters - Chicago

still pretty accurate (in some sense) b/c she’s fitting the text into delineated forms; all right angles
single typeface; & clean but with sameness and sterility of traditional maps
size & color as ways to differentiate between neighborhoods

VladStudio

Typographic World Map

one typeface for all; all caps make it kind of imposing & intense “RUSSIA!!!”
distortion of country size is emphasized even more than normal b/c not only comparing the size of the countries & continents to each otther, but you’re also comparing text size

Mark Andrew Webber

City Linoleum Cuts

Paris is roughly 5’ x 6’; not sure how big New York is
a flow between the different sections of text; interaction that Jenny’s don’t have and feels maybe more accurate with the complete dissolution of borders
different typefaces give character to the different locations (but nothing handwritten)

Text as Form/Text as Source

Text still fills a more-or-less traditional mapping frame (city, country, etc.)
Difference is selection of text is relevant to location, but the text is not traditional mapping information

Unknown

Missed Connections

some obvious visual similarities to Jenny Beorkram’s maps, but using different data
of the last hundred or last two weeks of Craigslist Missed Connections posts per state mentioning a specific location at which the connection was missed.

Vera Evstafieva and Andrew Biliter

St. Petersburg: City of Words

seems to be hand-illustrated
seems more emotional...more of a love note to the city

Ian Huebert

The Literary City

Composed of words from poems, songs, stories, etc. that mention San Francisco
“loosely” based on St. Petersburg: City of Words map

Mike Boruta

Mouths Open Wide

Map of Athens, Ohio, by things he overheard and his own thoughts at a location
text selection over text visualization
use of type v. handwriting makes it seem more “accurate” & “real”, but conflicting with the recorded information...reduces all the text to the same “feel”
interesting to record extremely transitory data, which forces the issue that all maps are using transitory data; this map was never accurate for a single point in time...

Derives - A Genealogy of Sorts

2009-11-09T01:42:00.019-06:00

· This project seeks to present a genealogy of sorts that traces the evolution of ‘psycho-geographical’ mapping representations.
· Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as

"the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography)

Another definition is "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."The most important of these strategies is the derive (drift). - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography)

· The presentation aims to trace the evolution of psycho geograpical derives –

(From acts) intentioned originally as a reaction to the perceived ‘cold unresponsiveness’ of the modernist architectural city when initiated by the Situationists ( among other socio / political concerns)

current day practices that seek to represent and institute a refamiliarization with the physical city ( in its varied forms – architectural, social, natural etc) in an attempt to locate / annotate the meanings associated with everyday physical interactions with it / in it.

Indicate the evolving usage of the ‘derive’ as a methodology to inform upon the individuals position / meaning amidst a changing landscape.

· It also seeks to present/underline the importance of the act of the derive and psycho geographic mapping as an exercise.

While the ideological purposes of the different groups that have practiced ‘derives’ over time have varied, the act of the derive itself and its representation are consistent.

The presentation makes a case for

1. the narrative potential explored by each differing group through the practice of the derive,

2. and its mapping as a method to represent ‘individual’ ‘meanings’ associated with their physical environment.

Lets start with Guy Debord and the Situationists –

What it is -

· An example of mapping the neighborhoods of a city on the ideas of the international Lettrist and Situationist movement.

· The map of Paris has been cut up in different areas that are experienced by the user group as distinct sets/neighborhoods.

· The perceived distance between these areas are visualized by spreading out the pieces of the cut up map. The distance represented does not signify the actual physical distance, but rather the perceived distance of values (social, psychological, attitudinal etc)

· By wandering or drifting (dériver is the French word used) through the city each person can discover his or her own ambient impressions/perceptions of a specific city.

· The red arrows indicate the most frequent used crossings between the islands of the urban construct.

What it does –

· Provide a visual commentary to support the Situationist political and theoretical ideologies.

· Allows for an individual interpretation of the journey through each city, and a unique representation of the experience.

Move on to another similar derive – different in expression…such as –

The Guide Psychographique de OWU by John Krygier

What it is –

· Executed during by five Ohio University students and John Krygier as an experiment in improvisational psycho geography.

· The map was the product of a course – Mapping Weird Stuff – offered at the OWjL (Ohio Wesleyan University Junior League of Columbus) summer camp for gifted and talented middle school students.

· a dérive to get a feel for the campus and its “resonances,” by means of blind-folded and ear-plugged tours through the campus, collecting smells and sounds, as well as texture collection expeditions.

· (see legend of map for ‘collected’ texture icons and also smell and sound icons.)

· (inspired, in part, by Denis Wood’s Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights project).

What it does –

· Seeks a reorientation of sensory attention in the everyday.

· The derive itself, seeks to focus the experience upon sensory experiences that are lost or diluted in the everyday by the general focus of attention upon destinations.

· An experiment involving students, it seeks to redraw the attention of a youth group to the potential for sensory explorations embedded in the everyday.

The illustrations shown so far present the ‘derive’ as a method employed to assign precedence to the act of individual choice and sensory exploration over regimented urban constructs.

The next map –

The literary psycho geography of Edo/Tokyo by Tjebbe-van-Tijen

http://www.scribd.com/doc/20699094/Tjebbe-van-Tijen-Literary-Psycho-Geography-of-Edo-Tokyo-Amsterdam

What it is -

· A proposal for an interactive map which records (as photographs) the real spaces described in psycho geographic literary texts – Japanese texts.

· Mirroring 'time balls' that represent psycho-geographic moments (time, space and mood) float over a satellite picture of Tokyo and Tokyo Bay. Different balls (psycho-geographic moments) can be chosen...

· A mirroring 'time ball' floats over a satellite picture of Tokyo and Tokyo Bay in a zoom-out overview. The small ball indicates the relative position of an area, which is described. One needs to zoom-in to see a more precise indication. The big 'time ball' shows a recent 'fish eye' view of the area that is described in a literary text .

· One can also "enter" the time ball and see the place described...

What it does –

· By illustrating selected texts by the ‘real’ spaces they describe, the mapping seeks to inform upon the actual physicality of described imageries.

· The derive seeks to focus attention upon the translation of physicality from - real – its expression – and its re discovery …over time

· It translates as an attempt to rediscover one set of the myriad ‘codes’ embedded in the urban environment by man, over time.

While the afore mentioned two illustrations are methods of derive that aim at drawing attention to sensory faculties and historical perspectives, the next illustration seeks to draw attention to and map emotion. And the need to develop a sense of community

The Stockport Emotion Map – Christian Nold

What it is –

· Over a period of two months in summer 2007, about 200 people took part in six public mapping events. This map collects together and shows the results of the two activities: Drawing Provocations & Emotion Mapping

· People were asked to sketch their responses to a variety of serious and humorous provocations about their daily lives such as –

- what really annoys them about Stockport,

- where they meet their friends,

- as well as who are the most important and dangerous people in town.

· Other provocations were focused on the town and its history, river and landmarks.

· The drawings were then scanned and used to create the map.

· The second activity involved people walking freely through Stockport equipped with a special device invented by the artist, that measured their emotional arousal in relation to their geographical location in the town.

· On the map, the walks are represented by thin angular lines tracing the paths that people walked.

· The emotional arousal is represented as a series of pillars at four different heights corresponding to the intensity of emotional arousal.

· Arousal as mentioned here, is not necessarily positive and is intentioned in terms of heightened attention to ones body or surroundings.

· The textual annotations on the map were written by the participants themselves to describe the huge variety of events and sensory stimuli that caused their emotional reactions during their walks.

What it does –

· This map suggests a model for recording the apparently trivial conversations and events of our everyday lives and

allows us to see them all simultaneously without being constrained to a narrowly defined topic.

· When it is possible to see this overview, these apparently disconnected conversations show their true value and form clusters of issues and concerns.

· The mapping of this ‘group derive’ helped realize underlying concerns and reveal avenues for development about the city such as –

- The marginalized history of Stockport – and the locations in the city that could be further developed to encourage a sense of history in the community

- The hidden river Mersey – the apparent lack of awareness of the river due to its being hidden from view by buildings – and a discovery of the potential therein to develop a recognizable sense of identity for the city

- Monolithic shopping – concerns revealed issues about the disappearance of local shops with the influx of ‘chains’ and a consequent loss of the sense of community

- Lack of semi public spaces - and hence loss of potential for community interaction

- Isolation of young people – lack of community / city initiatives to provide opportunities to youngsters for self expression, interaction etc

· While the afore mentioned are documented results derived from the exercise, another important result of the exercise is the exercise itself as a community building exercise, and as a method to initiate a realignment of the participants with the environment they live in – and its issues.

The presentation so far, has tracked the use of the method of the derive and its mapping for expressing personal concerns about the environment, exploring the sensorial attributes of the environment, exploring the connection between the physical environment and its past (in this case literary), to using the method to establish and strength a sense of community related to the environment inhabited. The next illustration, in a similar manner of concern regarding the individuals relationship to the worlds they live in, tries to explore the physical environment using the codes of another environment that the users inhabit – the virtual.

dot walk - social fiction.org

what it is -

· «.walk» by socialfiction.org raises regimentation to an art form by giving instructions for a walk through a city.

· These instructions correspond to an algorithm and can be traced back to a simple computer programme:
//Classic.walk
Repeat
[
1 st street left
2 nd street right
2 nd street left
]

· A detailed list of the codes provided and their iterations is given here - http://www.socialfiction.org/dotwalk/dummies.html

· Participants then use the software code provided to initiate a derive in the city.

· Interaction, exchange of code and information occur at points where the paths / algorithms of two participants intersect.

What it does –

· The psycho geographical project «.walk» supplies instructions (software) on how to use a city (hardware).

· The artistic interest in this case is concentrated on the instruction.

· The aforementioned derive – is used as an illustration here to show how the advent of the ‘virtual world’ and increased participation across the platforms of ‘real’ and virtual’ has revealed a need to be able to illustrate our position across both clearly, and to attempt to map the superimposition of the two for the sake of understanding

· Tries to document the weaving of individuals through and between both worlds

· The aforementioned illustration is important in showing the change of direction in the purpose of derives. It marks a point wherein the focus changes from rediscovery of ‘forgotten’ aspects of experience (sensorial, emotional, communal etc) to attempts to ‘locate’ the individual amidst the changing topographies caused by the advent of the world wide web.

Continuing the same line of inquiry, albeit in a different manner, The next illustration seeks to use one aspect of our dual worlds (the virtual) to define the extents of the other – the physical world.

Digital derive in Graz –

What it is -

· Executed in 2006, by the MIT Senseable city lab, Digital Derive harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity.

· The Real-Time City Map registered and visually rendered the volume and geographic source of cell phone usage in Graz.

· Statistics from the A1 Mobicom Austria network was used to compute locations of users by ‘pinging cell phones as they moved through the city.

· The tracking was initiated upon user approval (by means of an SMS to the network) – giving them the control over the extent of mapping. The tracking was engineered to stop after a 24 hour period as a default setting.

· The Real-Time City Map registered and visually rendered the volume and geographic source of cell phone usage in Graz, thus showcasing a different layer in the use and experience of the city.

What it does –

· Because it is possible to ‘simultaneously ping the cell phones of thousands of users - thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given moment in time - these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its inhabitants.’ - http://www.informationlab.org/?p=221

· The polis is hence interpreted as a ‘shifting entity formed by webs of human interactions in space-time’, rather than simply as a fixed, physical environment.’ - http://www.informationlab.org/?p=221

· The rendering of the peaks & valleys of cell phone usage here is reminiscent of a topographic map, as if a representation of the real geography of the city – which in a sense it is.

· This derive is significant in its attempt to map the shifting sense of ‘geography’ as we make our way through differing platforms – the real and virtual.

The digital derive workshop and Personas, illustrated next, shifts the concerns/ preoccupation of defining ‘location’ with respect to the real and virtual – to attempt an experiment in deriving our ‘self’ from the virtual environment.

Personas and the digital derive workshop

What it is –

Personas

· A program that scours the internet looking for characterizing statements about the user to use in its analysis.

· After suitable information is found, the user watches the computer try to make sense of the found references.

· Once it has finished its conclusions the ‘personas vector’ is displayed and annotated with a minimal legend

· Uncanny insights and errors are part of the experience

The workshop –

· The topography of the digital landscape—an intricate web of links and nodes—promotes the kind of randomized exploration and discovery that psycho-graphers find intriguing in the urban environment.

· Traversing the internets information channels, encourages a proclivity to ignore conventional directional cues and stray off course – to drift in a manner of speaking in order to assuage curiosity – analogous to a physical derive the purpose of which would be to heighten awareness of the physical environment.

· Each map serves as a psycho geographical data “portrait” of the participant’s unique experience navigating the web for a period of time.

What it does –

· Shows you how the internet sees you.

· Creates awareness about data mining projects and threat of loss of privacy therein.

· While constrained in its effectiveness as a derive, it is a credible derive – in post rationalization.

· The experiment explores the idea of ‘virtual identities’ – and how users may be misrepresented – and evokes for the users a need to develop a conscious digital presence in light of the derive and its inaccuracies.

· The project presupposes the virtual environment as a platform of active participation and integrated into everyday life’s of consumers and seeks to highlight the presence of the individual and the interpretations of their PERSONAS from their trails upon it.

The next and final illustration – Urban Tapestries – attempts to provide a platform to institute derives that are executed simultaneously across the real and virtual worlds – and presupposes most of the aforementioned as credible concerns, seeking to enable its consumers to address them.

Urban Tapestries - Public Authoring in the Wireless City

What it is –

· Urban Tapestries is the name of a research project and experimental software platform for knowledge mapping and sharing – public authoring – conceived and developed by Proboscis in partnership with collaborators such as the London School of Economics, Birkbeck College, Orange, HP Research labs, France Telecom R&D UK, Ordnance Survey.

· It was begun in late 2002 and completed in Autumn 2004, with a follow-on research program of experiments with local groups and communities called Social Tapestries starting in April 2004 and completed in Summer 2007 (additional publications and outputs will be released in 2008).

· Urban Tapestries investigates how, by combining mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems, people can 'author' the environment around them; creating a new social anthropology.

· The projects are documented in a variety of ways - from essays, project reports and academic papers to videos, installations and software (interfaces and code.)

What it does –

· The over arching attempt of the project is to engineer a platform that allows for public authoring.

· It proposes to adopt and adapt new and emerging technologies for creating and sharing everyday knowledge and experience.

· In addition to collating contemporary consumer knowledge, it seeks to build up organic, collective memories that trace and embellish different kinds of relationships across places, time and communities.

· The Urban Tapestries software platform enables people to build relationships between places and to associate stories, information, pictures, sounds and videos with them.

· Allows a platform for the ‘anthropology of ourselves’ intentions behind derive mappings.

· Indicates a societal shift towards ‘community expression’ over ‘governmental / institutional’ regimentation.

· Almost as if a realization of the implied goals behind the efforts of the original/early derives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY -

· http://imaginarymuseum.org/LPG/Mapsitu1.htm

· http://makingmaps.net/2009/06/22/making-psychogeography-maps/

· http://imaginarymuseum.org/JFtalp/MoodMap.html

· http://stockport.emotionmap.net/background.htm

· http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/dot-walk/

· http://www.socialfiction.org/dotwalk/dummies.html

· http://www.socialfiction.org/dotwalk/snapwalk.html

· http://www.informationlab.org/?p=221

· http://senseable.mit.edu/graz/

· http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

· http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/connections/

· http://confluxfestival.org/2009/events/workshops/julia-kaganskiy-and-an-xiao/

· http://urbantapestries.net/

· http://research.urbantapestries.net/

· http://research.urbantapestries.net/animations/AnimationA.html

· http://research.urbantapestries.net/animations/AnimationB.html

· LITERARY PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHY OF EDO/TOKYO & AMSTERDAM - End-Report for the Japan Foundation of the research done by Tjebbe van Tijen in the cadre of the Medium Term Visitors’ Program in Commemoration with the Okinawa/Kyushu Summit 2000 from 2/10/2000 to 28/2/2001

A Genealogy of Influences.

