The In-visible Envelope

Through the looking glass and beyond - SMH

2011-06-05T15:25:00.000+10:00

"In the library of the future, a robot will find the book you want, remove it from its shelf and deliver it to a service counter for your collection."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/through-the-looking-glass-and-beyond-20110603-1fkur.html#ixzz1ONOazuTZ

FK!!!

2011-06-02T22:11:00.000+10:00

Assignment 3 - Sources and Documentation

2011-02-15T17:32:00.000+11:00

UNSW Quadrangle

UNSW Library

UNSW University Mall

UNSW Library Lawn

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=7e6673ecfa5885bff59e6216a17dfd84

Pipes

Spatializing Photogenic Density - Assignment 3 Final

2011-02-09T03:46:00.000+11:00

This video shows the outcomes of a series of experiments involving Social Media, Yahoo! Pipes, and Photosynth. This explores the possibilities of creating new spaces and 3d objects through photogenic density, turning point clouds from Photosynth into useful information for design decisions, something which at the end i called a "photogenic viewing platform".

All the photosynth point clouds were left as-is and no alterations were done to them. Rather than trying to make precise reconstructions, this experiment favoured the uncontrolled and unintentional in what makes up social media.

Setbacks during this experiment included problems with the Yahoo! Pipe. Ultimately a mixture of Pipes and direct rss feeds were instigating, weakening the "mashiness" of the Pipe.

Assignment 3 Part 1 - Setting up the pipe

2011-01-25T01:24:00.001+11:00

Social Media Photo Firehose - Combines vendors from Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa, Photobucket, DeviantArt.

Mashiness Performance - BAD

Pipe returned with only 14 results, with results parsed from photobucket only. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=7e6673ecfa5885bff59e6216a17dfd84

Issues:

1) Flickr has over 16000 photos related to "UNSW," either Yahoo! Pipes will time-out due to the number of data in the feed, or Flickr will stop the requests comming from the API. It may not even be feasible to push 16000 photos into Photosynth even if the pipe can parse 16000 results into a feed.

2) A complex of operations was set up with multiple sites, particularly linking Google spreadsheets to loop call for page numbers. As a result there are weak links in the Pipe. For example, if Google Spreadsheets fails to parse then the rest of the URL will not work.

Solutions:

1) reduce "mashiness" of the pipe and cut the pipe into individual vendors.

2) reduce scope of images, perhaps shrink the data sample to highest rated 3000 images of "unsw"

XBox Kinect Hack - 3D Room Scanning and Model Construction

2011-01-19T22:39:00.001+11:00

Assignment 3 Proposal

2011-01-19T16:36:00.004+11:00

Proposal: To combine social media, photogammatery and spatial information systems to determine "Photogenic Densities"

Technologies Used: Social Media, Yahoo! Pipes, PhotoSynth+Toolkit and 3dsMax.

Social Media And GIS Mashup - Flickr, Panoramio, YouTube Densities.

Social Media and GIS Mashup - Flickr, Panoramio, YouTube Densities based on "likes", Parramatta and Blacktown.

Yahoo! Pipes Social Media Firehose.

Identification of the most photogenic facade in the search "UNSW Library"

My proposal aims to use Yahoo! Pipes to tap into the wealth of bottom-up information available in social media, visualize them using Photosynth, and overlay them onto a geographic plane or a geographic model.

The information can be used to determine desirable photogenic orientations, and/or popular spaces where people has been in. The key is not to get a overall accurate photosynth from social media, but to determine how one face/element/orientation etc is more detailed and popular than the other, thereby allowing us to see a range of densities and allowing us to make a judgement of photogenic facades and desirable/undesirable spaces.

Challenges:

1) Scale/Selection of Survey area(s) - To make a comparison, ie "UNSW" i will have to filter through more than one keyword and one set of synth, ie all the buildings and spaces in the whole UNSW Campus. First thing would be to identify general areas in the UNSW campus worth doing the query. 2 weeks will not cover every building in the entire campus. If i scale it down to an area or several areas, what justification do i have for that?

2) Variation of Detail - Finding a visual/geometric standard to determine photogenic rating. Amount of point cloud per search/ Amount of polygons per mesh?

3) Integrity and mashiness of the Yahoo! Pipe - Does the Yahoo! Pipe perform as expected? Can many different social media vendors (Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa, Photobucket etc)can be joined into one pipe, or are they all on separate file and "unmashed"

AR Museum Way-finding Model - FINAL

2011-01-19T01:12:00.000+11:00

Since the slice modifier fails to export into .ive format, ive taken a more brute approach where i simply scaled the model on the right keyframes. The model still suffered from a few setbacks mainly its refusal to animate or add texture to geometries that have many vertices. Nevertheless this is still an improvement from the last try.

AR Museum Way-finding Model - First Pass

2011-01-19T00:28:00.000+11:00

Here is a video of the ar model directly converted into .ive format. As you can see around 70% of the animation has been lost, rendering this device less useful.

PROBLEMS! Museum Way-finding Aid

2011-01-18T03:44:00.000+11:00

Looks like 70% of all the effects i intend to pull out of max is not going to make it into the model. A lot of explanation is required, so i just made a video of all the problems here.

