Theres an interesting correlation with my triangles that directly relates to my dissertation. I want to get businesses to ‘free up their data’ and release it for people to use for visualisations or projects. To make businesses open up their source code. Taking the archOS system as an example, the data from the archOS is made available for the use in visualisations of the ammount of water used or the Co2 levels. I want to develop a method of getting data out of companies and freeing it up by putting it in the public domain. There will be a continuum of varying companies that I could approach. Another idea to run alongside my project is to becom ‘Mr API’ by aggregating APIs that free up data and use it for other uses such as the Google API.

Refs:
Urban XML
Cabspotting
Google APIs
GoldCorp case study

During my meeting with Chris regarding my space project there were some interesting ideas bounded about. For the project I would like to produce something based around the cycles I defined. There was some interesting points about Greenfield and Brownfield, the idea all space started out as ‘untouched’ land such as agricultural or ‘green’ land and slowly through cycles has evolved into brownfield or previously developed land which has been left to decay and therefore is ripe to be entered into another cycle. There is the archaeological quality to the cycles that could be manifested in many ways, either by using GPS tagging such as Mediascape to show the physical transformation of the space, almost like a historical TomTom where you could walk old routes and pathways through present day architecture and be faced by walls or obstructions. There is also an interesting project by ex-DAT/MLA student Chris O’Shea who produced a piece that mapped how many people walked through a specified route on a 3D plane by forming ‘canyons’ in the plane. I’m not very good at explaining things so its best if you see it for yourself here.

Other links to consider:
Cyber Geography

The first thing on ‘Speedy’s list of things to do for my project’ was to draw some triangles! Basically you pick out the major points of focus for your project and position yourself in the middle…then map out other projects within the same fields so to relate my work with existing projects. Its a good way of establishing a thoughts and idea process as well as starting to turn the theory cogs! My triangle(s) is(are) below:

Below is a list of all the projects I have associated with mine:
Wikipedia
Open Journal Systems
KBPublisher
Twiki
LibreSource
Asterisk
CodePlex
Open Office
KnowledgeTree
Subversion
Open-Xchange
Lotus Notes
Flickr
YouTube
MySpace
Google earth/maps
Pirate University
Public Domain Works

You can plot the transformation of the space in a very distinct cycle denoted by the diagrams below. There is a very clear cycle that relates to Foucault’s ‘Dispositif’ model of space. Foucault uses 3 points to explore complex situations:
1 - Establish and ‘emergency’ or ’situation’
2 - Establish ‘rules’, ‘plan’ or ’strategy’
3 - Develop a ‘pattern’
These can be mapped to the cycles I have demonstrated below in that the ’situation’ is the decay or lack of use of the space, the ‘rules’ are the plans for the redevelopment and the ‘pattern’ is the cycle itself which restarts itself.

The first cycle shows the transformation from 1900’s Drake Circus to mid 70’s Drake Circus shopping center. This shows two steps of decay, one accidental during the blitz and one to make way for the redevelopment.

The second cycle shows the transfromation from mid 70’s Drake Circus to the Drake Circus Shopping centre we have today. This cycle show two different types of decay where the structure was left for a period of time to naturally decay, unused. Then the second decay is due to the second redevelopment into the new Drake Circus.

Its finished! at last after 3 intensive days working solely in processing we have finished the workshop. It all ended with a presentation of the pieces using the green screen in the window on portland square. There is some footage of the presentations on its way along with a video documenting the 3 days but for now Adam took some photos for me and can be viewed here. Below is an Image of my final sketch (hopefully I will try to get it live on the web).

Here is just a quick demonstration of the shear extent of change that has taken place in the Drake Circus space:

One thing I have noticed looking through the history of Drake Circus is that it has always been recycled as a social space. When documenting the use of space for the Eden project there was a very clear divide between the uses where it once was an industrial clay pit closed off to the public and was then turned into a social, educational and botanical space in one swoop. Looking at the images below, central to the history of Drake Circus (throughout the early half of the 20th century at least) is the large ‘Guiness building’ in the center of the series of roundabouts known as Drake Circus. From the photographs you can see that this contains shops and a cafe or two. From this it has been recycled into a shopping complex and then recycled again into another (if not somewhat improved) shopping complex.

In order to document the space in some way, I took some photos of the space (all outside because the security guards get a bit aggro inside!) in similar positions to some of the historic photos in order to compare the physical change. The flickr set is below:

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I have also found some interesting video from the BBC archives which show the transformation of the space. Please remember all videos are property of the BBC and I am only collating sources as reference. I really don’t BBC lawyers issuing a cease and desist!

An extract from a BBC report on the demolition of the old Drake Circus shopping centre.

A BBC report on the concept and development of the new Drake Circus Shopping Centre.

A time lapse video of the Drake Circus build showing the physical transformation of the space.

So, I’ve been taking part in a 3 day processing workshop in order to improve my programming skills. As part of the workshop we have to produce visualisations for data streams from iDAT’s archOS system. I’ve been working on a simple 3D visualisation of the temperature readings from the sensors of Portland Square where a cube grows and shrinks according to the outside temperature over a 24 hour period. I also incorporated a visualisation of the time of day that the individual data was taken in the form of a light source that mimics the sun’s path through the sky. I am still working on this and hope to include some colour changing aspects to make it look nicer! At the end of the second day we got to test our visualisation on the Green Screen in the atria of Portland Square ( a huge LED mesh screen) and they all looked really good. I have some images of mine below.