2009-11-06T20:39:00.018-06:00

“..In mapping, one’s objective is to discover” -Robinson and Petchenik.
In presenting a genealogy of maps which could be used as influences for a radical approach to mapping the UT commute, Text Cloud, which is a visual depiction of user generated tags or words of a site or activity presented itself with quantifying the common concerns and suggestions and random thoughts that were expressed by participants when responding to the problems of the commute. This could also be connected to the Transparency Map, by Kerry Mitchell which graphed the appearance of the word 'transparency' for the last 19 years. The fact that the UT participants were so emotional and vehement in their expressions and how much it affected their lives would find voice in the Emotion or Bio-Mappings (TheStockport Emotion Map) by Christian Nold and Julie Mehretu’s Maps of my Life/Sounds of my World.

My Bubble Map

Inspired by Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher and intellectual, I imagined myself alone in this world existing in a transparent bubble . So if existence is the field, then I am a bubble surrounded by other bubbles that give meaning to me and my existence. Each sphere is important and how I plot these connection with the other bubbles, defines my life.
To me, mapping is the ingenuity of making these connections with the data I deem important in a field that has been more or less given to me, but which I can manipulate to my design. "Potholes”, “mean drivers” jump at you. It makes you stop a moment and think about the bubble that we live in. In my understanding each bubble has to connect. In these connections, potholes and mean drivers play a part in making the bridge smooth or strained. As I look at it, each person or participant had his own story which is his point of view. These rantings and ramblings and composed thoughts expose more about how we connect with the other bubbles around our existence.

Unlike "tracings" which simply reproduce what is already there, mappings discover new worlds. They uncover hidden meaning and derive inferences from simple data. So a map can exhibit obvious data but mapping probes and derives conclusions and hypothesis.
This Text Cloud of President Obama’s Inaugural speech , done by CNN, quantifies the core of his argument…new nation. A text cloud or word cloud is a visualization of word frequency in a given text as a weighted list. The technique has recently been popularly used to visualize the topical

content of political speeches.

Bio-Mapping/ Emotion Map

Emotion maps can also be an overlapping registration of several maps combined in a way that none of the notations take precedence over the other while giving meaning or subjective interpretation to overlaps.

This map aims to record the trivial and seemingly meaningless conversations and events of our everyday lives and allows us to see them all simultaneously without being constrained to a narrowly defined subject.
When we talk about ‘issues’, our responses are guarded and neatly packaged, but responding to ‘things’ is freer. When a thing becomes explicit or public, I feel it becomes an issue and therefore requires a different response. This mapping captures our response to daily things before they become an issue. It uncovers an issue.
The student data of UT lends itself to this mapping as the opinions and suggestion are vehement and heartfelt. They mean so much to our time in space and our daily interaction with our environment.

Mapping gives a voice to group relocated in a new environment trying to connect to the past that was their homeland. In trying to understand the grid or the framework and the tools the artist used to map,‘Map of my life/Sounds of my World’, a mapping led by Julie Mehretu, where the artist asked the students of East African origin to record the sounds of Minneapolis, where they lived, to draw connections between the home they left behind and the home they inhabited now. The interface was an interactive audio-visual collage of sound bites and photographs contributed by the students. In his book ‘Presence of the Past’, Roy Rosenweig, studies how deeply ordinary people are engaged by the past. It is felt that the past is viewed in a very complex way mainly emphasizing the individual’s interpretation of his and his family’s past and ignoring others. This ‘privatized’ version of their past reinforces barriers and the selective memory could be the bane of communication and peace efforts by resisting rather than promoting change. As in India and Pakistan conflict, as also in the Mid-East crisis, it is difficult to move away from the atrocities to your own group imposed by the other. A rational approach or a middle ground is hard to reach when each groups private memory is so raw, vivid and inbalanced. In mapping, it would be helpful to come with an view that honors the individual point of view but gives a clear and distilled overview. It is evident that the artist is a member ofthis group and is trying to help a group to establish some semblance of home in an alien land.

The Arrival of Transparency-Kerry Mitchell

This visualization captures instances of the word “transparency” in Times articles from 1990 to 2009.
In concept it is similar to the tag cloud or the text cloud.
This is a radial or timepiece graph and the first mention of “transparency” is at the 1 o’clock position. Each ray represents a month; the months proceed clockwise into an explosion of instances of the word.
With globalization, it is time and not place that schedules our public life.
Access to infinite information has changed our perception of it and made the bizarre, normal. Do mapping of these varied extracts herald a new normalcy?

Conclusion
Mappings or radical mappings of an activity like the UT commute and their feelings about the commute could manifest itself into a map that reflects the feelings regarding the commute and the aspects of it that they love or loathe. The first reflection is of discontentment with the roads with its potholes and the manic drivers. A lot of emphasis is laid to mean drivers. Perhaps it is telling that everyone wants some compassion. Each one has a story to tell and is fighting some battle. Being nice is the latent message that you get from the data. An approach could be the Stockport Emotion map or the Twin Cities image/sound map that juxtaposes the grid or the field ( in this case the geographical position) with the abstract like thoughts and memories that the node evokes.. It puts value to trivial and random thoughts that could actually be plotted to have consequential meanings.
The possibility to stretch your mind by comparing and synthesizing various data opens up a realm of possibilities and expands your frame of mind. It uses the information from the x and y axis to construct the z axis.
There is a thought that the more detailed and life like a map is the more redundant and unnecessary it becomes. Maps, like art must have mystery to have meaning and to make sense, and suddenly I understand the meaning of the line ‘ the bane of untrained map readers is not at all the failing of maps, but rather their virtue’ (The Agency of Mapping. P 222) The genius or the lack of it of the designer is in all three but most significantly in the plotting of the extractions. They represent an abstraction of the designers inference of the plotting.
So is the map only as good as the imagination of the maker? Can the map reveal things that the cartographer had not envisioned?
I believe that the map can take a life of its own once the parameters of the grid and the extractions to be plotted are established.
It is definitely a fine line and the culmination is the intent of the designer.

References

Corner, James. "The Agency Of Mapping"

Holmes, Brian. "Counter Cartographies"

wordle.net

http://firstlook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/visualizations-the-art-of-times-apis/

WHAT DO YOU SEE HERE // WHAT DO I SEE HERE

2009-11-04T20:43:00.002-06:00

STATEMENT:

Maps and the act of mapping have the capability to be community created, and community enriching entities. Maps should make the user more aware of their surroundings and foster learning of spaces through other peoples' eyes.

PRESENTATION:

1. Map as community building element

a. reveal connections-- show latent relationships

b. reveal players-- participants as authorities, multiple authorities

c. recreate space-- see mew things through different eyes

2. Graffiti Mapping

-Social tagging

-comment upon comment (graffiti as comment in urban space, online comment as secondary)

-exist in different space

-community responding and interacting with one another

-look at the surroundings through other people's eyes(photos)

3. Trail Signs

-community respond to community channels

-responding to exterior conditions

-helpful to others

-useful and knowledgable guide (not authoritive, voice opinion)

-little personal gain to mark maker

4. Andrew Mahon's Flickr Tour

-friend's iphone app which links geotagged flickr images and locations

-see other people's views super imposed on yours

-community aiding another community (flickr to iphone app users)

-helpful? entertaining yes.

-build community

-comment on collective space

5. 1:1 Maps

-following a path on ground level

-roads? parking spots? clocks?

-relate to map but use logic

-gym floors allow for third party rules to be played out, allow experimentation

6. Connections

-open source- creators as users

-Emergent systems- what works best is known as it's being adapted to

-Community building- comment on self, one another. seeing the community through others' eyes

-Milieu Based- could perpetuate self? using existing systems so the map could build upon itself in time and space

7. Proposal

-put the map in the hands of you all, to mark trails of commuting patterns

-to comment on our own commuting patterns and how they intersect

-someone else takes a different route that might be better (better being: shorter, more scenic, different breakfast tacos)

-respond to life conditions (traffic, protest)

-aim for democratic vision of the city with situationist ideals carried out by the every wo/man

Metro train as urban safari

2009-10-17T23:06:00.003-05:00

See building blog's post on the new exhibition Safari 7 Reading Room, at NYC's Studio-X. A train route seen in terms of the ecosystems it traverses.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/safari-7.html

MAPS LIE: even as they tell the truth

2009-10-15T22:31:00.046-05:00

This presentation seeks to:

- Analyze the conceptual and formal qualities (and their implications) reflected in Eyal Weizman's 'B'tselem Map of Jewish Settlements in the West Bank'.

- It seeks to compare pertinent aspects of this analysis to two other mappings, and also discuss the methods chosen in each of the works to illustrate their intent.

The three maps chosen for the analysis are:

1. THE B'TSELEM MAP OF JEWISH SETTLEMENTS IN THE WEST BANK - by Eyal Weizman
2. 'MEMORIAL TO 418 PALESTINIAN VILLAGES DESTROYED' - by Emily Jacir
3. 'CRISIS IN DARFUR' - A Google Earth and USHMM outreach initiative.

ANALYSIS OF THE B'TSELEM MAP OF JEWISH SETTLEMENTS IN THE WEST BANK:

INTRODUCTION TO MAP AND ITS CONTEXT:

- The map was produced as part of the exhibition 'A Civilian Occupation: The politics of Israeli Architecture', by architects Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal, in collaboration with B'tselem (and Israeli human rights organization, that acts primarily to change Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories).

Israeli Policy in the Occupied Territories: " ...Israel has established a seperation cum discrimination regime in the Occupied Territories, through which it maintains two systems of laws, and a person's rights are based on his or her national origin...
...As part of the regime, Israel has stolen thousands of 'dunams' of land from the Palestinians. On this land, Israel has established dozens of settlements in which hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians now live...
...Israel forbids Palestinians to enter and use these lands and uses the settlements to justify violations of Palestinian rights...
...the sharp changes made to the map of the West Bank make a viable Palestinian state impossible as part of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination..."

- Excerpts from the B'tselem website, Land Expropriation and Settlements, http://www.btselem.org/English/Settlements/

- The map is an illustration of the extensive process of land grabbing instituted by the government of Israel.

- The process of map construction involved collecting master plans of over 150 Israeli settlements, comparing/collating them with aerial photographs and previously collected satellite images.

- The map is widely accepted as accurate, in Israel and outside.

FORMAL ANALYSIS:

- The map uses color primarily to establish -

a) Differentiation between Israeli and Palestinian settlements, and

b) The actual size of Israeli settlements, compared to the areas around it claimed by the Israeli government under differing pretexts.

- The contrast between the cool blues and the warm ochers of the Israeli and Palestinian settlements, heightens the presence of Israeli occupation on what is technically all Palestinian land. It emphasizes the extent of occupation, and alludes to a large scale Palestinian displacement.

- The map reveals its bias in its choice of colors to represent the opposing factions - Cool blues (relating metaphorically to a calculated intervention by Israel) and Warm ochers (relating to the pathos of the Palestinian people).

- It uses color gradations to illustrate the size of settlements, the allocated area for their projected growth and the greater reach of the jurisdiction of the settlements' regional council. These area definitions when seen all together as a set, reveal the extent of the land grabbing instituted by the Israeli government under the pretext of protecting the interest of its civilian settlers.

- Most existing maps of the West Bank illustrate the settlements as points, with some indicating alongside the population of the settlements. The B'tselem map, diverges from this mode of expression. By outlining the 'actual' shape, reach and positioning of the settlements, their municipalities and regional council jurisdiction the map communicates -

the scale of intervention

the actual size of settlements versus the area claimed (the collective size of all Israeli settlements amounts t0 approx. 2% of the total West Bank land area, the larger area claimed by the Israeli government under pretext of natural expansion and jurisdiction amounts to almost 47% of the total land area.)

the planned strategy of locating settlements so as to disconnect larger Palestinian settlements from outlying villages and strategic control over key military routes (e.g.: the Israeli settlement of Ariel)

LITTLE WHITE LIES:

Maps, as all mediums of communication do, serve the interests of those that commission/make them. They tend to portray points of view - however impartial the intent. Consequently, maps lie, consciously or not.

While this map sets out the scope of the Palestinian dislocation that has occurred, and alludes to the scale of human rights violations therein, its paints a one sided picture. As intended by its makers, it serves to illustrate the occupation by Israel of Palestinian ground within a larger discussion of Palestinian human rights violations. It does not however, allude to any persecution of Israeli settlers.

The maps portrays one aspect of what is a long story of struggle and dispute between two communities. While accurate in its representation, it leads the 'uneducated' viewer to form assumptions out of reference with the whole context.

For instance, the large extent of blue on the map illustrates the extent of Israeli occupation, with reference to the actual small size of the settlements. The dialogue it possibly omits to mention in this expression is the scope of civilian persecution within these smaller Israeli settlements upon 'foreign' land.

ANALYSIS OF 'MEMORIAL TO 418 PALESTINIAN VILLAGES DESTROYED':

INTRODUCTION TO MAP AND ITS CONTEXT:

- This mapping was executed by the artist, Emily Jacir in 2001, during her residency at PS1's National Studio Program.

- While differing from a traditional cartographic visual expression, it is an effective expression of information communication.

- The construction/execution of this artwork involved the artist's sourcing of a refugee tent, and penciling upon it names of 418 Palestinian villages that were destroyed or depopulated during and after the 1948 war in which Palestine was occupied by Israel. The artist invited members of this displaced community to contribute to the embroidering of the village names onto the tent, thus organizing a collective exchange of experiences, stories and healing.

- The map was deliberately left incomplete, to illustrate the ongoing course of the displacements and human right violations.

- The decision to write the names in English instead of the Arabic script, so as not to distract from the pathos expressed by considerations of the calligraphic beauty of the writing.

COMPARISION - Similarity and Contrary Aspects:

- This artwork shares a common concept with the B'tselem map in that it seeks to draw attention to the displacement of the Palestinian people.

- While the B'tselem map deconstructs Israeli claims, and clarifies the scale of the land usurped in a methodical, scientific and factual manner, the 'refugee tent' alludes to the same, while focusing primarily on the human tragedy from an emotional point of view.

- These contrary positions are further illustrated by their chosen mediums of expression.

- The tent is constructed by victims of the ongoing war themselves, as versus the map, which may be perceived as a third person point of view. This accords the tent an unchallengeable veracity, while the map though widely acknowledged remains a political interpretation.

- Another dissimilarity is the 'view' employed by both works. While the B'tselem map employs the traditional planometric projection, the 'tent' employs a very personal and grounds up view of the same scenario. In this the map remains (despite its objectives) the 'occupier purveying territory' while the 'tent' relates to the 'ground reality' - names, faces, homes, places - of the dispute.

ANALYSIS OF 'CRISIS IN DARFUR':

INTRODUCTION TO MAP AND ITS CONTEXT:

- Google Earth (GE) in collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has instituted an outreach program 'Crisis in Darfur', wherein, GE maps on its interface the location of every single Darfurian villages know to be destroyed or damaged.

- In addition to 'locating' the villages on GE's 'virtual globe', the initiative allows each village tag to inform about the number of poeple displaced/killed, photographs from ground level, first person testimonials and links to essays about the crisis elsewhere on the internet.

- This mapping was initiated to bring awareness of the humanitarian conflict to approx. 200 million GE users, with a view towards generating international support.

- The simplistic 'icon' based representation of the damaged sites allow for easy recognition upon the larger GE interface.

- The GE globe is developed by a 'stitching' of satellite images to mime the appearance of the earth from above. Since the user can zoom into varying heights from ground level, it allows for a clearer exploration of the terrain - emphasizing the act of natural calamities (drought) upon a population under strife from war.

- The choice of interface used for the mapping, is significant to the purpose of the act - generating awareness. The GE platform differs from a traditional cartography significantly as it offers immediate options for further education about the crisis. The mapping takes into account that awareness may engineer a desire for a deeper understanding of the crisis, and hence seeks to cater to users with differing 'scales' of awareness. It (attempts to) allows for varying levels of information dissemination to cater to differing user profiles.

Its platform, enables diverse forms of communication (map, photography, testimonials etc) - each of which have differing impacts upon the viewer.

- The GE interface is however not an extensively sociable one. This ensures that the user's experience of the 'initiative' is of a one-sided perspective and is as purported by GE.