Proposal: AR Museum Way-Finding Aid

2011-01-18T03:40:00.002+11:00

For assignment 2 i chose SANAA's 21st Century Museum at Kanazawa as the architecture in question. This museum has exhibition halls scattered throughout the building, producing many paths, and making way-finding difficult.

4 courtyards are integral to this building which brings light into the center and which also acts as visitor beacons. 4 markers are proposed to correspond to these 4 courtyards, which then highlights the paths through the adjacent exhibits linking through to other courtyards. These courtyards and paths will then be accordingly color coded.

My AR object is to function as a way-finding aid in an environment (the museum) in favor incorporating mixed-reality exhibits. Below is a video clip of the 3dsmax animations i intend to export and place on my markers.

3dsMax Animation Experiment

2011-01-16T01:50:00.001+11:00

Layar and Social Media Mashup

2011-01-13T20:24:00.000+11:00

1. Experiment in bringing my former Yahoo! Pipes of favourited Flickr images into Josh's RSS Gateway.

Link to my Pipe: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=7e6673ecfa5885bff59e6216a17dfd84

Evil George Builds His Own Prison - Final Result

2011-01-10T06:50:00.004+11:00

EVIL GEORGE BUILDS HIS OWN PRISON

This model is abstracted from a photogammatery of a George Bush doll. The distortion is based on the concept of the Klein Bottle and the infinite loop. What was once the hands, feet, head and back of George Bush is now stretched to an external shell, which then folds back onto himself. The evil actions coming out from his hands and his head now comes back, like karma, to build his own prison.

Evil George Builds His Own Prison - Development

2011-01-10T06:40:00.002+11:00

The model deviated from the lattice pattern i was experimenting with for two reasons. One was that the lattice modifier presented the worst case scenario STL Check. Second of all was that it completely knocked off any reading of the folding effect which i was trying to achieve as seen in the two images below.

PROCESS

1. Model was Resized to fit within 100mm cube.

2. Using a series of FFD Modifiers the hand, head, and back was attached to the exterior surface of the model as per the original bottom. Vertex snap and welding secured them to the surface.

3. The model was taken through a Optimise Modifier and then a MeshSmooth modifier to decrease and then smooth out the number of polygons. A series of STL Check modifier was stacked under Edit Mesh Modifiers to delete/edit the error polygons.

The final cleaned surface was then offset to the thickness using the Shell Modifier.

4. A series of spheres was placed around the model. A series of Booleans was done to cut the surface using these spheres.

Final Result!

STL Check

2011-01-10T01:54:00.000+11:00

Just made a discovery for fixing errors identified in the STl checker.

Adding a Edit Mesh modifier on top of your STL check modifier will allow you to edit the faces that are generating the errors. I mostly get the double faces error, so i would isolate this in the STL check before apply the edit-mesh modifier. Use a combination of Flip or unify, or just delete and redraw the error faces.

jackyyuen.com is up!

2011-01-09T17:14:00.001+11:00

Hey guys just finished my flash portfolio go check it out.

Click on the image to be redirected or just go to
http://www.jackyyuen.com

Evil George - Builds his own prison

2011-01-07T15:14:00.009+11:00

Evil George Builds his Own Prison

My sculpture aims to draw my George Bush photosynth (George Bush doll from Russell Lowe) and create a prison around him. An interesting thing occurred from photosynth noise where the synthed background attempted to close the model onto itself as shown below. From there i came with the idea of the Klein Bottle and the infinite fold, and using that form to invoke karma between George Bush and his prison (what goes around comes around).

Source: Uncleaned photosynth.

Inspiration 01. Klein Bottle.

Inspiration 02. M.C. Escher, Drawing Hands

M.C. Escher, Relativity, 1953

Mobius Sculpture - Random Works

Klein Bottle Opener

Mobius Sculpture

Bathsheba Grossman, A Twist in Time, 2002.

Pedro Reyes, Capula Klein's Bottle, 2007.

Mobius Sculpture

Hole House, Texas.

Using Modifiers Optimize and Lattice in 3dsMAX. I aim to attach his arm over the lattice in the weekend to achieve the Klien Bottle effect.

Evil George - Progress

2011-01-07T01:08:00.004+11:00

George Bush Model - With Background.

George Bush Model - Reconstructed: Octree Depth 6

George Bush Model - Reconstructed: Octree Depth 8

George Bush Model - Background Deleted Octree Depth 9

George Bush MAX Render - watertight

Evil George

2011-01-05T17:22:00.005+11:00

George Bush - From Russells office

93% Synthy

_______________________________________________________________

Error Shots: A previous attempt to shoot an object under the same lighting condition yielded only 27% synthy. The guess was the lack of color variation in the model taken, and the incompleteness of a 360o shoot through of the object.

______________________________________________________________

Postscript: Another attempt was taken on another more detailed and more color varied object. However, the model only yielded a 59% synthyness. it was with daylight that was streamed in from one direction (from the window). The contrast between highly illuminated and dimmed down photograhs separated the synths, even when the photos were level corrected in Photoshop.

