constellations: popular

The interaction and navigation design of the Air.Terminal is dynamic in that the information on the screen moves and positions itself according to how the user navigates. Complex data can be explored by means of a touch sensitive screen, a solution which posed the challenge of translating navigational static elements like cursor, rollover events or drag and drop functions into simple ways of touching the screen. While normally we are accustomed to moving a cursor over static elements like windows, buttons and text, this navigation provides the user with the opportunity to display information in a dynamic way, adapting to the interactions and interests of the individual user. This navigation and interaction design provides for uncomplicated and easy orientation through lengthy two-dimensional data lists, and promises to make navigation and image visualization fun to explore. Communication An airplane’s passengers and crew form a micro community for the duration of each flight. Nevertheless, there is usually a great lack of social interaction and freedom. Unlike in other social situations which take place in open public space, people here do not know each other and are unable to position themselves within the community, even though they stay physically close to each other for quite a long time â€“ sometimes up to twelve hours. Air.Terminal provides two communication tools to compensate for this lack of interaction: an instant message application where community members can write short private messages to each other, and an onboard public chat application, where the user is graphically represented by his/her seat which allows people onboard to meet and talk to each other while they cross the world together. The main objective of Air.Terminal is to give passengers a visual impression of the spatial and social dimensions of their unknown airplane community.

- ©Thomas Bircher

Image: Bircher, Thomas (2001). Air.Terminal. , : []

Motivation:

Web: Air.Terminal (09-11-2004)

Prompt: Ingo Günther: world globe

(502) art and design schools compete for research funds with traditional universities

http://folksonomy.org.uk/?s=502

Simon Perkins (25-08-2005)

Utterance:

In 1992, – and just 150 years after their inception as institutions for the promotion of art and design for manufacturing and industry – British art and design schools were invited to compete for research funds against traditional universities with already well embedded scholarly and intellectual infrastructures that supported largely textually-based research. Few people in 1992 anticipated that research success within the academy was a serious proposition for art and design as a subject. Instead, its recent academic history pointed towards professional and vocational training that was rarely understood as linked to 'applied research'. Few art and design institutions had, at that time, evolved the scholarly research infrastructures enjoyed by traditional university departments – so they faced the challenge of articulating intellectual frameworks for research activities that were largely focussed on object-based outputs and visual language. Furthermore, since their incorporation into the polytechnics during the late 1960s and 1970s, the CNAA [Council for National Academic Awards] validation process had emphasized undergraduate course innovation and evaluation at the expense of graduate development and research growth. This combination of circumstances did little to prepare the academic community in the creative arts and design for RAE [Research Assessment Exercise] 1992.

- ©B Brown, P Gough, J Roddis (March 2004)

Motivation:

Web: Discussion Paper: Types of Research in the Creative Arts and Design (PDF) (21-09-2005)

Prompt: Design scholarship as an alternative form of research grounded in practice

Catalyst:

[history] controlling research activity in Commonwealth universities

(99) analysis of filmed behaviour

http://folksonomy.org.uk/?s=99

Simon Perkins (02-01-2004)

Utterance:

For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science.

- ©Benjamin, W. Illuminations (p.235-36)

Motivation:

Web: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (21-06-2006)

Prompt: natural history collections: herbarium of living structures

Book: Benjamin, Walter. 1988 Illuminations, New York, USA: Random House.

(323) Co-Links: a single word may have multiple links

http://folksonomy.org.uk/?s=323

Simon Perkins (16-02-2005)

Utterance:

Alex Primo at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and his research group have released a prototype of Co-Links. It allows readers to add links to any word on a page. A single word may have multiple links.

- ©David Weinberger (corante.com/many/)

Motivation:

Web: Co-Links (16-02-2005)

Prompt: Patterns Of Hypertext: complex webs of links

(170) Weblog: progressive design

http://folksonomy.org.uk/?s=170

Simon Perkins (12-02-2004)

Utterance:

A weblog (often web log, also known as a blog, see below) is a website which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage, with hyperlinks playing an important role. The individual posts (which taken together are the weblog) either share a particular theme, or a single or small group of authors

- ©Wikipedia: Web log

Motivation:

Prompt: Constellations: constellation-like formations of contested responses

Catalyst:

[interaction] Uses of Blogs: 2004 Year of the Blog

[commentary] Terra Nova: collaborative weblog about virtual worlds

(183) (mis)representation, as a living thing

http://folksonomy.org.uk/?s=183

Simon Perkins (19-02-2004)

Utterance:

The sixteen stripped-down monitors in Hill's "Inasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place", which range in size from the eyepiece of a camera to the dimensions of an adult rib cage, are set on a shelf recessed five feet into the wall, slightly below eye level. The size of each monitor corresponds to the size of the particular section of the body recorded on the video loop: a soft belly that rises and falls with each breath, a quadrant of a face with a peering eye.The arrangement of the monitors does not follow the logical organisation of a human skeleton. Representations of Hill's ear and arched foot lie side by side; tucked modestly behind them is an image of his groin. On a torso-size screen, smooth, taut skin stretches over the ridges of bone that shape the human back. The image fills the frame, and the monitor, given its equivalent size, is perceived as part of the body: an enclosure, a vessel. Monitor and image exist as a unified object, as representation, as a living thing.The long, nervelike wires attached to each monitor are bundled together like spinal chords and snaked along the shelf, to disappear from view at the back of the recess. Although it unites the system of monitors, this electrical network emphasizes that the body parts are presented as extremities, without a unifying torso. The hidden core to which the components of the body are attached serves as a metaphor for a human being's invisible, existential centre: the soul.

