Category: LookingOutwards-01

this is what I look like in the morning

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The project I want to discuss is the 9/11 museum designed by Local Projects, an experience design studio. The 9/11 museum is designed to be a museum of collective memories with a plurality of views. Visitors can record their reflection on 9/11 and the curators will integrate visitor responses into the exhibit. By the end of the exhibit, visitors may write a note of hope and remembrance, and these notes will be projected temporarily onto a space near the beam, then stored in the museum’s permanent digital archive.

I like this project because it changes the role of the visitors from passive receivers to active contributors in how the tragedy will be remembered. Conventionally, museums provide a singular and authoritative narrative, and all the work of collecting evidence and making analysis will be finished beforehand. However, because 9/11 is still influencing some of us in the present, incorporating ongoing stories from the public successfully addresses the unsettled nature of the subject. The rawness and variety of expressions send a clear message: the past is still present.

I am not sure exactly how many people are involved in the developing phase of the project, but I learned that the team is multidisciplinary and they usually put a different interdisciplinary team on each phase of a new project because the main focus shifts as they move on. Speaking about the technical aspect, I am not sure what softwares are used but the project involves a powerful database that frequently updates the most recent articles related to 9/11 and store newly introduced notes and video record. As for the inspiration, Jake Barton, the founder of Local Projects says that he was influenced by Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. He commented, “It was really an exercise in empathy, in trying to find the humanity of everyone involved.” I believe that this project points to a future where the museum is no longer a static, official, and definite place but a continuously evolving cluster of stories and memories from everyone and everywhere. I imagine the dynamic between the visitors, the installation, and the designers will change interestingly.

Before starting this course I had rather limited exposure to interactive projects. One project that I saw and was in awe of was my roommate’s interactive desktop wallpaper (no longer available on website).

My roommate had this “clock” that went through the different phases of the day and it did so beautifully. I always wondered what went into creating complex projects like this. At the time I was taking 15-112 so instead of feeling that seeing something amazing would be impossible, I was thinking about what went into its creation how it came to life.

When I saw it for the first time it wasn’t even the clock function that caught my attention – it was the intricate skyline/scenery and how the shadows and light glossed over the screen as it traveled through time. It was inspirational and got me to think about what the possibilities could be if I could learn how to create projects like these.

The word “computational projects” was first started off as questioning myself what it defines as. Computational defines as “the use of computers”, therefore I assumed any program or product that has been created by the technical ability of computers such as coding.

            Facebook.com; an online social networking service, allows users to sign up for free profiles and it connects friends, family and people through online. It also allows users to share pictures, music, videos, and posts to anyone who has signed up in the website.

            The founder of Facebook is a well-known billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has started off making the website with a group of his classmates (Eduardo Savarin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes) who he has met in Harvard. His classmates included a programmer, spokesman, and investor in the website.

Zuckerberg got the idea of Facebook by first making a site in Harvard which helped University students get to know one another better through online. It only took 2 weeks for Zuckerberg to build the first version of Facebook. However, this did not come at ease since he was accused for stealing the “idea” of an intended social networking site called Harvard connection.

            Facebook.com was developed by a program called PHP. PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and it’s a scripting language used for the development of web applications.

            Facebook’s future goal still lies in the reason why they built the website: connection. The main objective of Facebook is to give people the power to build community and bringing the world closer together. I admire the power Facebook brings to the world- enabling users to connect with the world easier than ever before and bringing comminutes together.

Looking Outward Assignment 1 Basics

One of my professors from the previous few years is currently a computational design student in the architecture program after working in the field for many years. The project that I am speaking about is one in which he was able to generate different swatches of neighborhood in Grasshopper for Rhino, which would fit into the urban
context of the neighborhood very well, yet not seem like it had been gridded like traditional urban planning. I really admire the project because it shows that the power of architecture (especially in relation to computationally generated architecture) is greater than just at the scale of the house. I believe he did it alone and took a semester. He used a lot of custom software. Was inspired by others in the field of Computational Design. I think it points to a future where computers can provide a baseline for how to design or rework parts of cities where we can quickly propose a multitude of opportunities for the neighborhood. The project is called Urban Synthesizer by Jinmo Rhee.