PhotoSynth Dos:

- choose object with more detail and panorama (+50% synthy)
- change the color levels in photoshop before synthing (+6% synthy)

PhotoSynth Donts:

- take object in a variable light condition (-25% synthy, ie the overshadowed face will not match)

PHOTOGAMMERTY: Experiment 1 - Photosynth

2011-01-05T14:55:00.010+11:00

My interest in digital technologies has always been utilizing social media to mine for bottom-up information. Here is a short proposal for what Photosynth can do when you combine it with social media.

1. Extract "UNSW Library" Images from Flickr (Yahoo! Pipes)

2. Download RSS

3. Import Photos into Photosynth - We cannot get a full reconstruction of the whole building based solely on photos in Flickr alone, this collection is only 17% synthy. However we can determine that one angle or one facade is more photogenic than the other angles of this building, based on the density alone.

4. Identified that this facade is collectively the most potogenic for 'UNSW Library'.

Link to the Yahoo! Pipe

REDIWork

2010-11-11T21:13:00.002+11:00

Finally, the whole years work on 'The In-Visible Envelope' has come down to this. Part Business Plan, part Infrastructure, part Web2.0, part Mechanical. Something i call the REDIWork. Remote Distributed Workplace System.

Click on the image below to be redirected to the temporary website.

Renderings

2010-11-11T20:49:00.001+11:00

One last post before the finale

2010-10-23T15:51:00.003+11:00

The Precedents

RFID Sorting Systems

Go-Get Carshare

Augmented Reality, Teleconferencing

The Manifest

The Envelope - Current Vacant Office Spaces

The Infrastructure - 24hr Remote Infrastructure (Lockers for 4000 people, Data Storage for 4000 people, Security, IT, Concierge, GPS Bicycle and Segway, Central Receptionist/Librarian, Upgrades to Existing Library on site).

The Office Space - To User's Requirements.

Help needed...

2010-09-17T00:59:00.000+10:00

Does anyone know how to create a geometry from 3d polylines or contours in 3dsMax or Autocad, or do the same with the massing tool in Revit?

Library Experiments

2010-09-16T02:57:00.001+10:00

The Distributed Office

2010-09-07T03:38:00.001+10:00

Here is the interim proposal, along with the synopsis ripped off from the flash file. Patience with the flash file it takes a while to load.

Planning

To design a still tower for a society of mobile knowledge workers is redundant. A static, mono-located office space designed for said workers to perform his/her task is defunct considering the anywhere/anytime and ‘anyplace’ potentials that wireless mobility affords.

Is a new highrise office development required? A run by Yahoo! Pipes against market sources such as realcommercial.com.au and commercialrealestate.com.au reveals exact locations and rentable areas in Parramatta. Add those disparate envelopes up and you will find more vacant spaces than those designed for the Parramatta Masterplan.

In terms of the working environment, no new forms, materials, etc are required, simply upgrades and infrastructure additions. In this case, what are the still forms of space that is required in this new workspace system? Data Farms, Processor Farms, Central Receptionist Areas, Lockers, in short: remote infrastructure.

Field

Now that there is no top-down architectural hierarchy and order where there is bottom-up micro-coordination, how do you determine a space-syntax to the scheme?

Geographic features are fed into Yahoo Pipes and measured against end user ratings from bottom up sources such as Truelocal.com. A restaurant located along a nicely designed avenue that is close to public transport scores lightly compared to the strip of restaurants further north of Church Street in which the locals dub “Little Paris”. Fields of influence i.e. likely scope of travel an average user would like to spend travelling to from his/her workplace are extrapolated and densified against the end user ratings.

Routine

We have established that the relationship between the spaces and external features is one based on something similar to end user ratings and leeways, rather than top-down principles of order, form, scale etc.

We could now reverse engineer these score to predict likely usages of the vacant building floors, and in turn optimise the organisation of said spaces. For example, a wanderer who is mindset on getting a cup of coffee before work will “given the opportunity” likely end up in a space close to the coffee shop if there is no preconception on where he/she is going to work at. Similarly, A client coming into town requesting a face-to-face meeting will likely be held in a office space close to his/her hotel and near parking facilities.

Remote

A plethora of infrastructure upgrades is likely to be expected to sustain The Distributed Office. To effectively cater for the wireless, anytime/anywhere knowledge work society we will need to implement rigorous plug and play capabilities in the new teleoffices, including integrated access (via swipe card, smartphones etc), hardware docking stations, shared print facilities and teleconferencing.

Ironically, the only fixed, built function is that relating to the storage of vast data servers and processors located in the refurbished library. Here, traditional office services can integrate and operate in a more efficient manner. A librarian can adopt his/her expertise in indexing and archiving to store all hard-goods and information of multiple peoples and corporations. A centralised receptionist centre can operate like an IT support service, directing all incoming calls, emails, people etc to their respective locations. With this comes an invigorated role of the librarian and the receptionist; once considered as a low assistant based profession can now be redefined as an all-seeing archiver/indexer and a mover/shaker. Premium customers can opt for a concierge service where goods are brought directly to their place. However, the new consolidation entails drawbacks; longer working hours for library staff, and the library itself is expected to operate 24-hours.

Generally, nothing significant needs to be done to the existing vacant lots; besides minor infrastructure upgrades as mentioned.

