Planetaki Planet Future Interactions

Data-driven, realtime advertising: The aura of approach

2008-08-20T09:02:40+00:00

So there I was in my London hotel one morning last week, working my way through croissant and coffee, and thumbing idly and without much interest through the free Telegraph that had been deposited at my door.

The hotel coffee wasn’t really doing it for me - it’s no Flat White, that’s for sure - and I only really perked up when I came to this British Airways ad.

The subtext of the ad is, of course, the chaos BA’s inflicted on travelers since its move into the new Terminal 5, and beneath that Heathrow’s horrible longterm reputation as an abattoir of on-time departures. Clearly, the ad’s objective is to reassure a flying public already wary of the brand-new, £4.3 billion terminal - once burned, and so on. There’s nothing in and of itself so very engaging about this, but the mode BA (or their agency) chose to drive the message home is of intense interest to me: gathering actual use data, foregrounding it in the ad copy at high resolution, and publishing within hours.

This is how the ad reads: “YESTERDAY AT T5 AVERAGE TIME THROUGH SECURITY WAS 4.7 MINS. This picture was taken at 9:44am yesterday and shows Amanda Gemmill on her way to Beijing to watch her boyfriend compete in the Men’s Eight Rowing Final. 4.7 minutes was the average time the 842 customers we asked told us it took them to pass through Security yesterday, between 6am and 2pm. We had to stop at 2pm so we could make this ad.”

That last line, even apart from its annoyingly coy self-awareness, reads like a dispatch from some rapidly obsolescing culture, doesn’t it? Because every other aspect of the ad is about as contemporary as it’s possible to be, a clear transitional step toward the sensor-fed, data-driven, realtime Minority Report scenario. In fact, it’s not so very far from the fully dynamic Times Square adscape that GSAPP students Matt Worsnick and Evan Allen envisioned for their thesis project (and which I discussed in “Urban Computing and its Discontents“).

All that really remains is for embedded sensors to replace the clipboard-bearing interns importuning tourists, and for the flimsy pulp the Telegraph is printed on to give way to some kind of networked display surface, and BA’s copywriters can substitute an elegant little Mad Lib for their coyness: “It took [number] customers an average time of [time] to pass through Terminal 5 security during the last hour.”

You know, Lev Manovich, in his “The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada,” describes Lars Spuybroek’s 1993 Water Pavilion like this: “Its continuously changing surfaces illustrate the key effect of a computer revolution: substitution of every constant by a variable.” He’s talking about architecture, but the point is just as true of anything that’s become digital, dynamic, and networked. And that’s just what I see happening here, albeit incrementally and hesitantly. I feel like I’ve caught a glimpse of the Missing Link.

The Tube Panorama

2008-08-20T07:33:49+00:00

The average speed of a Tube train in London is 33 km per hour (20.5mph) - including station stops. This makes capturing a panorama on the Tube tricky due to the movement of the train. Luckily these average figures don't really tell the full story and the Tube is often subject to delays and periods of unexplained stoppages in tunnels.

Thus during a particular long delay between Mornington crescent and Camden Town we were able to fully assemble our panoramic rig and capture the resulting panorama.

View the panorama of The Tube, London (2.9Mb).

Defensible space in Peru

2008-08-20T07:20:12+00:00

Defensible space produced with lower-end means in Cuzco, Peru: shards of glass and cactus as a deterrent to jump over that wall. The next occurence is less complex but also shows the use of glass:

Ethnographic outputs for design

2008-08-20T07:20:12+00:00

Working lately on how a course and a seminar concerning how ethnography can produce relevant and adequate material for design, I read “The ‘adequate’ design of ethnographic outputs for practice: some explorations of the characteristics of design resources” (by Tim Diggins & Peter Tolmie) with great interest. Published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing in 2003, it used to sit on my laptop for ages and I finally got time to peruse it properly.

The paper deals with the diﬃculties of making good use of ethnographic output in multidisciplinary user-centred design team and discusses some pertinent observations about the kind of characteristics the result may take for a successful collaboration between designers and UX researchers. Although they acknowledge there is no overall consensus concerning this question, the authors acknowledge the importance of employing diagrams as representational devices. Which reminds me of this other paper by Hughes et al. entitled “Moving Out from the Control Room: Ethnography in System Design” which claimed that “The output of ethnographic analyses are typically discursive and lengthy, looking nothing like the blueprint diagrams which are de rigeur in systems engineering“.