COMPARISION - Similarities and Contrasts:

- Both maps are perceived to be generally unbiased.

- The B'tselem map addresses its subject from a scientific and geographical approach. It addresses its detail to a single aspect of a larger issue - attempting to communicate it accurately. The GE initiative, however, addresses its subject from a geographical and emotional approach - attempting to give a generic idea of the 'scale and scope' of the crisis. It addresses directly the various human rights violations suffered by the civilian Darfurian population, while the B'tselem map (restricted by its medium) merely alludes to them.

- Concurrently, the GE initiative, appears 'lost' in the scope of its attempts, addressing various issues superficially as compared to the B'tselem map that is focused in the singularity of its intention.

Guy Debord & Neighborhood Maps

2009-10-14T21:14:00.008-05:00

Guy Debord (1931-1994)

Founding member of the Situationist International

Founding member of the Lettrists

Author of the Society of the Spectacle

dissertation on the media infused life and its shortcomings

dissertation on our lives in relation to reproduction versus experience

Work in film and “Nothingness”

Last piece was a direct contradiction of his work—an idealistic look back at the Paris of his youth

overly romanticized

one person’s view

Situationist International (1957-1972)

Lettrists (1952-1957) precurser

Aimed to disrupt any form of what they took to be the dominant regime or capitalist power

Accelerate the collapse of “the society of the spectacle”

“Hoped to overcome art as a whole in the name of the only true art that did not allow itself to become co-opted by the spectacle and the market.”

“The artist was left with a single mission: to create new situations for a new kind of human being”

Children of the existentialists and the surrealists, one must acknowledge and use art and society, as well as overcome it.

Full of contradiction—to deny the cannon yet become a part of it

To create ephemera and entertainment as a critique of its own medium

To become famous off denying the idea of celebrity

To benefit from the capitalist system you hate- Make money

Discours sur les passions de l’amour

Map of a drift through the city of Paris, walked through city and turned wherever he chose

Not interested in art objects and styles

Interested in engaging life situations and social formations

“Psychogeography”

According to Debord: “The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”

Exploring cities via non-predictable paths and jolting back into awareness of the space

Contradictions:

Creating a “map” has an implied audience, thus Debord is forcing his experience on others

Cannot be an equal creation- his map is more widely disseminated than mine would be because of his resources and stature within a group

Is able to make money off of its reproduction

Contribute to his celebrity, because it was his singular view

Able to follow path, out of curiosity with Debord, not curiosity of the city

Reduce an experience into 2d form

creation of art object

Boyland Heights Pumpkin Map

Dennis Wood, 1982

many other maps created

viewers would know the streets very well as it was placed in a book of maps of the neighborhood, for its inhabitants

more pumpkins ended up in richer neighborhoods

speak to economic conditions

speaks to environmental knowledge

physicality of streets is removed, but referenced

Unable to navigate if you do not know, useless if you have a motive

Time and seasonally specific

Choose pumpkin faces randomly

some did not turn out right

some were repeated

Visually appealling

Manhattan

Harold Horowitz, 1997

Poem took a year to write

Personal experience

Physicality of streets removed

Geography, emotion, and culture referenced and work together in visual space

Imposing view of city on others

Color impressions

Idealize situation

Useless of you have a motive

Visually appealing

Relationships

City/Neighborhood with physical elements removed or skewed

This is not an areal view, street view, without the streets

useless if you have your own motive

what is next is not addressed

how do I get here?

How do I get out?

What is the audience’s role?

Time as a silent element

Horowitz’s Manhattan references events that are seasonal, or things that no longer take place in the corresponding space to their relationship on the map

Debord’s reflection of his own drift through Paris

How long was this drift?

I would not be walking through the same Paris has he did

How did the time of day effect his walking patterns?

Was it midday during a traffic jam?

Did he record his walk during it or after it had taken place? Could his walk actually have been different

Wood’s record of pumpkins

If you went there now there might be pumpkins, but they would not be the same.

If you went in the spring there would be no pumpkins

Would times of economic hardship change the amount of pumpkins?

Contradictions

When one is recording an experience there are many more questions that arise than answers

This is not an areal view, street view, without the streets

Personal view imposed and printed, although changing through time

Can maps really be universal?

Can maps really be personal?

Can maps pinpoint a time and space and experience that can be recreated or not recreated?

Are we inherently following someone else’s plan whenever we seemingly “drift” or use maps?

2009-10-14T19:32:00.009-05:00

Introduction and Goals:

To show how environmental, social and cultural factors of John Snow’s historical mapping of the Broad St, London cholera outbreak of 1854 made this an effective historical tool.

Compare with two maps on and show how my own conception of mapping usefulness has changed through this study.

How even the slightest critical reading can show map failings.

How one should not altogether reject failing maps, but should help in immediate recognition of highly effective ones.

Snow Background

Had mastered various disciplines, became first sought after anesthesiologist, assisted the Queen with chloroform.

Possible that interest in cholera came from popular suggestion that chloroform was potential cure.

Had previously theorized about transmission of cholera and was using map as smaller part of argument about the transmission.

Water at other pumps LOOKED worse than water at the Broad St pump. Mapping proved otherwise, predicating germ theories by 30 years.

IMAGE: bar map

Initial deaths marked by thick black bar making houses with more deaths, more apparent.

HOWEVER, “needed to show lives, not deaths and show how the neighborhood was actually traversed” (195).

IMAGE: dot map

Comment on absence of brewery and workhouse labels.

Henry Whitehead gets credit for social data and for describing usefulness of outliers. (poor guy was left out of Tufte’s discussion?)

Johnson Conclusions

It was not the mapmaking that mattered it was the underlying science that it revealed (J, 194).

Originality of the map did not revolve around representation or result, but in the data & in the investigation that compiled the data (194).

In the long run was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science (201).

Snow/Whitehead Model has two key principles that are central to the way that cities generate new ideas:

1) Importance of amateurs and unofficial local experts

2) Later cross-disciplinary flow of ideas

Drawing on collective wisdom narratives, Google Map API, etc.

Tufte Conclusions

1) Placing data in appropriate context for cause and effect

Data was somewhat useless on a list

2) Making quantitative comparisons

Comparison of frequency of deaths b/w locations

3) Considering alternative explanations & contrary cases

Narrative documents

Workhouse and Brewery had own pumps

People came from areas w/ much closer pumps to get water from B st.

4) Assessment of possible errors in the numbers reported in graphics

Perhaps only place it fails

Dot map does not address overall population density

Mapping Comparisons:

Chose the first two that came to mind but intend to show where the convergence lies through the lens of Tufte and Johnson.

Both are linked somewhat directly to the Snow map by a particular characteristic.

From Hell Map:

IMAGE: FH map

Based on Stephen knight’s theory that murders were cover-up for illegitimate royal birth fathered by Prince Albert.

Resolution of uniquely urban occurrence due to population density.

Attempts to put viewer on the ground with the cases.

Obviously visual and thematic link with the idea of a series of grisly 19^th century London deaths

Fails miserably because it only has one variable,

(Even if you were a prostitute in 1888 it wouldn’t tell you where not to go!)

Disease Maps/Global Cholera Maps:

IMAGE: CH map

From volunteer-nepal.org

-Does not show time variable

-Does not allow for conjecture about causes, prevention, etc.

-No human element

From gised.com.au (graphic information systems ed in Australia)

-Slightly more useful due to time constraint, but not really

-High end of data range is outrageous (the DRC)

-No human element

From www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/int/geog/health/health/index.shtml?cholera

-Percentages are arbitrary

-Water map tells us little about cholera outbreak (causal but not definitive)

-More of human story, as water supply is somewhat more relatable than cholera suffering

Both attempt to show relationships, but one puts you on the ground with no useful data and the other gives you a birds’ eye view with no human story or element.

Works Cited

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map. Riverhead Books. New York: 2006.

Moore, Alan and Eddie Campbell. From Hell. Kitchen Sink: 1999.

Tufte, Edward R. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.

Graphics Press. Cheshire: 1997.

Various sites for contemporary cholera maps (see above).

Map as Metaphor

2009-10-14T19:17:00.000-05:00

Here is the text based notes I made... I refined the lecture notes when I put it all together in power point. If anyone would like to see my power point email me.

Map as Metaphor

A metaphor is… something expressed in the terms of something else.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely actors;
They have their exits and their entrances; — William Shakespeare, As You Like It.

Show historical Map of Texas.

The Road to Success - Allegorical Cartoon from the National Cash Register Co. 1913.

Why do we use metaphors?
* The process of translating one idea into another often yields insights into the original idea.
* Metaphors are useful tools for understanding complex or abstract concepts.

Love is a rose
but you better not pick it
It only grows when it's on the vine.
A handful of thorns and
you'll know you've missed it
You lose your love
when you say the word 'mine'.

- Neil Young.

Complex Concept Map
Herman Moll: A new map of the whole world with the trade winds, in: Atlas minor, 3rd ed., London 1736

Abstract Concept Map
Connecting Distant Dots Author(s):
Tyler Lang, Elsa Chaves
Institution:
Seed Magazine…

Created for Seed Magazine, this diagram maps the connections between the most disparate of forces, events and systems affecting our planet. In the center of the concentric circles are the most fundamental influences (population growth, deforestation, increased fertilizer demand, etc). Rippling outward are the effects, which create a surprising number of synergies. Red lines depict reinforcing relationships, while blue lines show some of the inhibitory forces that also come into play.

All Metaphors break down.

The Wold is NOT a stage. (If we are actors who is the audience?)
Love is NOT a rose. (Do you feed love with dirt?)
A Map is NOT reality.

World Map.

Mercator Projection (1569) - Useful for sailing because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments. Distorts size and shape as you move toward poles.

James Gall (1855) - (1970) Arno Peters Projection - Equal-area Projection. Does a good job of showing the relative sizes of land but distorts the shape quite a bit.

Winkel Tripel projection (1920s) - adopted in 1998 as the National Geographic Society map of choice. Does the best job of compromising size and shape.

Show WorldMapper.org

How Maps Can Tell Stories

2009-10-11T10:51:00.004-05:00

General
- all 3 maps are stories of journeys (2 are specific points in time; 1 is an annual event)
- focus on journey first & see how well maps tell it
- climate plays a large role in all of the journeys
- 2 stories focus on loss of life; 1 journey involves births, as well (but map doesn't show it)

Russian Campaign 1812-1813
- Russia broke treaty promises with France (embargo against Britian, et. al) & if he didn't attack, then Russia would attack his forces in Poland (Grand Duchy of Warsaw)
- Napoleon attempted to negotiate, but was unable to; didn't want to fight; had another war going on in Spain at the same time w/ 200,000 men
- Napoleon expected a quick and easy defeat; thought the Grand Armee would be engaged quickly & never intended to go all the way to Moscow; Russia's armies were divided by several days & together only numbered 200,000
on June 23, 1812 roughly half a million soldiers crossed the Niemen River into czarist Russia; the biggest ever assembled in history to that point; made up of roughly 20 countries (i.e. 20 different languages; different and/or lack of motivation); 1/3 French; 2/3 other countries
- well-prepared for a summer campaign; Charles XII of Sweden had been defeated by Russians in 1709 & Napoleon studied this, determined not to let Russia's winter defeat him; “A major system of advance supply depots was planned and the attacking forces carried 14 days' provisions, evidence that a prompt settlement was expected”
- also shows movement of auxiliary troops (upper side detachment)
- weather turns bad; by some measure, the weather going in was worse; heat became intolerable; soldiers died from thirst, exhaustion & heat stroke & the horses were also unprepared for this campaign (no spare horses, so when they die, the supplies don't move forward; someone doesn't ride a horse, etc.)
- lost men due to heat, desertion (not typically French, but men from other countries), leaving people behind to protect the flank & skirmishes (Russians refused to give significant battles; were skirmishes that the Grand Armee won all of)
- in September, 100,000 reach Moscow (already burning, sacked & deserted by the Russians)
- only way to win eventually became to defeat the Russian army (which joined together at some point) & they withdrew to Moscow; Napoleon didn't think they would allow him to take Moscow unopposed b/c it was the heart of Russia (w/ the Kremlin, etc.)
sent emissaries to negotiate peace while in Moscow; met with silence from St. Petersburg
- stayed in Moscow for 35 days (kept hoping Czar Alexander would give in) – transition between autumn and the bitterness of the Russian winter; too cold, not enough facilities for his men, not enough men, not enough way to protect forces, supply lines were very long, how long should Napoleon be away from Paris (plots against him), limited opportunities for reinforcements; Russians had unlimited opportunities to increase their military forces surrounding him so Napoleon finally decides to leave & return
decides to take a more southerly route that will avoid the potentially worst weather; also going back same way would have come across same scorched earth
- engagement as they begin to return to Poland; Napoleon wins; turns north & starts retracing steps b/c feels unsure...not many calvary, men are getting tired; had he continued south, the path was mostly open
- returns to the battlefield of Borodino; had been several months since they had fought; 10s of 1000s of French soldier bodies were still there

- December 3 (discussing weather turning terrible on November 7) “This army so fine on the 6^th was very different on the 14^th : lost a lot of calvalry, artillery, men
- supply depot in Smolensk; not enough food for everyone
- people literally froze to death while they were walking; a lot froze to death at night – didn't have appropriate clothing b/c it was - never meant to be a winter campaign

- finally reach the Berezina River: one of the earliest & coldest winters but not cold enough to freeze the Berezina river so had to build bridges (Russians had destroyed existing bridges)
- engineers build 2 bridges: one to move men, one to move horses, supplies, artillery, etc.
- Russians are attacking from both sides, but the crossing is fairly orderly at first
- soldiers waiting to cross, friendly-Russians who need to leave, women & other hanger-ons & there's a great panic & 22,000 die in 2 days (from 50,000); burn bridges as they cross
- Napoleon decides he's more needed in Paris, so he doesn't stay with the army anymore
- crossed back over the Nieman River with only 10,000 survivors
- “By the time the remains of Napoleon's army reached home, more than 1000 pieces of artillery, 200,000 horses & 570,000 men had been left behind in the glaciated terrain of northwest Russia”

Formal Qualities of Map
- includes Minard's name & credentials, as well as 5 sources for his information
- shows a possible connection between temperature and death of the army; warmest temp recorded is 32°F
- shows 6 variables: army's size, its location (lat & long), its movement/direction, temperature (linked only to dark return line) and dates
- published in November 1869 with a map showing Hannibal's diminishing army in the Alps
- an “anti-war” map
- focused on the human cost of life in war
- Napoleon's name does not appear; thus giving full attention to “memorializing the dead soldiers than celebrating the surviving celebrity”
- enhancement of river lines
- aggregation and simplification of Grand Armee
- selection of cities represented
- shows cold temperatures relation w/ diminishing size but actually many more were lost in the summer

Misc. Facts
- shelves & shelves of books related to this single event in time – amazing that Minard's map can tell the story as well as it does
ate a lot of horse meat on the way home
- Borodino: one of the best preserved battlefields in the world
- climates in Russia vary considerably but “every section has cold winters that are exceptionally severe in the northern forests and tundra”
- Russia, being deep within land mass, has minimized maritime effects, “being replaced by continentality, which ensures a climate of extremes”; France's climate is mostly “influenced by air that originates over the Atlantic Ocean and penetrates inland to lessen temperature extremes, both winter & summer. These milder conditions exist primarily because the ocean heats & cools more slowly than the terrain of Asia. That is, unlike land, water warms slowly while absorbing and storing large amonths of energy, only to gradually release it to overlying air year-round”
- Russian army leadership was weak & Alexander had never led troops into battle before
- the toll of both French & Russian casualties is estimated between 700,000-1,000,000
- Russian roads weren't built to accommodate 600,000 men marching across them w/ wagons, ammunition, cannonballs, etc.; impassable b/c of sheer number of men (communication slows as it becomes difficult to move through ranks)...not mud or anything
Russia doing scorched-earth policy
- “the impact of rain, snow and ice on trafficability and mobility can be critical”; functionality of weaponry & machinery can be impacted, as well as moving ballistics & even having reduced visibility
- Napoleon hopes the battle of Borodino will be the decisive victory that would lead to peace
- extreme heat & mud (worst mud in spring & autumn) from summer rains probably presented some problems, but the cold would prove to be more lethal than the enemy
- Charles Minard: 1781-1870; 88 when map was published; a renowned engineer; did large public works projects and designed canals, bridges, roads & docks; retired at age 70 & spent the next 18 years working on figurative maps, mostly military; was confined in Antwerp in 1813 during bombardment; images which stuck with him
- Napoleon: 1769-1821