Hub

Replacing hard information with soft information in the context of a library entails interesting dualities. Books are now seen as technology that behaves in replication and redundancy, one collection stacked upon each other, one edition after another. Social Media and bottom-up information however has the characteristics of renewal and reassembly, updating on the click of the refresh button. While books are collections of many individual objects of single strings of information, digital and social media are its binary opposite; one collection – continually refreshed information. The building lives in a refreshed state, responding to information, and also to infrastructural use (the coming and going of bikes, the fluctuations in network and computer usage, the amount of hard content stored and retrieved etc).

Creative Futures: Networks + Clusters

2010-08-29T14:52:00.000+10:00

Flashback to last semesters trip to one of the creative Sydney talks where people have been tracking the movements of Sydneys design community (literally) though GPS time lapse mapping. The interesting thing from the exercise they did was to show how the office was not just one place you visit everyday; in fact these team workers stop at multiple locations, crossing different suburbs and taking multiple long distance trips throughout the whole day.

Anywho, heres the link to the actual GPS overlay http://gpscreate.com/catch_and_release/

As a side note ive just discovered that the idea of a distributed office have been implemented in the past, and packaged into something Go-Get style called a "Telework Center"

To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder

2010-08-22T01:33:00.000+10:00

Montage, with images from own collection and quoted from Bernard Tschumi, "Architecture and Disjunction"

....And to continue again in the words of Tschumi; "Architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as by the enclosure of its walls." It doesnt matter how a space is designed and where it is placed; nothing exists between architecture, order and program.

Diagrams: Bernard Tschumi: Parc de la Villette. A programmatic brief is decomposed and reassembled prior to being scattered through an arbitary grid on the site. Images courtesy of Max-Roslin Melser.

As Tschumi stresses that there is no longer any relationship between architecture to program and meaning, can we say that there in the 21st century there is nothing you can draw between the task, the activity, the event and the architecture it is encompassed by, especially now that 'function' and 'cognition' is taken over by portable and wearable devices? Peel the thoughts of architecture away from neogeography, and you will find the most popular places happening in any odd locations; someones warehouse, a piece of road, etc.

Assume from the above that any location is good to place a space, as long as things will happen in them, forgoing ideas such as siting, site analysis, main views and vistas etc. Consider also that a 'brand new building' for a mobile set of knowledge workers is now defunct. In conclusion, there will not be a brand new CBD precinct physically built into the intended site.

Now consider dispersing space; if the idea of mobile working is that it could occur remotely, we have a premise that the new architecture for the wireless office is parts of here and there. And there are abundant existing office spaces opened for lease and sale. No new spaces are required. Herein lies the invisible envelope. The new building envelope. The distributed office building!

Net NLA - The Net Leasable Area (NLA) of the existing proposal (107,375 m2), minus the NLA of all the buildings required to be demolished for this masterplan (32,744 m2). Masterplan data sourced from Parramatta City Council.

Filtered via realcommercial.com and commercialrealestate.com with removal of duplicates, via Yahoo Pipes and ArcGIS.

Now what?

2010-06-25T03:16:00.000+10:00

The critique last week hit hard some of the realities of the project which i have been neglecting. Mainly the risk that has become evident now is that the architectural brief itself has almost disappeared.

How do i take these ideas of dynamic information and social technology into a brief and realise this into a project. This is something that needs some urgent dwelling into. At one point in experiment 3 a quick attempt of trying to architecturalize the concepts in experiment 1 and 2 proved insufficient, as trying to force four walls into something that cant be described by four walls is a challenging paradox, and a huge risk in the project.

My initial idea of a wireless and remotely activated office/work/play culture has now turned into an evaluation on information as reflected in networking. As a result, simply designing a 'wireless workplace' in the general sense (you can do your work wherever) does not do the research much justice. It was pointed out that 'Viral Places' are not simply about the geographic location but what happens in those co-ordinates that are shared and reflected upon in a social networked society, by people in turn existing in multiple geographic locations. Geographic location is irrelevant. The question is now how can you bring architecture into places and situations that dont want to be in one place?

The break is a good time to burn through some more various blogs out there and some readings. Also there needs to be more filtering of those experiment outcomes, with some to be discarded and some carried forward, and packaged to be more succinct rather than generalised. Either focus on dynamic information, or social media, but not both. Most importantly what the final outcome at the end of next semester is going to be; do i pursue in designing something in a location, to be viewed in plans, elevations, sections, models, renderings? Or maybe reduce the physical scope of the product; can say an installation in a foyer space, a short film, a short animation?

Final Marketing and Research Matrix

2010-06-24T16:27:00.000+10:00

See below for the final revised Research Matrix and 4 marketing images (the fifth one has already been included in this blog).

Also included below are 4 of the 5 marketing images related to the Experiments.

Information (Ubiquitous) - Research Documentation

2010-06-24T16:10:00.000+10:00

And see below for the documentation on the final experiment. Please be patient with this as there are tons of externally linked videos that flash has to load up on every page.

//Encountering difficulties uploading the flash file to my FTP, will have a go again later today//

Information (Ubiquitous) - Results

2010-06-24T16:00:00.000+10:00

Professional Practice callings meant im posting this one week late than expected, but here they are.

Above: Prototype 01 for spatialising information environments - User responsive AR.

Above: Prototype 02 for spatialising information environments - Remote Feeds (visual).

TURNING POINT: Experiment 03 - In-Formation(Ubiquitous).