After an analysis of few ethnographically-inspired diagrams, the authors nail out the characteristics and problems that can be encountered. They propose their own representational vehicle along with an organizational solution:

“so that a particular formulation of ethnographic material is locally (indexically) relevant, it must have provide for mutual appopriateness among the interested parties (i.e. the design team). And mutual appropriateness is something that is worked up in situ between the ethnographer and designer, rather than something open to generic pre-
formulation. The grounded innovation map was, for us, a mutually appropriate means of representing the ethnographic work for design, and it was designed and redesigned by us according to current need. (…) It’s worth noting that the actual work of arriving at a mutually appropriate (and mutually acceptable) form, is arguably the most important output of the formulation itself – it is in this collaborative design and negotiation that some of the most important transfer of understandings can take place.
(…)
The interest is not in exporting detail, but rather in supporting the provision of information that is relevant and meaningful for the purposes in hand. At the same time it is important not to consider these devices to be oﬀering generalisations to cover all ends (…) it is a mistake to presume that generic claims will be relevant and meaningful to just any particular design enterprise
(…)
This also forcefully underscores the importance of colocating designers and ethnographers on the same design teams.“

They then describe the different characteristics of such representation (that they the “grounded innovation map” as represented above):

Form: economy (appropriate for its presentational use, whether screen-based or on paper), appropriate format (to a given subset designers)

Use: ordering & logic of practice (how the representation is delivered), indexicality (should have
internal features that can be pointed out and explicated in a variety of ways, both in terms of occasioning particular ethnographic accounts and/or recollections for debriefing), mnemonicity (a resource for a member of the design team, for calling to mind instances from the fieldwork)

Embededness: iconicity (physical resource and support for talking about
the ethnography in multiple settings), sequentiality and organisational accountability (serve to show that certain kinds of work and collaboration have been done), integration (provide common resources for those right across a multidisciplinary/multi-organisational project)

Warnings: reductivity (it may be seen to replace the diversity and irreducibility of the fieldwork observations.), constraint (the local groupings and categorisations within
the representation may come to have too great a significance and become constraints on further interrogation of the fieldwork and thinking about the design space.)

Strategies for coping with warnings: change (engendering a lack of attachment to a
particular phase of the representation by continual editing and change), instantiation (the deliberate bringing-up of ‘difficult’ instances that cut across the local categorisation), open-endedness/incompleteness (the deliberate avoidance of once-and-for-all formulations that are presumed to ‘explain’ the domain for all purposes), self-insufficiency (Making sure that the representation is not self-suﬃcient, but instead requires either a locally gathered competence with it or an accompanying explanation).

Why do I blog this? always struck by how this topic is rarely discussed on depth in various UX/IxD/HCI documentation, I am starting to collect material about it to go beyond the current practices. I do admit that some of the ethnographically-inspired research I’ve dealt with lately were not that imaginative in terms of output and I want to change this. Perhaps it can be caused by the client (who want above all a report with text, text and text) but I am sure one can iron out more adequate material. I generally use lots of pictures in my report too and some higher-level diagrams but it’s always good to have some pointers and guidelines about how to craft them more nicely.

On a side note, I am wondering about the importance of providing both primary (pictures, narratives, video excerpts) and secondary data (higher-level representations such as diagrams). Combining both in a topic-map way could be a solution, as described in the paper.

Finally, I found interesting here the notion of organizational solution, with the UX researcher(s) and designer(s) working together to produce this output. Too often both are working in different units and not producing something together.

Diggins, Tim, and Peter Tolmie (2003) “The ‘adequate’ design of ethnographic outputs for practice: some explorations of the characteristics of design resources” in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Volume 7 (3-4) July.