Trail of Tears
- Trail of Tears was the government-sanctioned forced relocation of Cherokees from their homelands in the deep south to Oklahoma in 1838
- no exact figures on the death toll, but roughly between 2,000-4,000 (out of roughly 12,000-16,000 Cherokee who initially resisted location); estimates of 1 in 4 dying
- thousand-mile forced march began in winter of 1838 for women, men & children
- many died from disease (given blankets with small pox), cold and starvation in internment camps before the march began (kept in camps while their farms were auctioned to white settlers)
- farmers charged Cherokees high tolls for crossing, including ferries, their land, etc.
- started off as a drought, then rained a lot then was very cold (similar to Napoleon's march...not sure about the drought in Russia, but there was a lot of rain before it turned cold); made navigating rivers dangerous for travel
- “Ross's party reached Fort Smith in Indian Territory by March 1839, the last to arrive. Some groups had spent three months on the road. Others marched as long as six months through six states and territories.” (John Ross was a Cherokee leader)

Formal Qualities of Trail of Tears map
- simplification/enhancement of state borders
- enhancement of rivers
- abbreviation (of river names)
- displacement of city names (connecting line - feel like there was a term for this; look again)
- probable aggregation/smoothing of area features of Cherokee Nation (east)
- time-series map

Trail of Tears map contrast to Napoleon map
- no return journey (from one group of 875 Cherokees, only 602 reached the territory alive)
- doesn't show loss of life, dates, temperatures (which affected death rate here, as well); no accurate record of precipitation or temperatures during the relocation time periods; information comes from scattered first-hand accounts of the hardships
- not an emotional representation; legend says "Routes of Emigration"; neutral/misleading term - who commissioned this map? - Unable to discover origin/background during brief research
- doesn't tell you the assumptions made in creating the map
- shows movement direction (directly by using arrows)
- Napoleon map reads more quickly, as it moves from left to right & back again (at least it starts out like reading); Trail of Tears moves right to left to create a slightly awkward/uncomfortable "read" of the map (which also necessitates use of directional arrows)

Hummingbird Migration Map
- hummingbirds: at least 341 species; roughly 21 that breed in the U.S. & have to migrate due to food sources
- males are highly territorial: head N in the spring at least a week before females do to establish territory & will also leave 2 weeks before females & babies to head S in the fall
- migration has to take place well before cold weather, not b/c they can't tolerate cold but b/c their food supply can't
- “return migrants are well-timed to match blooming of hummingbird-pollinated food plants”
- early return for males = better territory/possible death
- routes are sustained only if they're effective & enough of the population remains; gradually change routes...not immediate
- “climate & changing weather patterns are the major influences that shape migratory routes & destinations”; misjudging conditions can lead to death or ending up in odd places, due to drifting & being unable to stay on course

Formal Qualities of Hummingbird Map (from memory - will need to check & revise)
- selection and enhancement of rivers
- smoothing and simplification of land
- area conversion (of hummingbird pop)
- time-series map
- tells assumptions: unless otherwise indicated, birds travel out from & back to their breeding grounds on the same route

Hummingbird Map contrast to Napoleon map
- shows direction & round trip return
- shows regionality rather than population size (how would births affect this map?)
- indicates seasonal cause for movement
- explanation for having a different route home?

Misc. Facts
- 1/2 the world's bird species migrate
- week of migration is usually pre-ordained but exact date is determined by weather
- migration is instinctive; black cap example: birds bred in W fly SW; birds bred in E fly SE; hybrid birds fly S & die over Alps; "survival lies in keeping to the migratory divide"
- birds can be tricked into speeding up their breeding, molting, migratory restlessness & putting on weight (normal yearly cycle) by light exposure; the record is held by a starling who was tricked into molting 8 times in one year

Phyllis Pearsall and the London A to Z Street Atlas. Connections with the TomTom Navigation Device and Technical Drawings

2009-10-09T20:35:00.013-05:00

Introduction
Unable to find the address of a party she was going to, in a 1919 Ordnance Survey Map, Phyllis Pearsall (1901 – 1996) decided to devise a more efficient way of helping herself and others to navigate the labyrinthine London streets. Working from her bedsit or studio on Horseferry Road near Victoria Station, before satellite imaging or extensive aerial photography, she set off early each morning to walk and catalogue the streets of the city. As London was so big, rather than produce a cumbersome map, which would be very hard to read as each street, bridge or building would be so small in scale, Pearsall decided to divide it into different sections, each of which would be coded in an index. She walked a total of 3,000 miles while mapping London’s 23,000 streets. Completed in 1936 she met almost universal apathy from the book buying establishment and so formed the Geographer's A-Z Map Company and arranged to have 10,000 copies printed - completing all the proof-reading and design work herself.
Yet Pearsall never saw herself as a designer, but as an artist and travel writer who happened to have invented a successful design concept by chance. She rarely thought of the Atlas as anything other than a means to allow her to pursue a life of painting and writing.

Influences and Early Twentieth Century England
Early twentieth century saw the gradual establishment of a modern constitutional monarchy and was a time of great economic and industrial growth. “Faster” and “sooner” were the buzz words of the time. Everything was on the fast road to a new century until the Great War. For cartographers, there was opportunity in this chaos. Everybody wanted maps to stick little pins and flags to mark the battle lines, defeats, and victories while refugees and travelers wanted routes and escapes.

The Map
The London A-Z is a geographical, urban, street map with severe scale reduction. The maps show only planimetric distance and its symbols are exaggerated in size to ensure visibility. There are generalizations in the map that reflect judgments about the relative importance of mapable features and details. So in a street map, information that relate to streets and directions are enhanced and others displaced.
A map often has a point of view – mostly the cartographer’s.
Pearsall’s A to Z street atlas and gazetteer reflected her deep and rigorous process instilled through her life experiences, of collecting information and constructing it effectively with the sole intent of making London city legible for everyday life. The map works in reality. It abandoned any semblance of coherent urban structure in favor of presenting a legible coded surface. The streets are manipulated by smoothening and simplification. A calculated selection of information like post offices, hospitals, police and spaces pertaining to street navigation. Similar to the contents of a book, the opening page shows how to access categorized information quickly. It has important information to guide the navigation of the atlas including Contents, Reference, Publisher information and a Disclaimer. There is a definite focus point (originating point) of the atlas. The city is divided into rectangular zones which are numbered and correspond to the page number for further details. It is handy unlike the foldout map, but lacks the celebratory depiction of erstwhile monarchies with all their power and glory. It seems classless, devoid of hierarchies and hardly any depiction of the physical terrain. It could well be the map to any other city.

Relating the London A-Z to the TomTom – Navigation System
About TomTom
GPS originated as a military technology as a system of satellites launched by the U.S. Department of Defense in the early 1970s, that offered precise ground locations for both defensive and offensive purposes. GPS has now become a ubiquitous consumer technology available in cars, watches, and PDAs. The TomTom, just like the A-Z, reads the map through grids and keys. The start menu has information about language, systems, and voice choices. The main difference being the real time in which the TomTom functions as opposed to the A-Z which would have to be updated as the city grows. You can also map the physical navigation of the A-Z to the digital of the TomTom through the very same language of icons and legends, zooming in digitally as against physically in the former. A big difference would be the customizability of the map although a lot of your freedom, anonymity, simplicity is lost through this technology, perhaps nudging a militarization of the people. It also points out to our obsession of control and of the desire to know our location at all times. Is this leading to a different kind of imperialism or colonialism?

Relating London A-Z Map to Technical Drawings
About Technical Drawings
Drawing to communicate technical ideas may predate the written language. The oldest drawing instruments known, a drawing board inscripted with a temple plan, date from the 3rd millennium BC from the city of Lagash in Babylon. The ancient Greeks influenced drawing through their work in geometry, and tools such as the compass and triangles used in engineering were then developed
It is a coded language that helps engineers and users communicate complex product details for manufacturing. Dimensions, tolerances, thickness, materials, cross sections are some of the terms used. Each page has a table with keys and legends identifying the parts and the materials. The grid is used in both the A-Z and the Technical drawings to identify the location of the detail on the page. Technical drawings have a universal language which allows for a standard and global code for production.

Afterthoughts
Just like the A-Z atlas, the TomTom and the Technical drawing is a representation of a physical reality. Like any other representation, there is a loss in the translation of the sensation of form, experience, and ergonomics. A product is appreciated in its context and its interaction with the user. It is an intangible representation of a material out of its context. There is a discrepancy in its visualization but the drawing translates the image into reality through its data.
Map is a tool for data visualization but is as much ingrained and intermingled with reality.

Bibliography
A-Z London Street Atlas (Street Maps & Atlases). Null: Geographers' A-Z Map Co Ltd, 2002.
Hartley, Sarah. Mrs.P's Journey. New York: Pocket Books, 2002.
Kaplan, Caren. "GPS & Militarization." Project Muse.

Bucky with Maharishi

2009-09-13T00:59:00.000-05:00

Buckminster Fuller

2009-09-12T23:24:00.011-05:00

Buckminster Fuller (B. July 12, 1895 – D. July 1, 1983)

"From now on there are going to be new individuals who do not just assume that a client knows what he wants, or a society know what it wants to do. These individuals are going to examine environmental controls, human needs, world resources and industry's capabilities before they design anything."

Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was a man of BIG ideas and one of the first to identify the environment and global social harmony as concerns of design. The first 25 years of his professional career were marked by numerous commercial failures. But as Bucky pointedly pointed out "you succeed only when you stop failing," which in finally did in the early 1950s with his wildly successful geodesic dome design.

The geodesic dome is a spherical or semi-spherical structure made out of a lattice work of connected triangles. The structure distributes the weight evenly and extremely strong. In his 1954 patent Bucky wrote "a good index to the performance of any building frame is the structural weight required to shelter a square foot of floor from the weather. In a conventional wall and roof design the figure is often 2500 kg per square meter. I have discovered how to do the job at around 4 kg per square meter.."

One of Bucky's maxims was an inversion of the Bauhaus epigram "less is more" into "more for less." The Geodesic dome is the prime example of this idea because of its minimum structure for maximum volume.

Originally Bucky came up with the design as paper and cardboard models that illustrated as system of thought he developed.

He visualized all useful experiences and un-usefully experience as being divided. There was a clear sphere into which all of the mundane and useless thoughts were stored. Once this was filled up all of the useful thoughts had to exist on the surface of the sphere. He was interested in exploring the "insideness and the outsideness" of the useful and un-useful thoughts. Bucky thought that it took three experiences to fix their relationship. But to establish a sphere he needed to connect these triangles in 3D space. Thus the geodesic dome was born.

Bucky would go onto design many projects of massive scale but his geodesic dome was his only design to find widespread acceptance in the commercial world.

IDEAS and PROJECTS of INTEREST:

Design Science - One of the many terms Fuller invented, Design Science sought to bring together technology, science and art in such a way as to work toward "a world that works for 100% of humanity in the shortest amount of time without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone."

Dymaxion Car - A three wheeled car, steered by its rear wheel. The car could carry 11 passengers and got good gas mileage (30MPG). The car was reported to handle poorly at high speeds and was involved in a fatal accident. The car never made it into production.

Dymaxion House - An energy efficient and inexpensive home designed to be mass produced.

Dymaxion Map - is a projection of the world map onto the surface of polyhedron. This map has less distortion of relative size of areas. Also the map has no rightway up. it's isolemtric!

Tensegrity - utilizes tension as opposed to compression. Invention of lightweight tensegrity construction allowed for structures of limitless size.

Ephemeralization - doing more for less can lead to an implosion of functions, one into another, until only a gossamer thin but steely strong multifunctional envelope takes the place of the separate cultures of architecture, building and aesthetic (Manhattan dome).

Tetrahedronal City (Triton City)- a floating city designed for San Francisco bay. Earthquake proof. 2,500 meters tall, contained 5,000 apartments. Broke the components of a city into different floating units.

Geoscope - large scale map of the world positioned with the same axis as viewer and which visualized and inventoried all available planetary resources and their historical movements.

Natalie Jeremijenko

2009-09-11T21:06:00.001-05:00

Background/Bio:

Natalie Jeremijenko (born 1966, Australia) is an Associate Professor at NYU in the Visual Art Dept., and has affiliated faculty appointments in Computer Science and Environmental Studies.
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist and engineer whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering.
Jeremijenko is the director of the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic at NYU, assistant professor in Art, and affiliated with the Computer Science Dept

OneTrees Project

Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories

Janet Abrams & Peter Hall

p. 254-259 “Bark to Bytes” by Alice Twemlow

2003 (plants were cultivated in 1999)planted 20 pairs of Paradox clones throughout the Bay area to return data about the “social and environmental conditions to which they are exposed”
together with Terraswarm, she created a map of of the site locations, especially designed to be used one-handed by bicyclists (boomerang shape)
trees were chosen b/c they don't bear fruit or nuts (a tripping hazard) or produce allergens
she prioritizes layperson knowledge over “expert” knowledge, as “the questions that are of interest to the experts may not necessarily overlap with the public imagination.”
this map: “Twenty aerial photographs are arranged in vertical strips showing the locations where the OneTrees pairs are planted, four per panel, along the top of the map. The lower half of the sheet is divided proportionally to represent the five OneTrees planting zones. Each area is depicted as a vegetation and heat 3D contour map, using data derived from a Landsat Thematic Mapper. Instead of using what Jeremijenko refers to as the 'rainbow saturated colors' to which satellite imaging defaults, she and Terraswarm chose more realistic shades of green for the vegetation and mapped the heat isotherms using a gray scale in which cooler temperatures are represented by dark lines, hotter ones by white. As one would expect, the biggest concentrations of cool contours correspond with the most densely vegetated zones, or proximity to the Bay.”
map includes other knowledge, including the median income of each area and endangered birds' habitats
“Jeremijenko's mission is to redistribute intelligence: to redirect emphasis away from 'authorized' information, towards under-utilized sources that are at once more complex and more alive, with the aim of putting the people, the poetry and the mess back into mapping.”

From the OneTrees website

A-life trees: self replicating growth algorithms -- to grow a tree on your computer desktop. Unlike other popularized forms of a-life the rate of growth is controlled by realtime CO2 levels. The sensor and software enable monitoring of the CO2 -- the information that measures the global concern for climate change [me: to what end? What use is this information put to?]
Stump  : A printer queue virus that counts the number of pages consumed by the printer. When the equivalent of a tree in pulp has been consumed the program automatically prints out a slice of tree. Accumulating these pieces of paper ‘grows’ a stump of the forest that you and your printer have consumed, and a tangible representation of tree debt

Feral Robotic Dogs (from site: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots/)

Mission one: Exploiting the markets of scale of the toy industry, specifically in the realm of entertainment robotics; the hardware distribution power of national and multinational corporations (and the cultural imperialism); to provide a readymade, inexpensive and highly distributed hardware platform. The robotic dogs currently on the international market provide the most inexpensive source of compatible motors, actuation, and sensing mechanisms available [$15-$200 for the dog adaptation].

Mission Two: To use this distributed hardware platform to build a networked (knowledge) community interested in the transformation of robotic dogs from their intended entertainment use to activists instruments for exploring (and contesting) local material conditions. The web-based community openly shares low cost adaptation strategies and techniques for updating the rationale (i.e. hacking) of these and similar toys. This is a community that is built on a particular post-purchase activity with the toy rather than the act of consumption itself in contrast to a community of SONY AIBO owners, and it is designed to exploit the popular culture references of these toys to involve youth in the interpretation of environmental conditions and a critique of the corporate imagination.

