Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Find Me In Dead Tree: AD and Google Maps Hacks
The latest issue of Architectural Design is available now, entitled Manmade Modular Megastructures and edited by Jonathan Schwinge and my colleague Ian Abley. It contains an article Interchange Now by Robert Stewart from YRM on the modularisation of megastructural transport projects, which features a small preview of some of my simulation work.
Also in dead tree format, Google Maps Hacks by Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson is out now, and features a write-up of the Google Maps GPX Viewer which Steve and I made last summer. Fans of the viewer might like to play with the full-screen one I made here, but there are more exciting animated Google Maps GPX Viewers out there now if you're looking at it for serious use.
Arch-os vs Crystalpunks
I'm at the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture, and yesterday the lovely Arch-OS folks introduced us to the streams of sensor data they collect from their building.
Here's a quick sketch which maps the temperature of their "Atrium B" floors onto the floors of the office block which houses the Crystalpunk Workshop. Wilfried calls it coloured goo, and who am I to argue?
Inspiring Crystalpunks since Sept 2005: 11, 12 & 13 November
Almost at the same time, I read Paul at dataisnature's blog post about this and Wilfriend Hou Je Bek at socialfiction sent me an email about it. It looks so much fun, it would be rude not to spread the word, so here goes.
Next weekend there's a Crystalpunk Workshop in Utrecht which gathers together a great collection of people/ideas/things/activities, including a Processing/Wiring workshop with Manuel Dahm. From the Crystalpunk page...
A Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture Event
The Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture will from Friday 11 to Sunday 13 November be open for crystalpunks and public to work, learn and discuss what is needed to develop soft architecture. During this period we will be open for extensive amounts of time, while we will also provide for some inspirational juice open for the general public with these two events:
Program:
Saturday 12 November 15.00-18.00
Processing & Wiring Board Primer by Manuel Dahm Processing is a scripting tool, designed for teaching the basic of programming using a visual environment, that has become rapidly popular over the last 2 years. Making use of the fact that processing is open source other applications have extended its use. One of the examples being the Wiring boards, of which the workshop possess 5. These are easy to use tiny programmable interface boards that allow you for instance to read sensor data.In true Crystalpunk fashion this primer will be hands-on, allowing complete novices to learn from the more experienced.
This workshop is free, but you might want to bring your laptop (and install the software before you come) if you have one.
Manuel Dahm is the best interaction designer in the world.
http://www.dr3.dehttp://processing.org/
http://wiring.org.co/Sunday 13 November 15.00-18.00
Making It So - presentations by Pete Gomes, Paul Prudence, Inga Zimprich, Jo WalshPete Gomes is the best filmmaker in the world. He teaches Film and Architecture at the Architecture Association London, and has undertaken many experiments in physical GPS annotations of visible and invisible objects. When Pete talks other people listen http://www.mutantfilm.com
Paul Prudence is the best designer in the world. His blog Data=Nature is one of focalpoints in the developing genre of generative art. Recently his graphic work took Majorca by storm. He will show his VJ work as well as discuss the importance of images for crystalpunk [anti]theory. When Paul is on the jazz the audience wiggle their toes in admiration.
http://dataisnature.comInga Zimprich is the best artist in the world. Currently she is a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy, prototyping Think Tank, a speculative approach to social software. If the van Eyck academy didnt exist already it had to founded for this purpose.
http://www.thinktank.con-gress.netJo Walsh is the best semantic web developer in the world. Apart from being an excellent programmer her background in literature pays off in her capacity as a software critic. Currently she is working on Nodal, a framework for collaborative knowledge management and information distribution making use of semantic web technologies. Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW for her. ">http://frot.org
Perhaps I'll see you there (to be confirmed) but if not - let me know how it goes!
Architects, Social Networks and Hypertext
I've recently re-read Christopher Alexander's essay A City is not a Tree (found via City Of Sound) as research for a lecture I'm giving which will tentatively be titled Turning Architects into Programmers (or perhaps less aggressively, Programming for Architects). The first time I read it, in relation to a social network visualisation project, it triggered a brief exchange with Alasdair Turner, a lecturer in architectural computing at UCL, who was lecturing me in Methods of Synthetic Construction 2 from the Bartlett's MSc Virtual Environments at the time.
As part of the course, students were asked to visualise the social networks existing between past and present course staff and students, with an emphasis on the alumni database which was becoming increasingly difficult for one person to carry around in their head. The alumni visualisation was difficult due to incomplete information, but because it has always been online sites like the Wayback Machine at archive.org helped a little. Questioning the staff from the course also helped, though it became apparent that not everyone agreed how long they had been involved - some people even got their own involvement wrong!. It's worth pointing out that effective and general purpose social network visualisation is incredibly rare (please correct me if I'm wrong).
A lot of the social network visualisations started out by assuming that the social network of the course was a tree, i.e. that each person was a 'child' of a year group. I also did this, but I did make an attempt to bridge the gaps between years by developing a way to show that faculty members and part-time students are members of more than one year group. This was designed to emphasise the continuity provided by the course team, and also to illustrate how weak the ties were between year groups.
Christopher Alexander's essay is not just relevant to architecture. He is mainly talking about hierarchical trees, which Dan Hill notes are "the technical and experiential structure of most sites on the web." For me, the key point we can draw from Alexander is that despite the intuitive manner with which we can arrange and consider data in tree-form, these forms don't occur when things (in this case towns and cities) develop organically. It could be for this reason that the original pioneer of 'space syntax' methods Bill Hillier says, "I wouldn't design a city … I'd grow one."
