Seminar

Research

http://learningagreement.blogspot.com/

Curent work
noise Ning
Noise
Portrait of a Nation

Loads of links

Very briefly, this is work form MIT in America. It was project that mapped in real time the activity of users in a city. In this case Rome.

In essence what they did was use mobile technology such as Bluetooth and GPS to turn the city into a social network site. What I am starting to work on is using the idea of a city as a social network and applying some of these ideas and theories to H Building. This is involves number of difeferent elements. Alfred Korzybsk quote that the map is not teriorty is perhaps key here, in that the work will be about mapping the use of the building and how people interact with building and the spaces. This ties back into work such as the design of Harry Becks London Underground Map, where distances don't matter or the work of Edward Tufte, and the visualization of information.

The other element of this which I think is crucial is allowing users to interact with something in order to collect information about a space. What I have learnt over the last year, and in particular the last month, is to keep things simple with regards to using technology. So I will be looking to use ex sting Web 2.0 technology. For example an initial starting point was simply setting up a Blog or Twitter account in one part of the building and feeds into another area of the building which is displayed publicly. Another idea is using the Flickr tag method used by a site such as http://www.thechemicalbrothers.com/live
In regards to what information I will start to map and collect the basic starting point is I'm on an art and design course so text and images will be the key thing to collect initially.


http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wikicity-0830.html

http://senseable.mit.edu/wikicity/rome/

http://senseable.mit.edu/wikicity/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map-territory_relation

http://realtime.waag.org/

http://senseable.mit.edu/realtimerome/

http://www.senseofthecity.nl/sotce/sotc.jsp?cmd=autoplay

http://www.mlgk.nl/

http://www.carloratti.com/projects/015.htm

http://mobile.mit.edu/component/option,com_deeppockets/task,catShow/id,32/Itemid,76/

What I've been doing for the last two months

I had an initial six weeks worth of work with Noise Festival in Manchester, which has carried on. They are charity who run a biannual festival of new creative work by under 25's. Work is submitted and showcased online.

There site is here It's odd as I've referred to this site a lot throughout the past year. So was pleased to get the work. What has been enjoyable over last few weeks is to be able to test some of the ideas and research I've done over the past year.

As an example www.portraitofanation.net is a site I have designed for Noise festival in partnership with Heritage Lottery Funding and 17 city councils. Portrait of a Nation is a series of arts projects running across the UK for the next twelve months and to be showcased at a festival next year as part of Liverpool's Capital of Culture celebrations.

This is potentialy very exciting project. The idea is to provide a user generated content site that will showcase work for each city and the projects they are working. Ideally they could do this throughout the course of the whole year. There would be a combination of private areas where cities and projects can be worked on and a public area for contributuons from residents of the city.

So that is the basic pitch, I did the mock up visuals and a mock up of the site. Which was presented at a meeting to HLF and the Local Councils.

Update

I should really update this.
At the moment I have been mostly getting pissed off with a PHP form that should have been finished weeks ago but has been coded it in a stupid, bizarre way; getting exteremly worried about this site and the fact I've not done any work on it for nearly a month.

Oh I've also talked to the head of BBC interactive department and been given the contact details for the head of Google Maps in the UK.

I'll update this porperly over the weekend.