Mission Three:

To create a local mediagenic event: the feral robotic dog pack release. The feral dogs have a simple communication system added in their adaptation, that allows the coordinate behavior of a pack. The dogs will cover different portions of a terrain (maintaining a radius) for effective space filling, but will converge if one dog gets a particularly strong signal. This functionality is intended to provide information that is displayed in a form that is legible to diverse participants i.e. the movement of the dogs. The dogs paths provide immediate imagery to sustain discussion and interpretation of an otherwise imperceptible environmental condition of interest (e.g. radioactivity; air quality issues and the re-opening of English powerstation; class-based environmental discrimination). Because the dog’s space-filling logic emulates a familiar behavior, i.e. they appear to be “sniffing something out”, participants can watch and try to make sense of this data without the technical or scientific training required to be comfortable interpreting a EPA document on the same material. Furthermore, I argue that by using the movement of the dogs as the display this renders the information at an appropriate level of accuracy (the data looks fuzzy). An emblematic feature of the adapted dogs is placement of the webcams in the non-barking end of the dogs, whereas traditional robotics and AIBO place the cameras in the ‘eyes’ of the agent. The rear end placement in the Ferals collects footage of the spectators and their actual interpretation of the dog’s behavior, privileging this as information rather than just the data collected and stored onboard for later interpretation. The feral dog pack event is designed as an opportunity to enable public discourse and open-ended interpretation of the evidence at hand, and an opportunity to coordinate diverse interpretations (for instance at the English Power Station release attendees invited include activists who have opposed the reopening, residents, politicians, and power company representatives). The display of the empirical evidence on the local pollutant is intended to enable and change typical lay-expert communication patterns, by raising the standards of evidence, or at least changing who produces this evidence.

General

projects seem almost abandoned; not updated as seemingly intended
many links don't work on the sites
OneTrees Values: seems to have a long-view (not just fashionable); however the site hasn't been updated since 2004 ; more Stakeholder inclusive than client exclusive (interested in the effects on the trees & thereby the effects on the nearby people)
Feral Robotic Dogs Values: Subversive (not obedient) as the dogs are hacked from their original purpose of just entertainment; More long-view than fashionable, but with the same questions as the OneTrees Project...where are the updates?
different disciplines represented, including engineering & biology with an obvious interest in the environment and recording our impact or rediscovering a past impact with present implications

2009-09-11T16:15:00.025-05:00

DES 380 Core In Design I
Meghna Pathak

LASZLO MOHOLY NAGY

" His genius ventured into all realms of science and art to unriddle the phenomena of space and light. In painting, sculpture and architecture, in theater and industrial dsign, in photography and film, advertising and typography, he incessantly strove to interpret space in its relation to time, that is, motion in space." - Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy - experiment in totality, 1950

EARLY WORK:

Born on July 20, 1895, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy grew up in in the city of Bachsbarsad, Hungary and studied law in Hungary's capital of Budapest. A born poet, his experiences in the Russian battlefields of World War I, revealed to him the inadequacies of poetic expression. He began to explore and analyze the reality around him in a series of representational sketches. Moholy-Nagy had discovered his life’s calling (1914).

However, an extreme disgust with the prevalent Communist system of the time caused him to reject not only the social order, but also its symbolic connotations in art. He plunged into an exploration of the most fundamental visual forms – colors, shapes – and the interrelationships tying them together.

These explorations evolved naturally form investigations into the nature of form to color, transparency – from painting to collages; from severe simplification of form in two dimensional space to the creation of visual depth through color transparencies. He had found his ouvre. His life’s work would be dedicated to the exploration of light, space, depth and motion, and he would explore any medium of expression to unravel these mysteries.

“Constructivism is neither proletarian nor capitalistic. Constructivism is primordial, without class or ancestor. It expresses the pure form of nature – the direct color, the spatial rhythm, the equilibrium of form.

The new world of the masses needs constructivism because it needs fundamentals that are without deceit. Only the basic natural element, accessible to all senses, is revolutionary.

In Constructivism, form and substance are one. Not substance and tendency, which are always being identified. Substance is essential, but tendency is intentional. Pure substance (Constructivism) is not confined to picture frame and pedestal. It expands into industry and architecture, into objects and relationships. Constructivism is the socialism of vision.” – Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Excepts from an article in MA, May 1922.

He began dabbling in photography around the same time (1922) – exploring the same elements of form, light, and color gradation in addition to shadows and textures. Influence and inspired by the bold humor of the ‘Dadaists’ of the time, he turned to political collage and photomontage for a time. However, he lacked the peculiar obsession of the revolutionary artist and his dabbles remained such.

He discovered the photogram, and that veered his work back into his preoccupation with space and light. It became his goal to eliminate color/ sublimate it to a point where the visual impact rested on the most essential medium – direct light.

This preoccupation with the existence of objective visual values, independent of the artist’s inspiration led him to orchestrate a series of paintings – dictated to the foreman of a sign factor over phone, using a color chart and an order blank of graph paper to specify the location of form elements and their exact hue.

THE BAUHAUS EXPERIENCE:

Invited to teach at the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany by Walter Gropius in 1923 and inspired by the pedagogical goals of the institute he joined the staff as master of the advanced foundation course and the Metal workshop. His was the appointment of youth and the infusion of the constructivist ideals in contrast to the convictions of german expressionism that the other well appreciated teachers of the institute were devoted to (Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, Schlemmer).

“we might as well call the scope of his contribution Leonardian, so versatile and colorful it has been. He was successful at once as a thinker and as an inventor, as a writer and as a teacher…..constantly developing new ideas, he managed to keep himself in a state of unbiased curiosity form which a fresh point of view could originate. With a shrewd sense of observation he investigated everything that came his way” – Walter Gropius, Obituary Note in 4^th edition of The New Vision

The Bauhaus published 14 volumes of the ‘Bauhaus Books’ in the composition and typography of which, Moholy-Nagy was intricately involved. While significant for their pictorial, theoretical and typographical form, the Bauhaus books were, and are to date the only – coordinated effort to relate the teaching of all visual disciplines to one integrating principle.

Another significant development that arose from his position as the head of the metal workshop was the development of a line of lighting fixtures which, still today, constitute the basic design of most modern lamps. Bauhaus, where the process of development was valued higher than the finished product – was slowly destroyed by the growth of technological cells within it. This process of pedagogical divergence was climaxed by Walter Gropius’s resignation of his position. Moholy-Nagy followed suit.

While Moholy-Nagy went on explore other mediums of design as tools to continue his personal exploration of space, time, light, shadows and form, his years at Bauhaus had infused in him a passion for instruction. He went on to escape from the third reich in Germany, to Holland, Britain and finally emigrated to the United States (1937) at the behest of the Association of Arts and Industries, Chicago (and Walter Gropius) to start again a new institute of instruction, following the principles of the Bauhaus, called ‘The New Bauhaus’. The school closed down a year after opening, as the financial backers withdrew support (influenced mostly by the stock market crash of 1938).

With supreme confidence in the scope of the pedagogy that the school had prescribed to, Moholy-Nagy sought to restart the school – this time as the Institute of Design. While the curriculum differed in some degree from the original, it was in its totality the same. Moholy-Nagy worked hard over the succeeding years to keep the school afloat, meeting investors, prospective students and advertising the merits of the program constantly – eventually to the detriment of his own health.

INFLUENCE AND LEARNING:

The most enduring aspect of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s legacy is his pedagogy as prescribed in the ideals of the Institute of Design’s curriculum. While essentially similar to the curriculum at Bauhaus – in its emphasis on exploration of avenues and media, process over finished product, he added to its artistic component more technological arts such as photography, film, kinetic and light sculpture, music and poetry. To Walter Gropius’s two elements of art and technology – he added science. This thus served to provide his students a more diverse and exhaustive exploration.

While students at Bauhaus explored different media in the foundation year, and then went on to further explore media of interest in the later years, this ‘open’ system of learning ensured them the capacity to think beyond their areas of ‘experience’, offering solutions that were relevant and referential to other avenues of development. This focus on ‘process’ and ‘exploration’ over a finished product ensures discoveries and developments beyond the original conservative scope of a design solution.

It is very easy to see parallels between the Bauhausian method of thinking and systems thinking, where the intention is not restricted to set parameters/values of a perceived solution, but the ability to perceive and anticipate further avenues affected from the solution, and arising from the solution.

“To be a designer means not only to sensitively manipulate techniques and analyse production processes, but also to accept the concomitant social obligations…. Thus quality of design is dependent not alone on function, science and technological process but also on social consciousness.” – Moholy-Nagy as quoted in Moholy-Nagy’s design pedagogy in Chicago, by Alain Findelli

In Moholy-Nagy’s incessant investigation of the relationships of ‘space making’ elements, in his constant exploration of different media to achieve his purposes, one sees the drive to achieve not a simple solution, but different alternative solutions to the same communication. A pedagogue who emphasized the importance process to his students, by holding up his life’s work as example.

Bibliography:

Moholy-Nagy, Experiment in totality by sibyl moholy-nagy, Harper and Brothers, 1950

Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Biographical Writings by Louis Kaplan, Duke University press, 1995

Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Color in Transparency, Steidl Bauhaus-Archiv, 2006

Technical Detours by Oliver A.I. Botar, Kromar Printing Ltd, 2006

MURIEL COOPER

2009-09-11T13:02:00.006-05:00

(notes from a presentation by Courtney Inge)

EXPERIENCE

(1925-1994)

In 1952 Cooper graduated from Massechusets College of Art and Design with a degree in Graphic Design, as well as art education.

Although a print designer by trade, she is best known for her work with computers, most notably at the MIT Visual Language Workshop, which she co-founded in 1972. Previous to the VLW's founding, Muriel worked as MIT press's first art director. Her work there includes the press's logo(first image), and the books Learning from Las Vegas as well as File Under Architecture(second image).

While at the VLW Muriel Cooper conducted visual inquires into the use of computer and the viewer's interaction with it. Cooper believed in the power of the computer as a medium with immediate feedback which allowed the viewer to get the most out of their interaction with the information. Furthermore, she felt typography was the most perfect way to explore the computer's abilities, due to the fact that all its users would be about to recognize the forms, and feel comfortable, while navigating through this new world.

PROCESS

-Graphic design a filter:

Designer is given information, and must decide what the appropriate articulation of this idea is. Every material has inherent limitations, it is the job of the designer to use these limitations to their audience's benefit.

-The Computer as a tool:

Designers must see the computer as something that can benefit their design, as long as they keep in mind that it is an entity that takes in information and spits it out. Thus, the input, output, and the manipulations that occur within the computer, must all be accounted for.

-If the main interaction point of information is on the computer, the designer must keep in mind the world outside the computer. Digital forms should seek to reference tangible objects, but be self aware of their existence on the screen.

Lastly, Muriel Cooper also saw the democratization, brought about by desktop publishing as a benefit. The result of which would be a new interdisciplinary approach to communication. Thus, designers would be freed up to become consultants and design publications would inform readers about computer issues, and computer publications would keep its readers abreast with design news. The revolutionary aspect of Muriel Cooper’s views lay in the time period of most of these revolations: the 1980’s. Well ahead of the proliferation of Adobe or even widely held personal computers.

"ALL TECNOLOGIES ARE SURROGATES FOR PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE; FOR EXAMPLE, TYPOGRAPHY IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR AUDIBLE SPEECH. " -Cooper

IMPACT

Although she never wrote a piece of functioning computer code in her life- Muriel Cooper helped shape the aesthetic vernacular we are used to today. Because the Mac was the perfered creative system, even of that type, her work dealt with designing a visually comfortable space for a designer to access all of their tools, which responded to their needs and tastes.

Those who follow:

DAVID REINFURT

carries on work at MIT Visible Language Lab. Gives lectures and writes publications on Muriel’s life and work. Is also a working designer in Manhattan.

DAVID SMALL

former student, working designer, wrote programs which sensed the angle of the viewer which allowed the type and image to respond accordingly.

ELLEN LUPTON

admirer, who has interviewed Muriel Cooper twice, and both had a profound interest in the viewer as the creator.

Reinfurt's lecture at the Walker Art Center, where he delves into the concept of feedback (with metaphor on sailing which I mentioned).

LINKS

WIRED on MC

ART AND CULTURE on MC

NYT on MC

Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT

DAVID REINFURT on MC

Another lecture by David Reinfurt, this time at MIT.

Mapping a designer: Henry Dreyfuss

2009-09-10T22:32:00.013-05:00

Amrita Adhikary
DES380 Core in Design
Mapping a designer: Henry Dreyfuss

Henry Dreyfuss was born to immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York in 1904. He studied at the Ethical Culture School in New York before becoming apprenticed to the industrial designer and legendary Broadway stage designer Norman Bel Geddes in 1923. While working in Geddes’ office, Dreyfuss mainly concentrated on theatrical work and designed costumes, sets, and lighting for the Strand Theater, New York, and for the R.K.O (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) chain of theaters. In retrospect, he viewed his experience in theater as training for his future chosen profession in industrial design. He compared his job in theater, of creating a set that expressed the mood and the action of the show, to industrial design, as both involved carrying his ideas through by dealing with people diplomatically. In design, the producer and director were like the president of a client firm, while the carpenters, electricians, and musicians could have been the firm’s engineers. He also had to meet a definite schedule, and the final determining factor of success was audience approval (applause after the show!) or the customer’s reaction at the sales counter.
“Form follows function” had been the Industrial designers golden rule and Henry Dreyfuss believed in it. Ergonomics and safety took precedence over styling and as a result, many of his products such as the Round thermostat, are the sort that we take for granted.
He opened his own design office, Henry Dreyfuss Associates in 1929, for theatrical and industrial design activities. The theater was to pay the bills while he concentrated on developing his industrial design work. This practice holds true even today where a lot of fledgling design firms fall back on simple jobs to sustain themselves while pursuing their calling.

Work Methodology
Henry Dreyfuss had a rigorous working methodology. He understood that the designer played a dual role. He was a member of the client’s family as well as an outsider intervening but retaining his authority and individuality. The industrial designer’s most valuable contributions to his client’s products was his ability to visualize. He could sit at a table listening to ideas thrown off by engineers, production executives etc. and incorporate them into a sketch that crystallized their ideas, good or bad. The designer’s outside point of view or perspective was the key contribution. Dreyfuss was a Generalist in the most positive sense of the word.
Following the Depression years, all manufactured products came out looking similar. Companies were under-cutting each other until manufacturers came to the realization that the answer to the problem was to “make their product work better, more convenient to the consumer and better looking”. Industrial designers were called in to do just that against the general view of their role as decorators of the finished product. The simplicity of the Round thermostat was a brilliant solution to a problem. Most thermostats until then were rectangular, posing an irritating challenge of aligning it in an installation. Correcting crooked installations were time consuming and the Round eliminated that inconvenient alignment component altogether.
It was interesting to note that he viewed the service of transporting people and the marketing of a product with the same eye. The difference, he felt, was just an increase in scale.
Dreyfuss’ methodology was strongly process driven, iterative, and subversive, in a search to tackle the real problem. He categorized them as Analysis, Sketching, Modeling, Presentation & Critique. His basic characteristic of work was “simplicity”, resisting the temptation of superficially decorating objects. He focused on making meaningful aesthetic choices and made complicated things seem simple.
He was very realistic about the system within which he worked. “It was pointless to produce a product so expensive that no one can afford or so under-priced that it did not permit a reasonable profit to the manufacturers.”
The diagram above shows his desire to stay in control of the design process.
He would routinely decline work where he did not have ultimate control of the design process. If he could not consult with engineers, he was not interested in the project. This was the reason, he rejected the job offer from Macy & Co. upon his return from Europe in 1928, because he was to merely provide suggestions to manufacturers without having a say in new designs. What I found intriguing was his ability to involve all kinds of professionals in the design process. He would often pull in people who had no experience in an area that he was designing for, to bring in fresh ideas and new inspirations. In his eye’s the designer was a catalytic agent and should be able to “switch gears quickly”.
Henry Dreyfuss: “We bear in mind that the object being worked on is going to be ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated or in some other way used by people. When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the Industrial Designer has failed. On the other hand, if people are made safer, more efficient, more comfortable – or just plain happier – by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.”
Dreyfuss was influenced by the Art Deco movement, a style that was seen as elegant, glamorous, functional and modern. He belonged to the Streamline design era although he was not a stylist like his contemporary Raymond Loewy, who he regarded with some prejudice, on his use of streamlining. Simplicity was his strength. Dreyfuss’ locomotive design, Mercury, for 20th Century Limited was a classic example of Streamlining as the form that follows the rules of aerodynamics.