2010-06-12T04:45:00.000+10:00

Having rigged a series of ActionScripts in Flash to enable multiple camera feeds into FLARToolkit, it occurred to me to revisit my blog, particularly focusing on the literature surrounding the definition of my problem space.

Previously i have been quoting the idea of a read-write environment with vague allusions to the Klein Bottle and Escher's hands drawing. I previously argued that these two examples reflect an environment that can describe a metamorphic concept of space and place, that one change results in another which consequently alters the former ad-infinitum. This metamorphosis occurs, as i had argued, because of the recency and updatability of information that is overlaid onto our habitat.

Escher, Drawing Hands

Klein Bottle

What was not envisaged was that the pilots in augmented reality can reflect a literal construction of metamorphic space;- assemblies where space turns upon itself much like the Klein Bottle. What if stairs can literally turn into itself once you reach a platform, alike Escher's stairs? What if reflection were distorted (a front view presented as a side view etc)? What if reflection was a reflection of a reflection, like standing in an enclosed mirrored box? See below for new pilot on the Moebius Effect.

Experiment 03 - In-Formation(Ubiquitious). Pilot Testings.

2010-06-11T11:03:00.000+10:00

Here are a series of short pilot testing of the ideas and concepts presented in the literature view previously.

Experiment 03 - In-Formation(Ubiquitious). Literature Review

2010-06-11T03:36:00.000+10:00

A brief literature review of the ideas and concepts behind experiment 03 regarding augmented reality and information space. Experiment results and demonstrations will come soon.

Literature Reviewed:

- Steven Spielberg, 2002 - Minority Report
- Mamoru Oshii, 1995 - Ghost in the Shell
- Keichii Matsuda, 2009 - augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

Submission 02 Documentation

2010-05-31T02:31:00.000+10:00

Update on The Research Matrix

Still 01 - Synopsis of Methodology

Still 02 - Experiment 01: Information (Collective) - Click (HERE) to be forwarded to the full resolution version stored in Deviantart.

Still 03 - Experiment 02: Information (Negotiated/Discursive) - Click (HERE) to be forwarded to the full resolution version stored in Deviantart.

Experiment 02 - Information(Negotiated/Discursive).

2010-05-31T00:03:00.000+10:00

Check out below video and stills for the main results of my experiment (in response to the questions raised in my previous post) concerning aggregated read-write representation of places as seen through social media. Main documentation of these images and experiments will be presented in the next post.

Brief Overview: - This experiment explores the virtual representation of geographic places by feeding a mash-up of Social Media API feeds into a Geographic Information System via Yahoo Pipes. Density maps are created based on the rating that each entry (point) received from its peers. This experiment led to the identification of "Viral Places";- features that are not physically/visibly centered but have achieved the same popularity in density in terms of its representation in social media environments.

Neo-Geography, Datascapes and 'The Public Sphere'

2010-05-19T20:34:00.000+10:00

"How can we understand the city in times of globalisation and explosion of scale? Do we lose control in these quantities or can we file its components and manipulate them? Let us imagine a city that is only based upon data. A city, that wants to be described only by information. A city, that doesn't know any topography, no context, purely huge, only data..."

'Metacity/Datatown', MVRDV, 1999 (film).

The Personal - 'Mapping the Credit Crunch' - BBC Radio 4. Maptube Engine.

The Absurd - 'Global McDonalds Big Mac Prices, 2007' - Maptube Engine.

"Geography is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance and one that is becoming known as 'Neogeography'...a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in a manner of, the practices of professional geographers. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of Neogeography tend towards the intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd, and/or/ artistic, but may just be idiosyncratic applications of 'real' geographic techniques."

Hudson.Smith et.al (2008). The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life. Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London), London.

In the discussion of a public sphere, Alan Mckee (2006) debunks the Modernist notion of the term 'public sphere' as a singular, progressive, and consolidated representation of a common culture/interest among all people. Commonality, according to the modernist doctrine, is the glue holding the elements of the public sphere together.

In reality, the fragmentation that have always existed in the public sphere are becoming more visible to each other; - beginning from the extension of voting rights to the rise of broadcast culture. What is once the homogeneous 'official public sphere' is now challenged by distinct interpretation of places based on personal and affiliated memory. If we discuss the issue of heritage in this light, we may ask what is important to people;- is it an iconic monumental building of 'cultural' significance, scribed by years of official documents and media as an object of historic relevance? Or is it a visually indistinct, un-noticeable, perhaps run-down building that is associated with an aggregate of intimate memories and experiences concerning the neighborhood in question?

Left: Place (official, iconic, civic, progressive) - Customs House Library, Circular Quay.

Right: Place (fragmented, memonic, negotiated) - Former Community Language School, Auburn.

On the other hand, an increasing amount of information we now consume digitally is user created, and the distinction between the professional and the amateur in broadcast culture is increasingly blurred thanks to the availability of content making and airing tools/techniques at little or no cost. Broadcasting has been transformed from a read-only to a read-write culture. What kind of representation of geography can we draw in light of this, keeping in mind on one hand the rise of user generated information and on the other the imperative to account for an indeterminate, fragmented, and negotiated nature of a 'public sphere.'