- ©MoMA

Image: Hill, Gary (1990). Inasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place. , : The Museum of Modern Art & Gary Hill []

Motivation:

Web: Inasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place (19-02-2004)

Prompt: simultaneous cities: Tokyo and Los Angeles

Catalyst:

[history] La Specola: anatomies in wax

(503) Rosalie Gascoigne: bricoleur

http://folksonomy.org.uk/?s=503

Simon Perkins (29-08-2005)

Utterance:

Claude Levi Strauss once described the artist as a bricoleur, the one who, when the rest of the nomadic tribe has moved on, remains among the discards of little value, the bric-a-brac which has been left behind by his/her more pragmatic kinsmen, those scraps of bright fabric, Pointed firesticks, a cracked cooking pot, chicken skulls. From these disparate objects the bricoleur creates a work of art something which pleases the eye, gives them a good 'read', as Rosalie Gascoigne described the way she looked and looked and looked again at her work in process. Nobody had a better eye than she for creating wonders from the 'inorganic refuse' of humanity and discards of nature: old faded Schweppes boxes, swan feathers, great grey sheets of corrugated iron abandoned in tips or tossed aside in the sun-burnt scrubby country around Canberra which she grew to love. She hated the word 'junk'. It was an insult to the treasures she found or begged, and lugged home to transform into works of subtle mystery, strong contrasts of textures, shapes and colours; beauty where one did not expect to find it. She says somewhere, (and incidentally I have never known an artist speak about their work with such endearing clarity) that she never used anything that had not been 'open to the weather'.

- ©Barbara Anderson

Image: Gascoigne, Rosalie (1999). Metropolis. Sydney, Australia: Art Gallery of New South Wales []

Motivation:

Prompt: Rauschenberg: design by improvisation

Book: O'Brien, Gregory, Thomas, Daniel, Anderson, Barbara. 2004 Rosalie Gascoigne: Plain Air, Wellington, NEW ZEALAND: City Gallery Wellington, in association with Victoria University Press. 0864734727

Catalyst:

[integration] Ebdon: pioneering broadcaster and bricoleur extraordinaire

(136) Multilogue: computer-mediated multi-party conversations

http://folksonomy.org.uk/?s=136

Simon Perkins (09-01-2004)

Utterance:

The dynamics of computer-mediated, written multi-party conversation may as easily bring enthusiasm as frustration to participants. A variety of computer-mediated communication (CMC) environments enjoy continued popularity as spaces for social interaction, in spite of bearing features that tend to produce incoherences in turn-taking and topic development (Herring, 1999). Communities using CMC for scholarly and educational purposes face the same contingencies of the medium, for better and worse. On the side of advantages, the suspension of the turn-taking norms of face-to-face interaction in CMC provides unique opportunities for a broader range of participants to contribute "simultaneous" turns to the exchange, while the persistence of the textual products makes it possible for individual contributors talking "at the same time" to be heard distinctly (Shank, 1993). Thus, in keeping with the assimilation of features of spoken interaction into a written medium, Shank suggests that Net communication is more than dialogue: it is a multilogue, a term which well describes the enthusiastic phases of engaged conversation over a shared field of knowledge on a scholarly mailinglist. The multilogical features of CMC are attractive for purposes of idea development. On the other hand, the drift towards topical incoherence will presumably be more disturbing in activities oriented towards scholarship and learning than in leisure oriented environments. On a scholarly mailinglist the joint development of knowledge and understanding is ideally a prominent part of the activity, but many participants find the collective dynamics of written conversation frustrating, with its tendency to cycle between concentrated beginnings and distracted endings. While it is true that users adapt their turn-taking practices to the medium so that there is by now a rich and still evolving repertoire to draw on for the re-mediation of turn coherence (Herring, 1999), topical coherence is more recalcitrant to management by participants.

Motivation:

Web: The emergence and decay of multilogue. Self-regulation of a scholarly mailinglist (09-01-2004)

Book: Shank, Gary. 1993 Abductive multiloguing: The semiotic dynamics of navigating the net. The Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture, 1(1), 1-13, , : .

Catalyst:

[structure] Wiki: information publishing and linking software

[technology] Customised collections of learning objects from multiple repositories

(299) Placeless Place: Transportable City

http://folksonomy.org.uk/?s=299

Simon Perkins (18-01-2005)

Utterance:

Some five years ago, Los Carpinteros began imagining a city without fixed geographical markers, and Ciudad Transportable (Transportable City) was subsequently erected withinâ€”and againstâ€”the Havana urban landscape in late 2000. True to its vocation, this conceptually nomadic (and nomadically conceptual) work has since traveled to geographically diverse urban centers such as New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Shanghai. [...]Mobile in scope and temporary by nature, tents inexorably carry with them notions of refuge and survival. Existing half way between personal clothing and architectural edifice, the protection of the body is central to theirraison d'Ãªtre, with all the connotations of regression that this invokes.

- ©Lilian Tone