Wednesday, May 27. 2009
In-Formed [nadeemhaidary.com] is an impressive product design project that consists of three normal household objects which are augmented with statistical data. The aim is to seep quantitative data into the products that surround us to provide for a more intuitive context, and ultimately to create a more memorable and persuasive experience that might have the power to change people's behaviors and attitudes.
"Caloric Consumption" shows the caloric consumption per capita in various countries and regions visualized on a plate and fork. The information allows for the comparison of one's cultural eating habits with those from the rest of the world. For instance, the surface area of each of these plates is scaled in proportion to the amount of food consumed by the people who live in the region depicted on the plate. Each prong on the fork represents a different countries caloric intake per capita.
"Water Usage" is a water faucet that shows the relative amount of water consumed each time the faucet is used.
"Waste Production" consists of waste bin that measures the personal or household waste in terms of its weight in pounds. The weight of the garbage changes the angle of the waste bin, making it less inviting and giving one a visual cue as to how much trash has been thrown away.
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Via Information aethetics
Personal comment:
Des produits contenant des informations, en lien avec la fonction du produit.
Obama | One People [senseable.mit.edu] consists of two "dazzling" visualizations that celebrate Barack Obama and the people who supported him from all over the U.S. and the world. The maps are based on mobile phone call activity that characterize the inaugural crowd and answer the questions: "Who was in Washington, D.C. for President Obama's Inauguration Day?" and "When did they arrive, where did they go, and how long did they stay?"
The data analyzed consists of hourly counts of mobile phone calls served in Washington, D.C. and includes the origin of the phones involved in the calls. The map of Washington, D.C. is overlaid with a 3D color-coded animated surface of square tiles (1 tile represents an area of 150 x 150 meters). Each tile rises and turns red as call activity increases and likewise drops and turns yellow as activity decreases. On the left, a bar chart breaks down the call activity by showing the normalized contributions of calls from the 50 states and 138 foreign countries grouped by continent. The timeline at the bottom illustrates the overall trend of call activity in the city during the week of the Presidential Inauguration.
"Examining the relative increase in call activity by state reveals some unexpected results. The states with the strongest increase were the southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, with calls up to twelve times the normal levels. These are states that played a prominent role in the Civil Rights movement and notably are also so-called red states whose voting population went for the Republican candidate, John McCain. Other states with a ten-fold increase in call activity were Illinois, Barack Obama's home state, and Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, swing states which went blue, voting for President Obama. Most interestingly, comparing these results with U.S. demographic statistics shows that the percentage of African Americans in each U.S. state is a predominant factor determining increase in call activity and therefore participation in the event, which instead was not necessarily influenced by the state's proximity to Washington, D.C. or its political leaning." Other data analysis findings are described here.
Watch the three accompanying movies below.
See also World's Eyes: Mapping the Visual Traces of Tourism in Spain, Senseable City of New York, Real Time Rome and Mobile Phone Landscape Graz. Via datavisualization.ch.
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Via Information aesthetics
Personal comment:
Une cartographie "d'activité" de la ville (utilisation de téléphones portables lors du discours d'inauguration de B. Obama) qui révèle des "patterns" à priori invisibles. Ce type de visualisation de données extraites de la ville, développant de nouvelles cartes, une sorte d'"algorythmique du réel" (reality computation) va se développer de plus en plus, sur tout type de données.
[Image: Detail of a zoning map for New York City].
Earlier this month, mammoth – just two months old, but already one of the more interesting architecture blogs out there – cited climatological research that certain land use patterns can dramatically affect the formation of clouds above.
In other words, pastures, forests, suburbs, cities, farms, and so on, all affect the skies in very particular spatial ways. Deforestation, for instance, has "substantially altered cloud patterns” in the Amazon; specifically, we read that "patches of trees behave as 'green oceans' while cleared pastures act like 'continents'," generating a new marbling of the local atmosphere.
The same thing can be found to happen above cities, of course, with Hyde Park – however minimally – affecting rain fall over central Westminster. One man, realizing this, plants the exact species of tree in the exact location that will lead to diminished rainfall over his own nearby apartment.
Possibly sarcastically, mammoth predicts that BLDGBLOG will use this very research to "suggest a city built with the aim of controlling the cloud patterns above" – and I hate to be so predictable, but I think it's a great idea.
Instead of "being zoned 'R-3 Residential Low Density'," they continue, "a block might be zoned 'Cumulus H-2'." Or Mammatus H-3.
All new buildings have to be cleared with a Meteorological Bureau to ensure that they produce the right types of cloud. Atmospheric retrofitting comes to mean attaching bizarre cantilevers, ramps, and platforms to the roofs and walls of existing houses until the clouds look right. Sky vandals are people who deliberately misengineer the weather through inappropriate roof ornamentation.
Over generations, you thus sculpt vast, urban-scale volumes of air, guiding seasonal rain events toward certain building types – where, as mammoth's own earlier paper about fog farming suggests, "fog nets" might capture a new water source for the city.
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Via BLDBLOG
[Image: A Tribute to Sir Christopher Wren (1838) by Charles Robert Cockerell].
Yesterday in the architecture galleries of the V&A, I found myself looking at a painting by Charles Robert Cockerell called A Tribute to Christopher Wren, from 1838.
The image is a spatially overwhelming lamination of various buildings all designed by the legendary English architect; in a way, it's an early predecessor of today's total city renderings by firms like Foster & Partners and OMA: a complete metropolis designed in one fell swoop by a master architect.
What first came to mind, though, when seeing Cockerell's image, was something that I've mentioned on the blog before – as recently as in the interview with Jim Rossignol – which is that the era of the architectural monograph is over: perhaps we will soon enter the age of the architectural videogame.
In other words, what if Charles Robert Cockerell had not been a painter at all, but a senior games designer at Electronic Arts? His "tribute to Christopher Wren" would thus have looked quite different.
The architect's buildings would still be visually represented, all standing in the same place, but thanks to the effects of immersive digital media and not the intensely beautiful but nonetheless materially obsolete techniques of a different phase of art history.
Might we yet see, for instance, A Tribute to Sir John Soane, complete with scenes of zombie warfare beneath the arches of ruined bank halls, released by Joseph Gandy Designs Corporation™?
When it comes time to release a major monograph, MVRDV instead releases a videogame.
Bjarke Ingels has already released a comic book – the game, as another narrative medium, as simply another option for architectural publishing, can't be far off.
Learning about the buildings of Erich Mendelsohn... by hurling virtual grenades at them.
[Image: The Professor's Dream (1848) by Charles Robert Cockerell, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts].
Until then, here are some more or less unrelated close-up views of another of Cockerell's works, the otherworldly pyramids, domes, and steeples from The Professor's Dream (1848), courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts.
[Images: The Professor's Dream (1848), and several details thereof, by Charles Robert Cockerell, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts; say what you like about pastiche, but a part of me wishes that all cities looked like this].
Gaming our way through the future of architectural history.
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Via BLDBLOG
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