How can collective information contribute to a "bottom-up" approach in identifying a site/brief?

2010-05-09T23:46:00.000+10:00

Preamble:

Formerly, an approach to the design process involved having both the program and site as predetermined criteria. We are given a site to work on and the function that it is to be, and if we weren't given those we tell ourselves firstly that we want to build an X on a place Y. We then examine everything that place Y has on offer for a building X, or anything surprising that building X can offer to Y. Either case, we have made the prejudgment that building X is the best thing that could go on place Y or vice versa. We practice as a god-mode architect who says that "i want to build this building that would fit onto this site, believe me it would."

What if we leave either the site or the program as indeterminate factors? What if we know what we want to build, but lets leave the site out to the jury, especially if we are looking at a large scale building X that would have a significant impact to site Y. Rather than holding copious amounts of "community interaction sessions" with a few places the designers have in mind, what if we can tap into the vast and varying quantities of related information on the internet and translate those into a brief or identify a site?

Introduction:

“Web environments can be pictured as data bases that can be provided as a central service or can be built from the bottom up in decentralised fashion. To an extent this reflects our division between designers and users with central systems having designers in distinctly different roles from users.”

“The extent to which users and/or designers can create derivative products from the data no matter how it is created is part of the functionality of the system. This can range from entirely preconceived ways of manipulating the data in the search for patterns or networks to loose sets of rules that users and designers can invoke in creating searches for new kinds of patterns that are not predetermined.”

Hudson-Smith Et.al. Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web2.0 through Crowdsourcing. UCL Working Paper Series 143 (8). London: CASA

This experiment follows on from the initial project proposal of an live/work/play office precinct situated at Civic Place, Parramatta. The experiment would test the proposal of Parramatta as the best suited place for commerce oriented redevelopment by combining current market data related to "commerce oriented development." Three sets of information, (the employment market conditions, the commercial real estate market conditions, and the housing real estate conditions) have been scrutinized in order to arrive at a place for commercial oriented development at the LGA scale. In preference to real-time and flexible information, the experiment shyed away from "official data" arrived by sources such as census data or RPData as they tended to be skewed, outdated, or generalised.

Assumptions/Challenges:

High expectations of the data turning in favor of Parramatta LGA was anticipated as it is heavily backed by current metropolitan strategies as a key performance area for commercial redevelopment. It was also expected that market data would be easily obtainable in legible forms, that is, the data would immediately present us with a title, a figure of density and a time factor. These data were assumed to be obtainable in RSS format.

The outcome was that a significant portion of these data were skewed to highlight some areas, for example, premium listings where sellers paid extra to duplicate their advertisement were evident in expensive areas such as Sydney and North Sydney. To maintain the information asymmetry between buyers and real estate agents, many of the data were not available on RSS feeds, and the methodology was amended in order to strip out website data and reconvert them into useful RSS feeds.

Methodology:

Website information from various employment and real estate agencies were fed into Yahoo Pipes. A technique known as "mashup" was used to unpack and recombine the data into relevant formats, namely the location the intensity and a brief textual or pictorial description. These were then converted into RSS feeds which were able to be cut and organised into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was then translated into ArcGIS for analysis.

An examination into the general descriptive content of each LGA area when converted into RSS was done to determine the specific market climate for each area. For example, whether the area was compact and centralising where the advertisements showed an abundance of new, compact properties or whether the area was dispersed, decentralised where the advertisement showed an abundance of detached homes, old warehouses, etc.

Results:

The data was recombined and evaluated. Parramatta LGA was third as the most suited place to build an office complex. After Sydney City, the experiment identified Blacktown as a more suitable candidate for an office complex based on economic criteria. The experiment was affected by the quality of the data by the way that the broadcasters tended to hide information on pricing and size (residential), and also by the way that the data is deliberately skewed to make certain items more prominent than others.

Experiment 1.1 - 1.3 - Still representation of dynamic information

2010-04-23T11:26:00.000+10:00

Experiment 1.1 - Animating

Experiment 1.2 - Remove/Bend

Experiment 1.2 - Extrude/Pipe

Research Matrix Released

2010-04-23T03:01:00.000+10:00

Click on the image below to be redirected to the research matrix titled 'The In-visible Envelope' hosted on an deviantart account. Meanwhile i will need to scout for some internet space this is getting too unorganised.

Urban Tapestries. Social Tapestries: Public Authoring in the Wireless City

2010-04-13T21:42:00.000+10:00

Found a social media, geo-tagging experiment that has been done in the past involving mobile technology. Unfortunately, the project is beyond its active stage, all program source codes, live-feeds etc, are all gone.

"Urban Tapestries is an interactive, location-based wireless application allowing users to access and author location-specific multimedia content. It is a forum for sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving ephemeral races of peoples' presence in the geography of the city...Users will be able to add new locations, location content and the 'threads' which link individual locations to local contexts. Urban Tapestries privileges the experience of the user over typical 'publishing' systems which control and author the user experience." From the Urban Tapestries Website

Uses of Urban Tapestries will be able to select threads to follow or drift across all threads. Users are able to add locations be tagging the GPS co-ordinates and uploading it to a central server, along with related content such as text, sounds, movies and images. For more immediate social interactions, a time-limited street graffiti system will enable users to leave messages tagged to locations (a local event announcement, an observation). Users can create their own threads through an area (favorite places, significant places) and upload them for others to access.

