Showing posts with label Research. Show all posts

Monday, August 06, 2007

Books layouts

Some book spreads from the three books mentioned below. Studies of grids pictures relating to text, different font sizes, hand-drawn sketches, architectural plans, photographs.

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Trying to find intresting books for inspiration, what better choice can someone have but looking at these three great publications. Truth is I have never been able to read them all but I think this is part of them too. They are great sources of inspiration, books that you can easily open randomly and read jumping around sections and chapters. The information can be read in various ways, linearly or randomly, refering from page to page and to different subjects / section. There are hidden stories to be discovered, clues to understand and look for more. Parallel stories or short narratives that develop in secret ways (and grids).
I am particularly enthousiastic about the ways that they manage to hold all this information (they are 1330+, 440+, 530+ pages each). Obviously I won't even try to get up to these sizes (I don't even have so much work!) but I would be interested on designing the book in such a way that can be read in different ways.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Research: Clothes-making Patterns

Two extracts from clothes-making patterns. On the top one the amount of information is massive, absolutely confusing and full of different lines. The original (these are just b&w scans) has also different coloured lines as well as different types of them like dashed, zig-zag, straight etc.
The second pattern is much simpler and most recent one. It obviously does not include as much information as the first one and is dedicated to a signle design for a woman's top. The shapes here are clear, the information is obvious and the ease of use is much better.
Legibility versus information then but for a personal opinion I would rather go for the top one and make my way through the info that I need to extract..

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Inspiration: Tauba Auerbach

great inspiring (mostly) typographic work from tauba auerbach

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Research: Poème Electronique

In 1958 Philips commend to Le Corbusier the construction of its Pavillion at the International Fair in Brusels, Belgium. Le Corbusier - Xenakis - Varese compound Sound and Image Technology, Architecture, Music and Poetry under the Poème Electronique.

The Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958 was designed in large part by Iannis Xenakis, at the time one of Le Corbusier's architectural assistants. The program in the pavilion during the World's Fair consisted of Edgard Varèse' Poème Electronique played through 400 loudspeakers, projected images and colored lights created by Le Corbusier, and Iannis Xenakis' Concrète PH played as an interlude between shows.

As Varèse later described it, the sound followed paths through the loudspeaker arrays, and groups of speakers were used to create effects such as reverberation. He said, "I heard my music literally projected into space."

Monday, April 16, 2007

Influences: Peter Eisenman - Casa Guardiola

great video studying Eisenman's Guardiola House and Deconstruction concepts..

Thursday, April 12, 2007

the Underpass: Materials Research

Theatre Square Schouwbergplein / West 8 / Rotterdam

Maritime Youth Centre / PLOT Architects / Copenhagen

Westblaak Skate Park/ Rotterdam

Memorial Bridge / 3LHD Architects / Croatia

Brogard Square / SLA Landscape Architects / Copenhagen

Blue Carpet / Thomas Heatherwick Studio / Newcastle, UK

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

the Underpass: History Research

The Colonels Walk Underpass was a pedestrian link from the Tanshelf community with the Pit Yard Colliery site of Prince of Wales.

The Community was built close to the colliery in order to house the people working in the colliery. A series of houses as well as small businesses, a theatre and a cinema, shops and small streets were developed inside this area which was a kind of a town within the greater town of Pontefract.

Most of the people (men) were working in the colliery. The approach to the colliery depending on where they needed to be was from a number of small pedestrian routes that were connecting the town of Pontefract with the Pit Yard. Colonels Walk was one of the most major roads of Tanshelf and the Colonels Walk Underpass one of the most used and important access points to the side of the Colliery. Its only use was from workers that would need to walk from their houses to work.

In the 1960’s, after the colliery was closed, the Tanshelf community had to be demolised as it mostly had small two-room houses in not the greatest state.

'..It was inevitable that the old terraced properties would have to be demolished, the houses were small and cramped, having mostly only two bedrooms, one small scullery, and one living room, with others a little larger having three bedrooms. There was no indoor bathroom and the toilet was situated in the back yard. Open coal fires provided a source of heat while the lighting was by gaslight and candles..'

Maurice Haigh from TANSHELF - A Bygone Community

People speak about the Tanshelf community with a sense of a great communal place, where people were feeling really close to their neighbours and their place. After a small telephone interview with mr. Peter Cookson (Pontefract Railway Society+Civic Society), I discovered myself this great sense that Tanshelf had and how people were feeling living in such a place.