As Alasdair pointed out to me when I first read the article, it is unfortunate that the web has come to be dominated by hierarchical trees, when the original concept of hypertext and http was about navigating through complex networks. (Note to self: Alasdair also mentioned the post-structuralists and the notion of Finnegan's Wake as the first 'hypertext' book.)
Alasdair was right, of course, that the original hypertext aim was not to have hierarchies of documents, but to cross-reference and interlink to your heart's content. Hence "world wide web", and not "world wide tree". This distinction is explicit in Tim Berners-Lee's initial hypertext proposal for CERN (for the uninitiated, this marks the birth of the world wide web). The brilliant thing here is that Berners-Lee actually begins by describing the web of social contact and collaboration which transcended CERN's organisational hierarchy in the late eighties.
Quote from Tim Berners-Lee's "Information Management: A Proposal" follows, apologies for length but it all seems relevant.
"CERN is a wonderful organisation. It involves several thousand people, many of them very creative, all working toward common goals. Although they are nominally organised into a hierarchical management structure, this does not constrain the way people will communicate, and share information, equipment and software across groups.
The actual observed working structure of the organisation is a multiply connected "web" whose interconnections evolve with time. In this environment, a new person arriving, or someone taking on a new task, is normally given a few hints as to who would be useful people to talk to. Information about what facilities exist and how to find out about them travels in the corridor gossip and occasional newsletters, and the details about what is required to be done spread in a similar way. All things considered, the result is remarkably successful, despite occasional misunderstandings and duplicated effort.
A problem, however, is the high turnover of people. When two years is a typical length of stay, information is constantly being lost. The introduction of the new people demands a fair amount of their time and that of others before they have any idea of what goes on. The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found."
The sad thing of course, apart from the increasingly hierarchical structuring of large sites, is that the web as we know it suffers from a high turnover of documents, much as Berners-Lee described a high turnover of people at CERN. As I pointed out in our crit session after the project, this problem afflicts the MSc too, since by design there is a yearly turnover of 90% of the people involved.
Back to alumni databases and social networks then, and to the defense of the tree, for a moment. I actually think that from an egocentric point of view a social network is most usefully considered a tree. That is, if I know two people already, it is of little consequence that they know each other. The only connections that matter to me are the ones which form the shortest paths between people I already know, and the people I want to know next. This is social networking in order to get ahead in business, or to make new friends, I admit.
On the other hand, considering the loops inside of who knows who, as well as the tree of who knows me, might allow a certain amount of insight to be gained into the nature of interactions across the whole social network. The interconnectedness of it all is what everyone was talking about in the crit, and what we're all stuck with trying to visualise and interpret in a meaningful way. Do self-organising structures hold the answer? I would argue not, but I'll leave that for another time.
I hope that we can be rid of the hierarchical straight-jacket that much of the web is in right now, and I think a combination of search engines and weblogs will get us there in the end (not to mention tagging systems like del.icio.us and Flickr which have emerged strongly since I first wrote this). Weblogs aren't just trendy, it's practically their whole raison d'etre to link and be linked, and we're seeing big businesses cotton on to this fact in a big way. If everyone had one, and used it (more than I use mine!), then maybe we would be able to map out social networks as we go, instead of trying to construct them after the fact.
Turning Architects into Programmers III
I need to find out how 'out there' Christopher Alexander was when he started talking about architecture in terms of graph theory (trees and lattices) in his famous paper A City is not a Tree. I know that my colleagues who carry out Space Syntax research in the VR Group at the Bartlett use graph theory heavily in their work, but if I talk to a group of recently trained architects, how many of them will know anything at all about this kind of analysis? If they already have a grasp of it, then it seems to be an ideal spring-board into talking about that classic of software engineering topics, algorithms and data structures. If not, then is it helpful or distracting to talk about both topics at the same time?
NB:- I'm currently only planning an hour long lecture under this heading, so to cover any of this stuff in serious detail will be impossible. I'm still interested in answering this kind of question anyway.
Turning Architects into Programmers II
Some more thoughts on turning Architects into Programmers.
I'm going to talk a little bit about "Hackers and Painters" by Paul Graham.
I can recommend reading the whole thing, if you haven't already. If you've not come across Paul Graham before, he's a LISP advocate, which means he does descend into bashing strongly-typed languages occasionally, but there is a lot of good stuff in there if you overlook the brief evangelism.
Here are some choice quotes if you really don't have the time to spare...
"What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They're not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better."
And...
"I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging.
For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn't hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do."
It's sobering reading for those of us who consider ourselves as hackers (or pirate dwarves, if you will), especially the parts about not forcing hackers to be engineers or researchers. I wonder if the other doctorate students on my course also consider themselves as hackers in the first instance and become research engineers as a concession to accepted job roles?
Turning Architects into Programmers
I'm preparing a lecture for architects interested in learning to program. In subsequent posts, I'll be writing some notes on the kinds of things I'll be talking about. These will include, but not be limited to, the following topics:
- Bottom-up vs. top-down methodologies (what Steven Johnson refers to in his book Emergence as "footprints not fiat")
- The relationship between parametric modelling and generative systems (including a tour through information theory - entropy/redundancy - and a discussion of degrees of freedom, dimensionality, etc.)
- The distinction between a drawing and a model, in the architectural and computer graphics sense.
I'll also be collecting links at delicious using the tag architectsandprogrammers.
Comments are open on this post, and I am open to suggestions. Any help (especially from architects-turned-programmers) will be gratefully received.
← Back to Home
© Random Etc.. Powered by WordPress using the DePo Skinny Theme.