"Urban Tapestries also aims to be a platform for anonymous people-to-people communication...An integral part of the system will be a time-limited 'street graffiti' system to enable people to leave messages for others that will fade with time." From: Giles Lane. Urban Tapestries: Wireless networking, public authoring and social knowledge.

All visual content here is the property of Proboscis.

What is a Mental Map?

2010-04-13T16:10:00.000+10:00

In the Lynch-ian tradition we have formerly ascribed mental maps of our city as an abstract reduction of its physical and visual properties. That the city can be read as an abstraction and re-organisation of its physical composition into five key elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks) remains the primary design research methodology of your typical site work. The problem is, whilst it is noted that these mental images are subject based and doesn’t sustain a overall reading of an urban context, we are still stuck in a Gehl-like tradition of putting a star on a landmark, coloring in an open space, draw lots of dots along a street edge, and finding the next darkest (but not too dark) marker to mark out a border around a collection of streets and lots. And if you want to claim that something different is experienced within that border you have just drawn, then you would hatch it in one of the brightest hatch-work available. We then make a bold claim that this representation - this abstraction - truly reflects what the whole population regards of the site. This, you say, is experienced by everybody, everyday, and in all situations.

Five elements: Paths, Edge, District, Node, Landmark. From: Kevin Lynch. Image of the City

In the mobile city, can we still represent mental maps on the premise of Physical Separation, Bounded-ness, Hierarchy, Presence, and Linkages that we scribe out on a scaled map background taken from Google Earth? Thanks to mobile communications technology, these have ceded in favor of subject based hyper-coordination and micro-coordination, which in turn makes all the concerns mentioned above more pressing. Nowadays, way-finding and sequencing are now replaced by temporal spatial orderings that is accomplished between users, the "where are you?" and "what are you doing now?" of wireless communications. Do things have to appear as what they are?

Above: Temporal distortion of Parramatta "The mobile phone enables their users to call and be called instantly and directly, making a 'real-time lifestyle' or 'just-in-time' lifestyle where the old schedule of minutes, hours, days and weeks becomes shattered into a constant stream of negotiations, reconfiguration, and rescheduling...By virtue of the cellular phone, meeting places have become indeterminate, fluid territories, rather than precise spots. As such, time space co-ordinates according to which mobile users move, meet each other and get together in urban space always remain uncertain, changeable, fluid and floating." From Alessandro Aurigi and Fiorella De Cindio. Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City.

What does it mean for boundary, distance and displacement when you can do things remotely, accessing multiple locations by one activity or by doing several functions on the same location. A recent experiment into peoples usage patterns on public Wi-Fi reveals that users do not perceive the technology in terms of its reach in space but as having presence only when they could access it. It is not visualized in a visuo-spatial image but more similar to notions of social network with strong and weak ties. The perception of the Wi-Fi bounded zone is not one of graduated change but more like the flicking of a switch, when the connection is lost.

Above: Geographic representation of location of Public WiFi zones in Parramatta and perceived reach (left) and reduction of these to 0 distance (right) "A person is thus perceived as being separated from another only by a switch to a network connection, not a physical distance in space." Katharine S. Willis. Places, Situations, and Connections.

Up Next, Precedents!

@Rosamond - SkinForm Project

2010-04-05T23:18:00.000+10:00

Was just mining for some more info and came across this technology done by our archrivals at UTS two years ago! Check out the skinform project. This really reminds me of Rosamond's motor and ballon experiment last week.

"We are developing an interactive pneumatic architecture that transforms dynamically in response to context. Its air-filled cells comprise a multilayered skin that allows for digitally controlled airflow to transform the shape in realtime. Collaborators are Master of Architecture candidates working in the Computational Environments Studio run by Joanne Jakovich, Bert Bongers and Jason McDermott at the University of Technology, Sydney [UTS]."

http://skinform.blogspot.com/
http://jakovich.net.au/skinform/skinform.php

Smartphones - Converging Real-time Media and Augmented Space

2010-04-05T16:52:00.000+10:00

First test on Live Feeds overlaid on Augmented Reality Applications (Acrossair) on an iPhone 3GS (not mine). Excuse the amateur quality and background noise. Do not make the same mistake of rushing and signing up for an iPhone 3G they can only display on a flat map layout.

Live feed information from both private and social media are uploaded and continually updated with geographic co-ordinates. The video shows instant information on live shows occurring today and also a collection of Panoramio photos that detemines the most popular locations for photo shoots (imagine yourself as a tourist attempting to instantly locate the most scenic location for a memorable photo opportunity).

The program has limited capabilities of displaying live twitter feeds, not to mention the lack of twitter users in Sydney. If we could imagine for a second that twitter feeds can be labelled and filtered according to keywords (location, activity, feelings, hours old the tweet) and updated on Augmented Geo-locations, could they reveal hidden, momentary, spots of activities which we may not have considered before?

Looks like TwittARound and flutter are likely contenders for these kind of possibilities..

Above: TwittARound augmented reality social networking browser.

Above: flutter - social media mapper

Augmented (hyper)Reality - Keichii Matsuda

2010-04-05T13:42:00.000+10:00

"The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it. " Sypnosis of the Author, Keichii Matsuda.

