links for 2009-11-23

A good exam­ple of artists cre­at­ing a con­text for cit­i­zens to par­tic­i­pate in the plan­ning of urban space. In 2008, the Parfyme col­lec­tive ran a ‘lab­o­ra­to­ry’ in Copen­hagen har­bor where peo­ple could come in and exper­i­ment with new uses for the area.

James Bri­dle showed this as an exam­ple of awe­some­ness dur­ing his Play­ful ’09 talk. Being a big fan of Pyn­chon’s Grav­i­ty’s Rain­bow, this blew me away. 760 illus­tra­tions, one for each page in the book. Awe­some indeed.

“Fabel designs and pro­duces par­tic­i­pa­to­ry con­texts for learn­ing that are intend­ed for change of atti­tude and behav­iours. […] Fabel call these meth­ods “wind tun­nels”, envi­ron­ments to chal­lenge the per­cep­tion of the tar­get group.” I was impressed with the talk Mol­ly Ränge gave at Play­ful ’09. She showed many exam­ples of projects done in Scan­di­navia that employ phys­i­cal games to cre­ate a con­text for learn­ing. A space I am very much inter­est­ed in explor­ing fur­ther with Hubbub.

Hav­ing worked on a silence lev­el data visu­al­iza­tion, this iPhone app that col­lects audio mea­sure­ments from around the world and aggre­gates them is of some inter­est to me. It could be inter­est­ing to plug their data into our Pro­cess­ing sketch…

1993 iPhones, 119717 throws, 48317.04 sec­onds of “hang­time”, and count­ing! Pos­si­bly the best game I have seen for the iPhone yet; one that requires play­ers to be very brave (or have spare iPhones lying around). Picked this up at Play­ful ’09.

“You should see what I see.” Indeed! I can­not begin to imag­ine what goes on inside Gondry’s head as he plans the whole video for the Chem­i­cal Broth­ers’ track ‘Star Gui­tar’ out on paper. The pro­to­type clip made with shoes, oranges and cans is a won­der­ful exam­ple of fast and cheap iter­a­tion that I plan on using with stu­dents the next time we talk about the role of sketch­ing in design. (Anoth­er Design by Fire 2009 left over, from Matt Jones’ talk.)

Anoth­er snip­pet left over from DxF 2009. It is one thing to dream about a tree that can be sus­pend­ed from a tree, but to make one is some­thing com­plete­ly else.

This was still lying around in my notes from Design by Fire 2009. James and Cen­nyd showed this clip as part of their pre­sen­ta­tion on the par­al­lels between inter­ac­tion design and music. It just blew me away. Appar­ent­ly there’s some­thing uni­ver­sal­ly human about this pen­ta­ton­ic scale.

I can relate to the tweet from Tom Coates that Rus­sel blogs about here. It’s (part of) the rea­son I’ve been hav­ing trou­ble get­ting back into blog­ging. I should just start throw­ing out frag­ments there again, I guess.