Five Point Formula
His mantra was – safety and convenience of use, ease of maintenance, cost , appeal, and appearance.
This prioritization made his design exceptional as these were five points centered on human and not abstract values.

Henry Dreyfuss introduced Human Engineering in the form of Joe and Josephine, his common denominators for all dimensions. His interest in anthropometry could be traced back to his admiration for Leonardo da Vinci and his Vitruvian man. Leonardo da Vinci made the drawing in 1487 and it depicts the correlations of ideal human proportions using geometry described by Vitruvius. He made it as a study of proportions of the human body. Everything designed today is used by people and they come in many sizes and have varying physical attributes. Joe and Josephine were a part of his design staff representing the numerous consumers for whom they were designing. The designer’s job was to make Joe and Josephine compatible with their environment and this new process was called Human Engineering. The design group also created a miniature encyclopedia of human factor data for industrial designers.

Henry Dreyfuss’s design process is still the current practice although the dynamics of the industry has changed. In the global market where manufacturing is usually outsourced, it is critical for the designer to have a good control of the design through the development process. Iterations between the client and the manufacturers allows for the accurate translation of the intended design.

Conclusion

To Henry Dreyfuss, Leonardo da Vinci was the first Industrial designer. He had the imagination to put his drawings of his flying machine on paper in 1517. They became a reality 500 years later. Leonardo was as modern and imaginative as someone in today’s times. By his example, to look ahead, we need to look back and discover how many of the ancient dreams have realized, to hope how successful and accurate the innovators of today would be 500 years hence.
Henry Dreyfuss’s ethnography and anthropometric data as a research tool laid the basis for designing for people. Now, new technology has taken this tool many steps forward and uses 3D scanning to compute exact body proportions ( Sizing China: 3 –D scanning and recording of head shapes in Asia for helmets, eyewear etc. for the Asian market). This new digital database is going to be the first of its kind to enable designers to enter markets that were beyond their reach because of insufficient data. China and India comprises one third of the world consumer base. With globalization and the opening of foreign economies, following the fall of communism, the whole world has come closer and products have a wider reach. The new global culture creates a global trend and designers and manufacturers need to pay heed to the differences in physical attributes, when designing for a trans cultural audience.

Yet, data without imagination is but data, and industrial designers play a critical role in its translation.

Bibliography
Dreyfuss, Henry. Designing for People. New York: Allworth, 2003.
Fiell, Charlotte, and Peter Fiell. Design of the 20th Century. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2001.
Flinchum, Russell. Henry Dreyfuss, industrial designer the man in the brown suit. New York: Cooper- Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and Rizzoli, 1997.
Hall, Peter. "Sizing China." Metropolis Magazine Mar. 2008.
Plowman, Tim. "Ethnography and Critical Design Practice.

John Heartfield. Taking one for the working man since 1917.

2009-09-10T15:26:00.006-05:00

Political Background

Born in 1891 to mother who was a political activist and father who was socialist writer.

Joined communist party of Germany (KPD) in 1918 along with George Grosz and brother, Wieland Herzfelde, after Anglicizing their names in response to the poor reception of English presence in Germany (ST)

Started Publishing company Malik Verlag in 1917 where much of work appears on book covers and magazines.

Beginnings of Photo Montage

Saw dadaism as only substantial movement in Germany in the last hundred years, but “swayed in midair, and could not assume responsibilities of both classes at once” (GHH)

Heartfield and Grosz began by piecing together postcards to form anti-war messages sent to the front (resembled carte vistas (travel album) of the time which is how they passed censorship). (DK)

Important to remember that “these primative p-montages did not mythically spring from artistic inspiration and settle down into an ascribable authorship for the edification of the future; they arose tactically in a context of dissent.” (DK)

Critique of Bourgeois Art

Two approaches to art expressed as difference b/w formalism and tendency art

-tendency art is committed, political… art constantly in service of class struggle.

-formalist seeks to avoid tendency… illusory goal is to remain aloof, free from demands of everyday life, looking to the eternal and mysterious. (PG)

“Tendency is the rule, not the exception” (GHH)

“what could a worker do with art?” (GHH)

“art belongs in museums to be gaped at by the petit bourgeoisie while on vacation. In the palaces of the bloodsuckers to hide their wall safes!” (GHH

Rationale behind Photo Montage/ Duty of Tendency Artist

Traditional Graphics were too slow to keep pace with the rapidity of events and the readiness of the bourgeois press. Photos had to be used to keep up with the proletarian struggle! (PG)

It is the duty of the revolutionary artist to propagandize in two ways:

1) to purge the world view of supernatural powers, of superstition, of god and angels

2) to show to man his actual relationship to his environment (GHH)

believed that:

“The twilight of art began with photography, when art forfeited its right to report the world”

and that

“the bourgeois pen wrote art out of existence.” Only montage can compete.

“Art is about increasing the effectiveness of Communist Propaganda” (GHH)

(interesting, the liberal use of the word propaganda when read next to the way we situate the word today)

Here we understand a directive to read photographic fragments as indexical, bearing a one-to-one relationship with/ reality. (LM)

P-montages rely heavily on juxtaposition and mimicry (where what is being mimicked participates) (DK)

The illusionism of the work both depends on and refutes the so-called ‘truth’ of photo-journalism and direct a rereading of commercial mass media (LM)

Some photos in publications where his work appears were so naturally idiosyncratic and incriminating that they must be protected by the statement that they remain unedited.

Similarly happens within his own work:

Goering (above) is untouched, actual photo, as mentioned in print

Nazi’s critiqued the montages, saying they were ‘corrupt, degenerate, broken apart.’ (associating them with ‘jewishness’) and contrasting them with Nazi’s corporativist aesthetic and politic, ‘unification of the people.” (PG)

On Viewing work in a current context

1) Number of attacks on socialists is relatively insignificant when compared to total number of montages. However, proportion means little for an artist who made works for the history of the moment. (DK)

2) Figures in political Caricatures are often unidentified. (too much historical subtext for comtemporary digestion)

3) Canonization is problematic when it threatens to upstage the historical context of politics and mass media involvement (LM)

(By virtue of this third sentiment alone, I contend that Heartfield’s work is/was extremely effective.)

Finally, discuss concern with re-appropriation of images far outside of historical context due to a misunderstanding of the properties of the photomontage form.

Works Cited

Gorrell, Paul. “Preface to ‘Art is in Danger!” Jack Hirschman, ed. Art on the Line. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press. 2001. Pp 98-127,

Grosz, George, John Heartfield, and Wielande Herzfeld. “Art is in Danger!” (1925) Jack Hirschman, ed. Art on the Line. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press. 2001. Pp 98-127.

Kahn, Douglas. John Heartfield: Art and Mass Media. NY: Tanam Press. 1985.

Lavin, Maud. Clean New World: Cultural Politics and Graphic Design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 2001.

Taylor, Sue. “Hearfield’s Photo-Grenades.” Art in America. No. 6 Jun 06-Jul 06. Pp 156-161.

The Role of the Handicraft in Mass-Production

2008-12-10T01:09:00.002-06:00

Can pieces that are mass-produced ever hold the same value as something of which only one exists? Consumer culture has long played upon the notion that the fewer the number of a product available, the higher the perceived value of that product. For this reason, many manufacturers will only roll a small number of their goods off of the assembly lines, to keep the demand high and to sell them at a premium price. This commonly agreed-upon theory treks into unsure territory when the product at hand is a piece of art. The following three artists put their hands to the test to challenge this very idea – Charlotte Perriand, Cipe Pineles, and Hella Jongerius. The three each lived in separate eras, practiced in different media, and yet all grappled with the inherently oppositional issues of mass-production and consumerism in their daily practice.

Upon her graduation from the Ecole de l’Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs, Perriand was dead-set in her intentions to create her own furniture, playing by her own rules. When she realized that none of the artesanal furniture shops in her French hometown were willing to break the mold of traditional furniture-making techniques, Perriand threatened to cast aside furniture design as a profession completely and began to study agriculture instead. She eventually finding solace in the architecture firm led by famed architect Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier had already established a hardened set of objectives that he demanded from the furniture he allowed to grace his building designs, but Perriand refused to conform completely to these ideas. She felt that furniture deserved a stronger role in the life of a building. It wasn’t merely a placeholder to clarify how a room is to be used, as Le Corbusier’s furniture had been used in the past. To Perriand, the furniture could, and perhaps should, be a focal point in its own right. And, thus, she went on to design several lines of tables and seating that utilized the materials of the machine age aesthetic – mostly chromium-plated tubular steel, leather and glass – and merged them with her own deep understanding of how humans would interact with the furniture. She raised the expectations of furniture as an element of forward-thinking design, and, as a result, was heralded by Europeans as the well-to-do bought up her pieces.

Ironically, Perriand’s furniture was almost always photographed for advertising purposes in the singular. The singularity of the furniture in the advertising pieces allowed the viewer to take in the delicate features of the piece and to revel in its intricate attention to detail. In practice, however, most of Perriand’s furniture was used in large groupings, as in a set of eight chairs at a dining room table, or a row of multiple barstools in a café. This was the truth of how her pieces were used, typically in bulk arrangements, and it naturally took away from the intimate relationship that the owners had with each individual piece. There is a strong dichotomy in the way that Perriand designed her furniture – to be reveled in its uniqueness as a singular piece – versus the reality that her furniture was mass-produced and used in large quantities.

Custom furniture, it could be argued, is inherently designed to be prepared in small quantities, and may well raise an eyebrow when it is sold en masse. In mediums that are intended for mass production, such as postage stamp design or textile design, there are separate challenges that must be addressed. Take the case of graphic designer and magazine editor Cipe Pineles, for example. She can be credited with creating the format for the modern magazine layout as we know it today. She took women’s magazines produced during the 1930s and -40s and transformed them into cohesive, multi-page works of art that told a story through a marriage of text and image – generally one of the woman’s world outside of the home.

Pineles never intended for her work to be framed and hung on the wall. It was designed from the forefront to be printed by the hundreds, maybe thousands, spit through the presses and shipped off to bookstores and check-out lanes across the country, where young women of all walks of life could pick up a copy of Glamour or Vogue or Seventeen magazine and be inspired.
The fact that her work was reproduced in numerous quantities here does not change its value in the same was as in the Perriand case, based solely on the nature of the media. Magazine design is quite different from furniture design. While a once-popular magazine may become a collectors’ item once only a handful are left, a magazine that only affords to print a few issues is sometimes also deemed relatively worthless. From Pineles’s example, it becomes clear that the basic nature of the medium must be considered in determining the value based on its quantity of reproduction.

A closer look into Pineles’s past, however, reveals that she began her artistic training as a highly skilled watercolorist. During her studies at Pratt, she was revered as one of the best watercolorists the school had ever turned out. She went on to participate in painting residencies and to host several exhibitions of her watercolor works. But when it came time to get a ‘real career’, she gave in to the demands of consumer culture and found her niche in an industry that catered to art that could be rapidly reproduced. She more or less abandoned her watercolor talents, inserting them into her works only infrequently, and instead adopted the cut-and-paste techniques using photographs and mechanically-reproduced typeface. While Pineles’s skillful eye is clearly at work in her magazine layouts, her skillful hand is reduced to a rare appearance.

Lastly, let us consider the work of Hella Jongerius. Jongerius is a designer who is difficult to categorize neatly, for she is constantly adopting a new medium. She’s been proven successful in ceramics, textiles, furniture, etc., generally staying true to her theme of producing items for the home.

Jongerius began by designing home furnishings and art installations with the intention that they be mere singular pieces, never to be reproduced. They were made to be displayed temporarily in a museum or two, at which point she would then go on to create her next round. By now, however, Jongerius has been practicing on her own and with her self-directed team for several years, and she too is beginning to consider the role of her pieces in the mass market. Unlike Pineles’s magazine layout design, and perhaps to a lesser extent, also unlike Perriand’s furniture, Jongerius’s installations were intended to be singular, highly detailed works. They were designed to challenge the viewer or user on an intimate level, leading them to think twice about the nature of the materials being used. Jongerius would be the first to admit that her work is perverse. One minute she is reinforcing expectations, only to pull the rug from under our feet the next. These conflicting impulses reflect her ambivalent attitude toward the design world and what she calls “this whole marketing shit.”

But even Jongerius has found herself trying to find her own place in the world of consumerism. She recently has been teaming up with companies that manufacture popular lines of art pieces to create her own works that will be mass-produced through their companies. In interviews, she has said that she’s never entirely sure if her pieces will survive on the mass-market. “I want to explore whether my ideas will stay alive if I’m designing for a larger market. Maybe people will be disappointed, or maybe I’ll have to accept that I can’t change the world but, for now, that’s what’s triggering me.” In each piece, she struggles to incorporate the quality of the handmade artifact with a design that can be created in large numbers with relative ease and efficiency. Says Jongerius, “The craftmanship comes from the romantic, down-to-earth farm girl in me, and the industrialisation from the metropolitan power woman.”

Jongerius’s work is intentionally meant to question presupposed notions of how things work. She makes vases with holes in them. She designs dinnerware that has large ceramic figurines in the center of the dishes where one’s food would typically go. She’s even made a line of ceramic dishes connected by a string handle. The natural thought is to be able to pick the grouping up by the string, but, hopefully, the viewer will realize before doing this that the dishes will crack or shatter if they collide with each other when the string is raised.

So far, Jongerius has proven to be a success on the mass-market. Her lines of vases for IKEA, as well as her animal-inspired line of dishware for Nymphenburg Porzellan, are both widely popular, catering to consumers on opposite ends of the consumer market. Indeed, Jongerius has proven that her designs can conform to production costs of both the penny-pinching and exorbitant budgets.

Jongerius, as well as any artist moving her pieces to the masses, must consider the possibility that a level of hand-detail may be lost when a machine, especially in the cases where the original piece was hand-made to exactitude, pumps the pieces out. Manufacturing technology has undoubtedly come a long way in the last century or two, but the debate on whether the machine will ever equal the artist is one steeped in ages-old controversy. The Arts and Crafts movement rallied against the social and artistic consequences of ill-considered machine use. They valued hand skills because they expressed the individuality of the worker, the same individuality that the machine would naturally obliterate.

Artists like William Morris, commonly accepted as one of the leading voices of the Arts and Crafts movement, faced a similar battle as those of the aforementioned artists with his own furniture design. Morris’s furniture was based on traditional rural forms and he exemplified his ‘truth to materials’ by staying true to manufacturing his chairs using the rural traditional methods. According to Christopher Crouch in his text Modernism in Art, Design and Architecture, “This use of a pragmatic traditional solution to design, one that emphasized hand labour, sits awkwardly with the industrial world that existed around Morris. However, he was not unaware of this contradiction. . . . The Arts and Crafts designers wanted a mass market, and therein lay their dilemma, for their intention was not to design, as Morris put it, ‘for the swinish luxury of the rich’.” Many of the artists of the Arts and Crafts movement would go on to choose sides. Some accepted that their one-of-a-kind artwork was only to be marketable to the rich, while others accepted that the machine age was too strong a force to fight against and instead made concessions in their designs to accommodate the process of machine reproduction. As a compromise, Morris suggested that, “should the designer be engaged in designing for machine production, then the object should look as mechanical as possible” (2).

This debate has been going on for the past century at least (and much longer if you include Walter Benjamin’s argument that the ancient Greeks dealt with the first methods of reproduction via branding and stamping), and we as designers may have to accept that the debate may never be totally satisfied (1). As art students, our professors, our clients, and even our bosses constantly pull us in opposite directions – to maintain that traditional hand skill, but at the same time to remain abreast of the new technological advances in design software and machinery. Professors like Lorraine Wild, a graphic design professor at Cal Arts, are well-aware of these stresses in the classroom. It seems to be just as confusing to the professors to know what to teach as it is to the students to know what to pay the most attention to. She argues, “The knowledge gained through activities that can be described as tactical, everyday, or simply craft, is powerful and important, and it must form the foundation of a designer’s education and work – it is how we create ideas.” She goes on to explain that there’s a difference between ‘design’ and ‘craft’. According to Wild, ‘craft’ seems to be limited to the making of one-of-a-kind things, whereas ‘design’ is aimed at mass production. By this definition, perhaps the handicraft versus mass-production argument is rooted in a faulty decision to try to merge two contrary practices (3).