Augmented Reality systems shows the beginnings of a new relationship between information and inhabited space. Geographic Information Systems can not only mark the paths to an intended task, but also triggers the executions of instructions.

What if users of the city becomes closely registered to their portable devices and smartphones? What if your every task done is assisted by a continuous set of instructions? What if at any moment you can determine the current hotspots and activities occurring in a city, and have your digital counterparts precisely calculate, re-calibrate, and correct the steps you have to take in order to get you to your destination?

What if social principles of inhabiting city form is filtered out and discarded in favor of electronic tracking and information overlay? Would Gehl's principles of the optional and social activities be made redundant as we are more able to locate our friends and acquaintances on live feeds and at lesser public domains? Would the element of surprise and delight slowly fade out as we rely more on precise locations and instructions, and as we are continually updated on things occurring around us live?

Feel free to give comments. Will begin to explore visualisation and social media on digital devices in the next post.

Social Media and Urban Representation

2010-04-04T01:40:00.000+11:00

How can we visualize the spontaneous and the instantaneous in contemporary urban experience? What can we disseminate from the effects of wireless technologies and personal networks in urban cognition? How can we understand urban places that is shifted from geometric industrial models to personal social modes of values?

The ability to broadcast to a global audience is now available to private individuals at minimal costs. New forms of Social Media (Web 2.0) opens up new avenues for the metamorphic representation of city places. User broadcast information exists in a live form, and can be capable of instantaneous responses and spontaneous updates.

A simple web crawling exercise through these media will reveal hidden niches in an urban context. Doing a twitter search on your destination will reveal more lively activities occurring within the hour in the more unrecognizable places in the city. Instead of relying on fixed features in the city, portable devices can transmit and project destinations directly and calculate your travel. These time-based, feature maps could turn out to present a more accurate and continually updated representation of place in the city, compared to the generalised color blots on a brochure map or a council plan.

See below interactive flash clip for a brief summary. More on the topic of Augmented Space next.

Visit http://fav.me/d2mvva1 if the video doesnt load

What is a Wireless Environment?

2010-03-31T10:57:00.000+11:00

(left of the drawing) FIXED - LINEAR/PREMEDITATED:

You commit to doing one thing until the transaction is complete. You cannot change things or commit to exchanges during the course of this transaction;- information is only exchanged at the end of the transaction. You are fixed to one space as long as you are performing the function/task at hand (waiting for a call, phone conversation via landline). Fixed spaces and preconceived encounters is preferred to over instant status checks, (an agreed waiting time and space set hours ahead, a tendency to wait for a phone call) with a hope that the details and steps are agreed to and events do not go astray.

(right of the drawing) METAMORPHOSIS - ON-THE-FLY/SPONTANEOUS:

Your network changes in response to your changing of actions. You have access to live feeds and instantaneous capacities to receive and transmit updates on your current status. You can act on the “spur of the moment.” You may not decide to meet a person until the very last minute; if you do you may not decide where specifically to meet him/her until your intended/random destination is reached. If you need an update on something you can instantly send the signal to receive the relevant information, with a peace in mind.

A task can occur no-where and everywhere due to portability (drifting across different rooms with a cordless telecommunications device, mobile phone space? Laptop space?).

Empathy Exercise: Understanding Wireless Living by removing Wireless Living

2010-03-30T17:19:00.000+11:00

Objectives:

Describe the outcomes of living (under normal routines) that is suddenly removed from Portable/Network Technology.

Controls:

- No no electronic tags (ATM Card, Swipe Card)

- No wireless or WWW connections

o No Internet

o No Wireless Access or LAN

- No Portable Electronic Devices

o No MP3, Laptops, etc.

o Exception: Digital Camera as a recording device.

- No Broadcasting Electronics

o No TV, Radio

- Lilimit Telecommunications to Landline – Incoming Calls Only.

o No Mobile Phones.

Exercise Limit: Three (3) Days/Nights.

Data:

Day 1

Day2

Day3

Project Proposal: Mobility and the Wireless Office Culture.

2010-03-28T16:46:00.000+11:00

"In the age of information, it is information itself that becomes environmental."

- Marshall McLuhan

"We are becoming less like Saint Jerome, immobilized in his study among his accumulated possessions, less like Dilbert stuck at his computer in his cubicle, and more like cyborg foragers navigating through electronically mediated resource fields. We are relying less upon things (or people) being at fixed locations, or available on regular schedules, and more upon electronic tracking and navigation to locate what we want and take us to it. Our mental maps of buildings and cities are becoming less static records of fixed features and more dynamic representations of current conditions."

- William Mitchell, Me++: The cyborg self and the networked city.

The issue between contemporary developments in information technology and its possible implications in architecture/urban design would form the investigation inquiry in this project proposal for the final year.

Specific attention would be given to the cultural implications of wireless networked technology (WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth) and portable devices (netbooks, iPhones, Blackberry). An investigation into the concept of network (spatial or organisational?), would be formed via the use of Geospatial Information Systems and less conventional methods such as web-crawling and spidering. There is a possibility of re-imagining architecture in a digitally assisted augmented state, separate from cartesian rules of functional proximity and hierarchy.