Archive for the ‘space’ Category

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Location and the iPad

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Location is not Place, but the two concepts do intervolve. Or perhaps (when I’m feeling well-disposed to the world) they intertwingle.

So I’m interested in location, and for this reason will be buying the wifi+3G iPad, which has a comprehensive suite of location-awareness technologies, rather than the wifi iPad, which is also location-aware but less comprehensively so.

I keep seeing absurd fallacies being promulgated about the iPad and Assisted GPS. I think “promulgated” is a word that is now entirely reserved for absurd fallacies. Do you think anyone is out there promulgating enlightenment? If they are, they’re not posting to the Wired Gadget Lab weblog comment threads, anyway.

So here for your edification is the truth about A-GPS vs. GPS vs. wi-fi triangulation.

Note: this is dull, don’t bother reading it. I just had to get this rant down to stop me boring people with it in person.
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Posted in place, space | 6 Comments »

Mondrian’s Atelier and the 場 (ba) Principle

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Mondrian's AtelierIn this precis of Mondrian’s work, amongst the paintings is an image of this most personal creation; his atelier. A useful word to think about; an artist or designer’s studio or workshop, from the middle french astelier (woodpile). Images of this place are preserved: it has been reconstructed as well. With the reconstruction perhaps a little neater than the original – no loose parts there. This brings to mind my own virtual reconstruction of Utzon’s studio – with a similar result. The reconstruction is interesting, but sterile. It historicises its subject; you can’t inhabit it. And without an inhabitant it cannot be a 場 (ba).

Consider: if I had all the resources in the world, and could create a perfect reconstruction of Mondrian’s atelier in which to work, I would not want to. Nor Utzon’s, Hundertwasser’s, Tufte’s. They all produce wonderful work, and their studios are surely part of the process of its production; but these things are intensely personal. Once again: it’s not the result, it’s the principles that matter.

Posted in CCS-blog, art, creativity, design, place, space | No Comments »

Web3D 2008 Paper on The Design of Virtual Place for Creative Collaboration

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

I managed to put together what I think is a reasonable summary of my unpublished work so far on virtual place, in time for the Web3D 2008 deadline. The writing could of course always do with some polishing, but my main concern is that Web3D tends to be an engineering-focused conference and my paper is on human factors and design. However it is the venue that I want to get into – it’s the engineers that I want to convince! Otherwise we’ll just keep seeing virtual worlds built without real consideration of what it is that is being built – why this set of affordances? Why these cultural choices? So here it is; all anonymised for review but anyone reading this blog already knows my research so no point being coy about it here ;)

Posted in Interaction Design, collaboration, creativity, design, place, research log, space | 4 Comments »

Topography, movement, scale and skateboarding

Friday, January 11th, 2008

At a scale too fine to notice in a digital elevation model, riding a skateboard on the street articulates topography as kinetic energy.

Posted in research log, space | No Comments »

Honours Research Report

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

My Honours Research Report is here (9.5 MB PDF). Tomorrow I’ll be demoing the VR model of Utzon’s studio in Hallebæk born from a practice-based enquiry into the nature of collaborative place, one of the studies described in the report. So now, to bed ;)

Posted in CCS-blog, Interaction Design, collaboration, conferences, place, space, virtuality | No Comments »

Honours research presentation

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

Here are the slides from my presentation today, in HTML (with nice navigation buttons but maybe too big for some screens), and in Flash (click to go forwards, no way to go back, but automatically fits your screen).

If you’d like to print it out, here is the low-res (1.6 MB) PDF, or the high-res (10.3 MB) PDF  (40 slides on 5 pages).

Posted in CCS-blog, Interaction Design, collaboration, place, space, virtuality | 2 Comments »

Big Ups to the Virtual Systems and MultiMedia Massive

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

Just arrived at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct for the VSMM conference, the program committee of which has kindly consented to display my poster about the design of collaborative place. I bumped into the most excellent and prolific Eric Champion on the airtrain, so I’m in good company :)

My first task on arrival was to whack up the poster, and the second was to get online through QUT’s wifi. This turned out to be an absurd and tortuous process involving the generation of a unique password for me, the installation of a VPN client, a web gateway, two clickthrough legal agreements that I didn’t read, a password change and a re-login. Thank Drokk I’m not on Windows or it would have required a reboot as well. The lovely people at the registration desk made me my initial login and presented me with instructions – VSMM made it as painless as possible, it’s QUT that is the villain of this piece. This is after all the Creative Industries Precinct, the denizens of which are supposed to be inventing the cyberspace of the future right here and now. How they are to do it with one foot in a bucket of concrete baffles me.

Posted in CCS-blog, Interaction Design, collaboration, place, space, virtuality | No Comments »

Utzon’s Studio as a Collaborative Virtual Environment

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

I’ve been reading about various real collaborative places lately, in an attempt to discover what makes them work, and what elements of those can be applied to CVEs. The studios of the Dada movement at the turn of the last century must have been something; I’ve found a few images but not enough to do much with yet. However there’s a fabulous archive of imagery at the NSW State Library covering Jørn Utzon’s studio in Hellebæk, where his small team brought the Sydney Opera House into being. Enough in fact that I’ve been able to reconstruct scenes from the studio. IE2007 is coming up, so I’ve proposed to show the virtual reconstruction of the studio as a demo there (4.6MB PDF).

Update: the demo has been accepted – here is the revised edition for publication (3.7MB PDF).

Posted in CCS-blog, collaboration, place, space, virtuality | 1 Comment »

Research poster on Space, Place and Ba in Second Life

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Space, Place and Ba – my poster submission to VSMM2007.

Posted in collaboration, place, space, virtuality | No Comments »

Protected: Research Project Notes – email me for password

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

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