Walter Benjamin adds that works of art have always been reproducible. The key factor comes down to the method of reproduction being used. Replicas that are made by the artist or his pupils diffuse the original slightly by removing the element of its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. Replicas that are made via technical reproduction, according to Benjamin, will always depreciate the actual work of art. Says Benjamin, “One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (1).

As a designer trying to find her niche in the art world, I’m tempted to say that one’s level of reliance upon mechanical processes for mass reproduction should be based, at least in part, on the skill of the artist. There are countless technologies available today to help aide the novice create a piece of ‘art’ that rivals the quality of other pieces he has seen. However, the limitations of that technology put up unnecessary barriers to the designer’s creativity. The designer finds him or herself conforming to the rules of the machine rather than working with the materials at hand to find the absolute best design to complete the piece in their imagination. I would say that the vast majority of designers will hold onto these crutch-like technologies to make up for the skills that they are lacking, with the tradeoff being the ability to mass-produce their mediocre designs into a more lucrative product that can reach a larger audience of potential customers. If a designer has enough skill to create singular pieces that can not only stand on their own but also create enough revenue through their intermittent sales, then I would strongly encourage that person to cast aside the technology and to remain true to their traditional skills.

I believe that in my work, I will remain hard-nosed and continue searching for a way to merge the machine with craft. It may be a fruitless search, a search of intrinsic opposites, but to find a solution that could solve this ages-old debate would be well worth the effort. I honestly don’t know if my work could stand on its own in a gallery and bring in a steady income, and so, out of a little uncertainty and a lot of desire for regularity, I will join the masses in relying on technology to make my art an attainable commodity. I will attempt to maintain the highest level of detail possible as well as the natural variation of human error. Perriand, Pineles, and Jongerius have all sought their own ways to grapple with these questions. While we can look at their struggles as they play out over the past century, even when coupled with the in-depth research conducted by Crouch, Wild, and Benjamin, a clear solution is yet to be found. Let the search continue.

[1] Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1935.

[2] Crouch, Christopher. Modernism in Art, Design and Architecture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

[3] Wild, Lorraine. “The Macramé of Resistance.” Date unknown.

Interative Narrative

2008-12-09T10:03:00.021-06:00

The Bidirectional Communication Art

-- The comparison of Interactive Narrative in Animation, Photography, Video Game and Theme Park.

Part One: Introduction:

“An interactive narrative is a time-based representation of character and action in which a reader can affect, choose, or change the plot. The first-, second-, or third- person characters may actually be the reader. Opinion and perspective are inherent. Image is not necessary, but likely.”
----- Brenda Laurel.

Interaction has been recognized for a long time, and widely used in many forms --novels, drama, music, photography, videos, software development, etc. The written novel is a very old interactive narrative, because there is an interaction between the word and the meaning, and between the author and the reader. The author can turn his meaning into words, while the reader translates these symbols into meaning. At the same time, through words, the author transfers his perspective to the reader, then the reader receives it as a new perspective according to his or her own particular world-view. During the process of translation-interpretation, the participation is greatly involved. Software development is also a kind of interactive narrative. A programmer writes code, while the user recognizes these symbols when using the program. Furthermore, the user could act as a secondary writer when inputting information to the system. Because the writer and user both add information to the database, their roles begin to blur. The level of interaction becomes deeper.

In a word, interactive narratives can be found in many fields for a long time. However, there are differences among them, such as in the aspect of plot structure, perspective, time, and participation level. How do writers take advantage of interactive narrative? In this paper I will take three artists (Brenda Laurel, Walt Disney, Man Ray) as research subjects to talk about these.

Part Two: Brenda Laurel

Brenda Laurel is a researcher, designer and entrepreneur in the fields of human-computer interaction. In 1996, she set up a company called “Purple Moon” to create video games and web activities for girls. In the process of producing the game Rockett’s New School, Laurel and her colleagues researched various plot structures for interactive narrative. What follows are three general models:

1. Nodal plot structure:

This plot structure is a series of events interrupted by points of interactivity. The advantage of this structure is that it allows a very strong back-story with a beginning/ending and clear character development. The disadvantage is that the user can’t change the development of the story but they can change some details of the story.

From Pause and Effect, by Mark Stephen Meadows

2, Modulated plot structure:

Compared with the Nodal structure, this structure also has a clear development of the characters, even though it has more participation from the users. The user has the freedom to choose a straight line to avoid interaction, or to make a more leisurely route and increase the participation level, but takes a risk being a lesser dramatic arc. Therefore, the decision making of the user can alternate the development of the story.

From Pause and Effect, by Mark Stephen Meadows

3, Open plots structure:

In this structure, the story relies on the decision making of the readers. So the dramatic arc is abandoned for the interest of exploration and investment. There are no specific entry points and the reader can choose wherever he/she wants to end the story. In an open plot structure, what the reader really appreciates is not the ending, but the journey.

From Pause and Effect, by Mark Stephen Meadows

In regard to plot structure, the game Rockett’s New School of Purple Moon Company adopted the Modulated Structure. It has several alternative routes of nonlinear narrative with the same beginning and ending of the game. At the beginning, the main character Rockett begins her day meeting Jessie. The choices the player makes from here determine which story line is chosen. But all story lines end with the advice from her best friend Meg. This is a typical framework of Modulated structure. The whole structure has clear back-stories and characters developments. And player can partially alternate the development of the game by decision-making.

From the aspect of using points of view, this game not only provides a first-person’s camera like many others, but also a third-person view. The later one allows a sense of depth and background that is hard to achieve from a first-person camera.

Compared with traditional story, this game has different notion of time because of human decisions. User can carry his or her own sense of time. So they can determine speed, pacing, suspense and the order of sequential action by decision-making. In this kind of game, time can be seen as a spatial arrangement of decisions and that it can be jump back and forth along the line of the plot structure.

As for the participation level, the degree of interaction in this game is low, because the influences of the designer in this game are excessive. They “force” users to spend time doing things they may not otherwise choose. Such as, to get to the next level, you have to perform some simple function or you have to repeat a single function within a prescribed error margin. In other words, the designers of this game try to conduct the players onto the expected step at the expected time.

However, the goal of an interactive narrative is not to conduct the reader, but to provide a context, in which the narrative can be discovered and investigated by the readers. Therefore, “the designers and authors of interactive narrative are far more like architects rather than writers. The visitor is allowed to roam freely, explore, investigate, and make changes in the environment.” -- Mark Stephen Meadows.

As Doug Church, one of the most respected game designers in the US, puts it:
“Those of us doing immersive simulation strive to make the game the player’s not the designer’s. While we, as designers, are clearly creating the environment and rules, we hope to allow the player to act, plan, and decide.
There is nothing wrong with games which decide to place the designer center stage, and task the players with ‘discovering’ the will of the author. However, I believe that if we acquire the knowledge on how to effectively involve the players, we can create more satisfying experiences. A work in which the player must figure out how to turn the prewritten pages can be fun, but one which the player writes the pages seems far more likely to be transformative.”

Part Three: Walt Disney

1, Disney’s animation

As a film producer and animator, Walt Disney’s success greatly relies on public resonance. This is because Disney's stories came from the commoners, met the popular taste, and most importantly, his animations shaped the American cultures. Therefore, Disney’s animation might be thought of as a piece of a larger interactive narrative.

For instance, the Great Depression hit America in the 1930s, and during this period of time, Disney produced the animation Pinoccio(1940) with the idea of sentimental populism. This animation emphasizes the dignity of the little guy, and the nobility of his struggle for survival against powerful forces in a hostile world. This spirit was fully presented at the beginning of the animation. (The camera roams around Geppetto's shop "Once upon a time there lived- not a princess- not a prince-not a king-but a little old man named Geppetto.) This story greatly strikes a chord with general audiences who suffered from pressing social circumstances in the Great Depression. The same plot in their own life let them better understand the story, and let them blend their own emotion and personal experience into the animation. Therefore the audiences play an active role in constructing the story.

The second reason why the story appeals to the public is because the conflicts Disney usually chooses tend to be something universal, such as fear, struggle, love and desire. It is the relationship of the personal to the universal that makes such issues so touching for the audience. Snow White is a good example. For the audience, this charming story of virtue, kindness, and honest labor can let them forget wars, crime, and economic strife in a modern world. “It is a good experience for men to laugh together over something sweet and innocent and clean.”-- The Magic Kingdom, by Steven Watts.

2, Watching Eperience

The above quote by Steven Watts leads to another form of interactions represented in Disney’s animation. Watching Disney’s animations with many others provides a whole new experience than watching them alone. In a theater, audiences easily manipulated if the atmosphere is well developed. As the climax reaches in the animation, music or a cue from the animation will light up the theater. Even if you did not get an emotional response from the animation itself, the interactions of others sitting beside you will influence your mood and potentially make you excited as them.

Watching animations alone can be interactive as well. The viewer can control the pace and the action order by toggling back and forth, or he can turn the volume down. They can alter the interaction experience each time.

3, Theme Park

Disney’s management principles in Theme Parks successfully reflect the spirit of interactive narratives.

Firstly, through out the theme parks, there are Disney’s characters and references to Disney’s movies and television shows. The familiarity connects the viewer to the collective awareness and memories. This strengthens the interaction between the tourists and the parks. Furthermore, the parks resembled the back lot of movie studios. Traveling in the park is like a tribute to the Hollywood movie tradition as a whole. This permits people to investigate and explore places where only the camera had taken them before.

Secondly, Disney believes it is best to communicate with his guests using visual literacy. All of his parks are welled decorated environments like magical worlds, full with visual-magnets. For example, the modes of transportation, from horse-drawn trolleys to rockets, play an important role in establishing the atmosphere of the theme parks. By focusing on every detail, Disney makes his guests totally immersed in the environment.

Thirdly, the layout of Disney’s parks embodies open plot structure as mentioned in discussing Brenda Laurel. Disney’s team designs and arranges each individual facility in a systematic grouping based on different themes. Each of them is an interaction point. Tourists freely pick their own route to stroll around under the guidance of the park's layout. They plot themselves into their own stories. There is no standard entry point, ending, or dramatic arc. The story relies on decision making of the tourists. In other words, theme park presents a high level of interaction. The design team creates the environment and rules, and encourages the tourists to act, plan, and decide their own journey/story.

Part Three: Man Ray

In his explorations of many art forms, such as film, photography, and the readymade. Man Ray’s idea about “surprising” is well presented and introduced to us. Surprising work can cause logical contradiction and then stir inspiration of the audiences. Thus, even though most of his works do not contain any clear stories, they still provide viewers imagination and interpretation as their eyes trace the composition, the texture and the shape of the work. Based on the understandings and imagination, viewer can reorganize and build an emotional suspicion. Because there is no real answer regarding what Ray was presenting, viewers are free to express what Ray's works meant to them. Some may be reminded of a personal experience, and some may imagine a plot or a story.

For example, in his work New York 1971, Man Ray used pliers and painted wood to create a readymade. Stacked wood is placed on the oblique pliers. The audience in that period might connect this work with the phenomena of construction booming in New York during early 20th century. The readymade would be imagined to emit the skyscraper into the sky. The process of imagination and suspicion about Ray’s work turns the viewer into an investigator. This brings viewer one step closer to interactivity, as opposed to passively receiving the clear intention of artists.

Conclusion:

Through the above analysis and comparison among the three designers, we can draw such conclusion:

Through the study of these three designers, I find an interesting place where animation and interactive narrative cross. Theoretically, any traditional stories can be evolved into interactive narrative—the former one is just one of a number of possible ways to interpret and present the world-view, while the later one tries to imagine all perspective and makes them accessible for the reader. A real interactive story does not simply refer to a story with interactive function, but with various perspectives, such as a story with several different tracks of time, or with the different time order in non-linear fashion, or with several effects/results. I want to study this direction in my impending independent study course. Brenda Laurel, Walt Disney and Man Ray have some useful methodologies for this.

Reference:

Pause and Effect, by Mark Stephen Meadows
The Magic Kingdom, by Steven Watts
The art of Walt Disney, by Christopher Finch
The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, by David whitley.
Disney and his world by Alan Bryman
Utopian Entrepreneur, by Brenda Laurel
Design Research, by Brenda Laurel
Computers as Theatre, by Brenda Laurel
The art of human-computer interface design, by Brenda Laurel
Narrative intelligence, by Brenda Laurel
Interaction: the New Images, by Brenda Laurel

Authorship and the Everyday

2008-12-09T09:00:00.002-06:00

Can design affect our perception of everyday things? How are we influenced by the way something is presented? To what degree does authorship play a role in the success of a project? After researching the work of Charles and Ray Eames, George Maciunas, and Irma Boom, I have found each of their design methodologies to differ in terms of authorship. However, all three designers share an interest in studying the everyday. This essay explores the ideas challenged by each designer, their unique approach to design, and my own design strategies.

Married in 1941, Charles and Ray Eames designed architecture, books, films, furniture, graphics, museum exhibitions, photography, textiles, and toys. In order to understand some of their work, it is important to note how the historical context influenced some of their designs. For example, the Eames’ were commissioned to design leg splints and airplane parts for the military during the war. This provided them with the access to military technology and manufacturing facilities. During the Great Depression there was a shortage of housing and construction materials. So, the California Arts and Architecture magazine sponsored Case Study Houses to find solutions to these problems. The Eames' designed Case Study #8 in Pacific Palisades, California in 1949. They used industrial materials such as, factory sash windows, commercial doors, and corrugated steel roofing. Characteristic of postwar modern architecture, the design had a flexible plan with multi purpose spaces and a double height living room. These examples demonstrate the connection between the Eames’ design and their historical context.

Charles and Ray Eames had a straightforward attitude towards design. For them design was about recognizing a need and then addressing that need (1). They prioritized process and experimentation with the knowledge that some work may have commercial potential. Most famous for their furniture design, the Eames’ challenged the limits of wood as a flexible material. They discovered a way to create compound curves using a handmade machine to mold plywood. Sketching and studying form was an important part of their design process. The gentle curves of their chairs are ergonomic and comfortable for the human body (2). Because of their rigorous experimentation, the Eames’ were able to understand the nature of the material and use it in unexpected ways. They developed their ideas and improved their work through trial and error and continuously working on new iterations of their designs (3). When asked about designing for mass consumption, Charles Eames replied, “The fact of the matter is that we’re a hell of a lot more like each other than we are different…What you try to do is satisfy your real gut instincts and work your way through your idiosyncrasies…” (4). His view of authorship in design separates personal style in favor of solving a problem.

In the 1950’s the Eames’ started a collection of photography and began creating films. Their work studied new ways of seeing the ordinary. They documented various elements in their home, including the table setting and the food they ate. Despite the humble nature of the subjects, the photography is experimental and explores composition and color. The film Blacktop, 1952, is a video demonstrating the abstract beauty of water washing down the asphalt of a schoolyard (5). The patterns of soapy water change in tune with the music of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The Eames’ took ownership of the beauty that exists in everyday objects and events and captured it in their photography and filmmaking.

Presenting found objects in an artistic manner brought attention to the everyday. Early in the twentieth century, ideas of modern art were being challenged in many ways. When Marcel Duchamp displayed a urinal titled, Fountain, he suggested connections between readymade and art. Fluxus was influenced by Duchamp’s ideas and the Dadaist movement (6).

George Maciunas was a founding member of Fluxus in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Fluxus was an international community of interdisciplinary artists, who challenged what constitutes art and what makes an artist. Fluxus questioned the categories of music, art, and theatre. They were interested in the subjects between the fields. These questions were important in deterring the institutions from limiting the work that was created. In other words, art did not need to be in a gallery, nor did music need to be played in a concert hall. Dick Higgins of Fluxus coined the term “intermedia” which blurred the distinction between art and life (7). According to Fluxus’ ideals, art should not be special or commercial. Fluxus emphasized appreciating things for their own sake. It also blurred the distinctions between art, artist, and audience.