'..Every street had a corner shop. At the bottom of our street was the fish and chip shop where Mrs Bessie Beaumont and Mrs Mabel Ellis worked. You always had a good laugh when you went in there. Opposite the fish shop was Tonks shop. Many a time we had been playing rounders in the street (men included) and somebody had sent the ball into Tonky’s shop and knocked the pop bottles over. Another game we played was skipping, with a clothes line the full width of the road.

Colonel’s Walk was all cobbles and every winter, after a fall of snow, it became the venue for sledging from top to bottom. It was like a sheet of glass until the council workmen came and salted it or one of our parents came out with shovels full of ashes and threw them all over the road..'

Maureen Holt (nee O’Hara) from FURTHER MEMORIES OF TANSHELF

You can read three very intresting stories from people that were part of the Tanshelf community taken from the Pontefract Digest publication. [story 01, story 02, story 03]

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Interaction Design

Interaction Design (IxD or IaD) is the discipline of defining and creating the behavior of technical, biological, environmental and organizational systems. Examples of these systems are software, products, mobile devices, environments, services, wearables, and even organizations themselves. Interaction design defines the behavior (the "interaction") of an artifact or system in response to its users over time.

Interaction designers are typically informed by user research, design with an emphasis on behavior as well as form, and evaluate design in terms of usability and emotional factors.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Research: Greyworld - The Layer

' The Layer is an art system created to articulate transit spaces through a series of contact sculptures.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel was the first installation in a public space to use the Layer system. We had been experimenting with different ways to articulate these transit spaces, from purely analogue methods of sound capture and distortion, to more complex means of digesting movement and form.

A long blue carpet was installed in the dark tunnel running underneath the Thames. Tiny sensors, beneath the carpet detected the direction weight and speed of pedestrians as they passed along its length and translated this information into a generatively produced sound environment. An album - 'Various Walkers' was created by recording these performances.

The installation was commissioned by the London Docklands Commission and sponsored by the Daily Telegraph.

The Layer has undergone many changes since the Greenwich foot tunnel. These allow both a wider range of inputs to be used, such as colour and shape as well as a large range of expressive outputs, such as light and generative display. Essentially though, it is the legibility of the installation to a broad public that remains paramount to us.

The work of art was also installed along the Millennium Bridge that runs across the Iffey in Dublin, Ireland. It gave pedestrians crossing an opportunity to crate and interact, simply by passing through the space. The installation was a counterpoint to another work of art, which we installed in the Guinness Storehouse.

We installed a bright blue carpet along the bridge, to signify that something was different in the centre of Dublin. We then embedded sensors in the carpet that responded to each footstep across the bridge, generating unexpected sounds and melodies - a plaintive piano phrase or the sounds of footsteps crunching through snow or sploshing through puddles. '

extract from Greyworld's website

Friday, February 23, 2007

Research: Project needs + Development

On the last seminar (21/02/07), we talked about research needs for our projects. We tried to identify them, expand them and interlink them in order to discover ways of expanding the projects.

‘What research needs to be done to help contextualise/ inform what you are doing?’

The main categories that were identified (in terms of areas of development and concern) are the following:

TECHNICAL
AESTHETIC
CULTURAL
SOCIAL / ECONOMIC
POLITICAL

The professional world (contemporary+historic) in graphic design and architecture, new technologies that can be explored and studied, tested and finally used, as well as the psychology of the client / designer on accepting new methods on multidisciplinary design projects, were just a few of the first questions of such a research.

In order to ‘discover’ new needs (or at least not obvious research needs) it would be a good idea to work backwards. The five categories that were mentioned before can act as targets and an expansion of their meaning could bring interesting results.

Let’s see a few images of such explorations, where each of the five words/ categories is expanded and explored through language.

'research' word map

'technical' word map

'social' word map

'political' word map

'economic' word map

'cultural' word map

'aesthetic' word map

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Alan Fletcher @ Design Museum

What an amazing exhibition. Went down to London last week and had the chance to see the Alan Fletcher exhibition at the Design Museum.

Very inspiring and full of fun, ideas and inspiration. I could feel the process of making things, the ideas flying around the designer and him just being able to grab them and make them alive.

You can easily say that it was mostly fun, the processes looked very obvious and the ideas were aiming straight to the point without any fancy stuff or really theoretical concepts. And this is what made everything so fantastic, so diverse and gave the flexibility for adaptation of different styles.

It was rather interesting seeing the actual works that I have been seeing in books, there nice and big for you to look at. Unfortunately I only managed to get to the Design Museum 45mins before it was closing although I felt I could stay in there for days..

some extras!

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Research: Detanicolain

A variation of the swiss typeface helvetica that concentrates the amount of ink that composes each character in a dot. in collaboration with jiri skala.

more info on detanicolain