Tech Trends
Visualization of Activity in Realtime Shared Workspaces: Adapting to Nomadic Work Practices
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session William Jobe, Stefan Nilsson
Visualization of user activity has been shown to be imperative to the success of real-time groupware as a tool for coordination activities within a collaboration. While such awareness mechanisms have been studied within the CSCW field for decades, our study contributes by addressing the specific use context of the modern nomad. Modern nomadicity means working and studying through the use of ICTs anytime, anywhere. It also means being connected to a variety of networks during a day while engaged in mediated collaborative activities. In this paper, we are surveying use contexts of the modern nomad and collect data about the network performance in order to aid the design of time-critical awareness mechanisms. The groupware used in this study, described as a relaxed “what you see is what I see” (WYSIWIS)-system, has been developed with the aim of supporting small groups of workers and learners in sharing and collaboratively working with various types of digital objects such as images, videos and texts. We learn in what way common network issues such as high latency, jitter and packet drops impact the usability of time-critical awareness mechanisms such as telepointers and suggest a combination of technology and social processes, making real-time awareness mechanisms more accurately visualize user activity.
The Risk of Digital Craftsmanship: The Development of Digital Makers in Early Design Pedagogy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aaron Whelton
This paper explores novel pedagogical strategies for beginning digital makers of architecture. Digital makers are those that both design and fabricate digital artifacts in the development of architectural tectonics. In their first digital design course, students explore what David Pye describes as “the workmanship of risk” in the context of contemporary methods of digital design and fabrication. The paper utilizes casestudies of student design projects developed in Portland State University’s School of Architecture. The overall goal is to develop hybridized constructive digital artifacts. For the students this means exploring integrated and inclusive methods of modeling where multiple forms of fabrication categories, including both additive (forming & paneling) and subtractive (sectioning & contouring) are required to enter into a hybridized, indexical relationship with one another. These categories are representations of innovative tectonic systems that, when brought together, form architecture. This approach challenges the common use of digital fabrication to create singular elements that rely on machinery for the precision and the certainty that comes with computer numerical control. Placing contrasting forms of making in direct dialogue increases the risk of failure in the combined, final product and incentivizes students, to paraphrase Malcolm McCullough, to discover the skill and craft located at the meeting point of fabrication tool and digital media.
Heritage of Higher Art and Technical Studios - New Angles
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Philipp Shebarshin, Natalia Averianova
In contemporary world digital art, artists and designers create their works with the help of computers and modern technologies. This is becoming more and more popular. Today we see a rising interest of the public towards mobile and interactive art of different nature - video installations, performances, happenings, etc. That’s why we think that by implementing and using digital technologies and creating contemporary and interactive pieces of art and design it possible to attract more attention to art and design. We have worked with the heritage of the Constructivism movement of the beginning of the twentieth century in the Soviet Union at VKHUTEMAS and the result of this work, video reconstructions, can be considered works of digital art narrating about the heritage of the twentieth century in a modern way. The use of video gives the possibility to show the projects in a modern manner and makes them easier to understand for the general public. We practiced the method of 3D reconstruction in the videos that we made basing on the projects of Rodchenko’s students many of which were innovative for that time. Many of these projects changed the appearance of ordinary objects because they could transform, became portable or were multifunctional. We think that this approach of studying and showing the projects of design will help attract more attention to them and increase the interest of the general public which will impulse the development of design in the future.
Visualization of Architectural Experiences Using Heat Maps
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Luis Alfonso de la Fuente Suárez
Architectural experience is defined in this article as the manner in which people apprehend buildings, and the way they respond to them. A classification of architectural experiences is presented here, encompassing people’s sensory and emotional responses, the meanings that buildings evoque and the actions carried out in them. The main objectives of this article are, first, to introduce a method to discover the experiential schemes or ways of appreciating architecture works that people adopt when they observe, explore and analyze buildings, and second, to render tangible those phenomena through graphical representations or visualizations. In order to collect qualitative data about the experiences of participants with buildings, a think-aloud protocol was used, in which participants were asked to say whatever came to their minds as they visited a building. The use of the think-aloud protocol and a special graphic survey (proposed here) allowed a deeper comprehension of human experiences with architectural environments. Pilot test participants of think-aloud and the survey were architecture students who visited one of the two buildings selected. The phenomena experienced in built environments were made visible through visualizations of the survey results. Just like eye-tracking heat maps, these visualizations allowed seeing in space which areas or parts of a building produce specific experiences, as well as the intensity of those phenomena. A better understanding of what is considered beautiful, interesting, uncommon, ordered, etc.—and the relationships among them—was achieved through this method.