In 1965 Shigeko Kubota performed a piece titled, Vagina Painting. This piece challenged the idea of authorship because the author gives the illusion of using her own body to create the art. Kubota fastened a paintbrush to her underpants, dipped the brush in red paint, and moved over the paper. The performance used female anatomy to redefine action painting. “This reference to the menstrual cycle and procreation of women was a rejection of the female as a muse. She demonstrated woman as the source of her own artistic inspiration.” (8) These ideas also illustrate that there does not need to be a separation between art and life. Life can be art.

Another way Fluxus challenged authorship is by changing the relationship between artist and audience. Rather than the artist producing a work of art to be received by an audience, the art is only completed by the participation of the audience. For example, Yoko Ono introduced the idea that others could complete her work in, Painting to Be Stepped On. At the time, this idea of the role of the artist was radically different. Alison Knowles, also of Fluxus, had similar ideas. Her work consisted of simple directions using found objects involving sound. These works were participatory and performative. According to Fluxus’ methodology, everyday experiences are actually performances (9).

As technology evolved, new media provided more opportunities for designers. In an interview for Dwell magazine in 2006 designer Irma Boom optimistically stated, “I always say, when I’m asked whether the internet means the end of the book, that it really means the beginning of the new book. More books are produced now than ever before, but people use them in a different way. After all, you can read plenty of information on the internet now. Print, however, still looks like the truth.” (10)

Boom is known for her creative reinterpretation of book form, in which aesthetic value is more important than legibility. To understand her work you have to hold it, feel it, and flip through the pages. By focusing her work on book design, she transforms an everyday object into an experience. She insists on shaping content rather than servicing the clients’ needs. Boom’s ownership of her work has been both sought after and ill received.

When working on a book for fellow designer Otto Treumann, Boom clearly executed the design as her interpretation of his work. She showed images she liked best larger, and those she did not like were printed as thumbnails. She said, “He hated it. He told me that it was more my book than his book. And I said, ‘That’s fine. I don’t care. That’s the way it goes.’ I’m not a servant.” (11) Boom disregarded her client’s opinions and worked with unconventional methods of book design.

Her attitude toward design has always been one of taking ownership of her work. She does not think about what people want, but rather she expresses her own ideas about the subject. In an article from I.D. Magazine regarding her audience for Thinkbook, Boom said, “I didn’t think of the audience at all. I thought if it’s good for me, it’s good for them.” (12) However, she fully investigated the subject by thoroughly researching the company. Thinkbook is a specific view on the history of the Dutch multinational SHV Holdings. Boom moved her office to be near their headquarters and had complete access to all of SHV’s files. Because there was no organized archive, Boom spent 3.5 years sorting through the records and researching in different cities. The book, like other books by Boom, is organized in reverse chronological order. Boom tries to convey the human factor as a method for storytelling by using reports, speeches, interviews, and more. The information is not exclusive; Boom made it a point to show the company’s successes and failures. The structure of the book contains no headings, large questions scattered throughout, and there is an alternation of text and image. There are no page numbers and no index exists. Boom wanted the book to be a voyage, “you find things you don’t want to find, and discoveries happen by coincidence.” (13) Boom has said that you navigate it more like a website than a traditional book, but also that it works like the memory does- the more recent information is in the front and is more complex and detailed. Then as you get further in time it is more filtered and simple. There are many layers to her design, which cannot be understood at first glance. Her work leaves room for interpretation.

Studying the details of the everyday is one way of approaching creative design. By taking ownership of existing beauty, the Eames’ introduce a new understanding of authorship. Fluxus challenged the role of the artist through participation and involvement of the audience. Although Boom chooses to deprioritize the consideration of the audience, she takes full control of her work by fully understanding the subject and allowing her ideas to drive the design. The research collected on these three designers has provided insight and inspiration for my own design methodology. I am interested in studying ways that meaning can be given to everyday objects. My current work explores the potential of recyclable materials as a means of bringing awareness to recycling. I would like to explore how authorship can influence the display of my work. In closing, a comparison of Charles and Ray Eames, Fluxus, and Irma Boom illustrates variations on the negotiation of authorship in design through the study of the everyday.

Works Cited

(1) Neuhart , John and Marilyn. Eames design: the office of Charles and Ray Eames, 1941-1978. (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1989) pp 14-15.

(2) Caplan, Ralph. Connections, the work of Charles and Ray Eames: Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, December 7, 1976-February 6, 1977 (Los Angeles: UCLA Art Council, 1976) p26.

(3) Eidelberg, Martin, et al. The Eames lounge chair: an icon of modern design (Grand Rapids, MI: Grand Rapids Art Museum ; London ; New York : In Association with Merrell, 2006) p48.

(4) Eames, Demetrios. An Eames primer. (New York : Universe Pub., 2001) p113.

(5) Kirkham, Pat. Charles and Ray Eames: designers of the twentieth century, Edition 1st (MIT Press pbk. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998) pp 336-337.

(6) “Fluxus”. Wikipedia. 12/2008 <>.

(7) Higgins, Hannah, 1964- Fluxus experience (Imprint Berkeley: University of California Press, c2002) pp 89-99.

(8) Anderson, Simon, et al. In the Spirit of Fluxus: published on the occasion of the exhibition .... Edition 1st ed. (Imprint Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, c1993) p82.

(9) The Misfits [videorecording] : 30 years of Fluxus / [produced] by Lars Movin, [for the The National Film Board of Denmark]. Added title 30 years of Fluxus Thirty years of Fluxus Fluxus Imprint New York, N.Y.: Electronic Arts Intermix [distributor], 1993.

(10) Szita, Jane, Cover Story, Dwell, vol.6 iss.9 (October 2006) p134-140

(11) Hall, Peter, Loose Canon, I.D. Magazine, 47.3 (May 2000) p75.

(12) Poynor, Rick, XXXL, I.D. Magazine, 43n6 (November 1996) p65.

(13) Bilak, P. An interview with Irma Boom, Abitare, no. 405 (April 2001) pp 219-23.

A Haiku to the Handicraft

2008-12-09T05:01:00.002-06:00

Made by hand - unique.
Take a stab at mass market.
Can it work? Who knows.

Design Methodologies and the Creative Process

2008-12-09T02:02:00.005-06:00

BRUNO MUNARI, GEORGE NELSON, AND VICTOR PAPANEK
DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO A PROBLEM

Industrial Design is a complicated profession. A designer can take multiple paths and approaches to a given problem. Since its conception, there has been a debate of what is most important in Industrial Design, and while the constant variables are form and function, there are also components that have been and keep being added to the equation as society and technology evolve. The profession has always been influenced by both art and engineering. Some designers tend to lean more to arts while others prefer the engineering aspect of design. This diversity in the Industrial Design industry is as extensive and complicated as the variety of products that can be created. The different methodology each designer acquires has a deep relationship with his creative process and with what drives his goals.

This semester I studied three designers: Bruno Munari, George Nelson and Victor Papanek. They had different responses to a problem that we’re still facing today – finite resources – and while being roughly contemporaneous industrial designers, each have quite different methodologies and design philosophies.

As mentioned above, this profession has multiple approaches and methodologies as it has been very diverse since its origins. After the Industrial Revolution, design was largely responsible for the design of aesthetic “treatments” for manufactured products, treatments that were highly indicative of its era, the Victorian age. Rejecting this use of unnecessary decoration, designers like William Morris were part of the Arts and Crafts movement. These designers saw the necessity for a new design that expressed the function of the thing itself and emphasized the materials and quality of construction. The Arts and Crafts movement suggested that each material incorporated its own value and the first principle of good design was to respect the properties of the materials used. The goal was to replace the machine mass-produced goods with well-made, well-designed products. The Arts and Crafts led to a series of movements, with different approaches to design, which set the path to modernism.

A movement known as “streamlining” was derived from the study of aerodynamics, the elimination of wind-resistance, during the 1920s. It had an enormous influence on industrial design in the 1930s. After the Wall Street crash in 1929, the market was nothing like the 1920s, the postwar period, when there was a boom of jobs, money and consumerism. The need for cheaply-made merchandise with public appeal grew as the Depression lengthened. It was a new movement emerging in the 1930s. Industrial designers applied styling to consumer products, to attract Depression buyers, and brought marketing skills to their profession. This new styling was temping and looked expensive, but it could be mass-produced by machines at lower cost. While some designers like Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague and Raymond Loewy embraced it, others were against it, as it led sometimes to superficial changes in the design and to planned obsolescence.

The approaches of Victor Papanek, George Nelson and Bruno Munari were quite different, but they all had in common the rejection of styling and streamlining. George Nelson’s view was that for an object to be considered good design, it needed to be honest. Honesty of a product can be referred to the idea of the Arts and Crafts philosophy of being true to materials. The goal being to appreciate a material’s properties, leave it in sight and not to cover up structure or joints. This view can be appreciated in Nelson’s design of the Comprehensive Storage System for Herman Miller, where the poles that maintain the structure are exposed and the properties of the material, extruded aluminum, were embraced. The design was made in order to work with the material, not forcing the material to work with the design. For George Nelson, this was good design. He also designed to his own criteria and taste believing that marketing research was not necessary: as long as he liked the design, there was going to be market for it.

In contrast to George Nelson’s idiosyncratic style, Bruno Munari’s unadorned design style made his products appear anonymous. He believed that to force the designer’s style in order to make it his own was wrong. Bruno Munari was more focused on the function of an object than its aesthetics. However, he believed that by achieving the right design for function, aesthetics would follow naturally as a consequence. Most of his products were made of unadorned materials and, like Victor Papanek, he tried to reduce design to its simplest form. I would say that he applied aesthetic functionalism to his designs while Victor Papanek applied extreme functionalism.

Victor Papanek believed that only a small part of the designer’s responsibility lies on the area of aesthetics; he was completely focused in finding the practical, most efficient solution for a given problem. He was harshly criticized for his design of a radio receiver developed for the Third World. Made of a used juice can, it used paraffin wax and a wick as a power source and cost only nine cents in 1966. It was a very well considered design, but it was ugly. Victor Papanek refused to paint it or make any aesthetic changes because, according to him, it would be unethical to impose his “taste” on people from a different culture. This action earned him the title of "Garbage Can Designer"(1), and yet he was an inspiration for other people to design ethical products. George Nelson and Bruno Munari were also an inspiration to other designers in their work, and it was interesting to learn how these designers came to be so creative and to discover what was the source of their inspiration.

George Nelson argued that we’ve been all conditioned from birth to believe that everything can be discovered by observing, measuring, analyzing, and thinking, but that we could not think our way into creative behavior. According to George Nelson the creative process has as a result a “Zap”, a glimpse of what a design could be, which consisted on a common collaboration between the left and the right lobes of the brain. According to Nelson, the left lobe resolves linear problems like language and analysis, while the right lobe deals with visual matters, synthesizing activities and non-linear situations.(2) He stated that what we call inspiration, seems to derive from the right lobe’s ability connect what seems irrelevant pieces of information to make sense. But for the right lobe to be able to pick these non-relevant pieces of information, the left lobe must do its homework of gathering and collecting data and taking the problem as far as it can. It is then when the right lobe mysteriously searches for things that can be fit together. Nelson gives tremendous importance to observation as the way of gathering and collecting data, the most information the left lobe collects, the more information the right lobe was to work with, therefore, the probabilities of being creative or getting inspired increases.

George Nelson’s creative process is reflected in his products as well, where this concept of switching through different information is also applied to his designs. When most designers show more interest in the getting to the final product or result, George Nelson was most interested in the initial conception of a product, where the idea or zap comes together, then switching along different solutions or to the next problem. Contrasting his friend and colleague Charles Eames’ method, which George Nelson described as “rigorous”, he described his own method as a “grass hopper sort of way”.(3) However, George Nelson and Charles Eames did share the same passion for good design and they both looked for different ways to experiment and use existing materials.

In contrast to George Nelson, Bruno Munari could also be described as rigorous. In his book “Da cosa nasce cosa” he describes the “metodologia progettuale” with a series of steps that, even when he mentions that these are flexible steps, are very well organized and seem to encourage you to “think your way into the creative behavior” (something that George Nelson stated you couldn’t do). This methodology has a strong contrast with the nationally recognized Bruno Munari’s Methodology, used for education and formation of the individual. This methodology is based on the affinity of children to express themselves freely without the interference of adults, which one could say means no steps or rules. This encourages them to become independent and to resolve problems by themselves. Bruno Munari developed a great interest in children’s education; he was concerned by lack of products available for the education of children and began to design his own. This of course was triggered by a personal motivation, the birth of his son Alberto, but even after his son got older, he continued to design for children. In 1977 he started the laboratories "Playing with Art", held at the Brera Art Gallery in Milan, to stimulate children’s creativity. This was Munari's very first workshop for children. Since then, he conducted children's workshops all over Italy, and worldwide in countries such as Venezuela, Israel, Spain, U.S., France, and Japan. These workshops are a great part of Bruno Munari’s legacy; according to him, these workshops were the most significant piece of work he ever did.(4)

Victor Papanek’s creative approach to design was not only of a commitment to children, but to mankind in general. He looked for solutions to the problems of people with “real needs”, meaning the handicapped, children, the medical profession, among other important fields he felt were neglected by most designers. His design ethics made him a constant critic of the car industry; he was highly concerned by the lack of safety at that time in the car industry, not only for drivers but also in the manufacturing process. Papanek’s inspiration was his constant concern about the environment and his desire to help people with real needs, but he also found inspiration by looking into different cultures’ vernacular designs. He focused his efforts on the simplification of design, minimal usage of natural resources and decentralization of society. According to Papanek, by decentralizing society towns and cities would be more independent, being able to apply vernacular materials to their constructions, consume local produce, and use sustainable energy.

While these three designers’ methodologies are different, they all follow a defined line on what they believe is important to design. For my personal methodology I applied the same defined principle. When designing a new product, Industrial designers must question what the goal of the product is and what need they will fulfill by making this product. Sometimes designers can get carried away by trends and meaningless “needs”, which lead them to design useless products with planned obsolescence destined for the landfill. Sometimes it is difficult to be creative in a world where everything we need seems to be already invented, and yet there is still a necessity to change the way we design. Designers need to understand the limited resources our planet has; we keep designing as if the earth was an endless source of materials with no limits or consequences. It seems that in the past 10 years we see the sight of a “greener path”, were society and governments are becoming more conscious about the use of resources and nature’s degradation, but we’re still far from a sustainable future.

My design approach to these environmental problems is to turn to nature for answers. Nature, imaginative by necessity, has adapted, changed, and solved most of the problems we are dealing with. The more our world looks and functions like the natural world the more likely we are to preserve this planet.(5) Industrial design can no longer be only about looks, function and marketing, and it doesn’t end at the purchase of the product. With this in mind, my proposed methodology is Biomimicry as a way to design environmentally friendly products. I find Victor Papanek, George Nelson and Bruno Munari’s methodologies interesting and appealing in different ways, and I’ll say that I can identify similarities between elements of my proposed methodology and elements of each of these designers’ methods. From Bruno Munari’s methodology I would like to apply the functionalist aesthetic idea. I will focus my products on the function of the object, but at the same time convey the consequential aesthetics that, according to Bruno Munari, follow with the right design for function. From George Nelson I would like to apply the experimentation of materials and encouraged observation to find inspiration (applied to observation of nature in particular). Finally, from Victor Papanek I will use his environmental ethics as guidelines when designing for the conservation of resources. These three designers have influenced my work in some way, and their philosophies and techniques in design have also helped to redefine my own.

(1) Papanek, Victor. Preface to Design for the real world: human ecology and social change. Chicago, Ill: Academy Chicago, 1985.
(2) Nelson, George. George Nelson on design. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1979.
(3) Abercrombie, Stanley. George Nelson: The design of modern design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
(4) Bruno Munari teaches us about the great possibilities that lie within children." "Think Daily".http://www.thinktheearth.net/thinkdaily/report/rpt_34.html (accessed December 4, 2008).
(5) Biomimicry Institute. http://www.biomimicryinstitute.org/ (accessed December 4, 2008).