Links for 2008-08-19 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-20T05:34:28+00:00

Archigram: David Greene Revisited [Flickr]
Creative Input: The Role of Culture Occupations in the Economy During the 1990s
"This study analyzes the extent to which culture workers were employed outside of culture industries during the 1990s, for example in manufacturing industries or business services."
Visual urban data slides [tecznotes]
"We think in the very near future, it will become cheaper for cities to publish raw data and let citizens do their own analysis with IT in a support/enabling/superhero role. Our argument is not about "democratizing" anything and the political baggage that rides along with such terminology, it's about responding to changing costs. "
Graphic Anatomy of Atelier Bow-Wow [A Daily Dose of Architecture]
"... Blown away after perusing the drawings in (Atelier Bow Wow's) latest book, Graphic Anatomy, at a bookstore a couple weeks ago. The thorough mix of working drawing, perspective drawing, and entourage is a novel combination of well-established drawing conventions. They're beautiful in their own right." Absolutely. Have resisted this book so far, but not sure how much longer.
The "Endless Accident Events" of Los Angeles [BLDGBLOG]
"Artist Luther Thie's proposed project LA Interchange would install a "gigantic public water fountain" at the intersection of L.A.'s Harbor and Santa Monica Freeways – and then use the fountain's water supply as a way to graph traffic accidents and fatalities occurring on highways throughout the greater L.A. area." Inc. good thoughts on extreme signage.
New breed of 'net newsers' shape US media habits, says Pew report [guardian.co.uk]
"A new generation of well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according to new research."
Abject British Dollhouse Collectors Now Know Who To Blame: Rachel Whiteread [Daddy Types]
"The artist has arranged the hundreds of old dollhouses into Place (Village), an eerie, sad, even haunting tableau. The lights are on all over the little doll house town, but nobody's home. It's like the set of an M. Night Shyamalan movie that didn't totally suck, if such a thing were possible. Of course, it's not, but such is the power of the artist that she can, for a brief moment, allow us to dream."

Finn number

2008-08-19T20:01:29+00:00

Got me a new phone number. Email if you must have it, mes petites chemises.

Barangaroo Tomason (超芸術トマソン)

2008-08-19T14:37:47+00:00

Greg Allen posted about the concept of 'tomason' a while ago, inspired by the fabulous Tokyo-based architectural practice Atelier Bow Wow and their relentless documentation of the the city and its quotidian architectural foibles, in books like Made in Tokyo and Pet Architecture. He described the thomason (超芸術トマソン) thus:

"Made in Toyko was about ridiculous hybrids: a department store with a driving school on the roof; a cement factory integrated with the workers' dorms. They called these ridiculous, pragmatic spatial phenomena dame [dah-may] architecture, using the Japanese term for 'no good'. Such ad hoc, aggressively undesigned accidents stick in my mind as I read about Tomason [also spelled Thomason and Thomasson in English]. If dame architecture is the awkward result of relentless functionality, Tomason are the useless, abandoned leftovers. Stairs to nowhere are a favorite. Bricked up windows are a close second. Tomason are the flashings and detritus of the incessant churn of building, destruction, and redevelopment that characterizes the Japanese city. No clean slates here, no way ..."

"The term comes from the art & architecture collective formed in 1986 known as Rojo Kansatsu [Roadside Observation], which counted the author/artist Akasegawa Genpei as a founding member. Rojo's inspiration was Gary Thomasson, who was given the biggest contract ever in Japanese baseball in 1981-2, only it turned out he couldn't hit; then he blew out his knee. He was a giant, useless lump on the bench." [greg.org, my emphasis]

The photos you see here are of a tomason I'm particularly fond of, found down the road from work in Sydney. It's a sequence of steps to nowhere, with the entrance and exit long bricked-up. There's no way in, there's no way out. It just sits there embedded in the sandstone. The base is thoroughly bricked-up, ensuring no-one can climb into the section in the middle, which presumably would've taken too much brick to warrant fully enclosing.

As a tomason, it's not exactly a remant of Tokyo-pace redevelopment; more some long lost relic of an early wave of urban development that had paused a long time ago.

It's on Hickson Road, as part of the extraordinary sandstone wall which curves right round the contours of the harbour here, part of the area now known as Barangaroo (more photos here), all the way to the Harbour Bridge. The wall was once host to a series of sky-bridges, comprising a form of connective tissue between the wharves of the harbour and Millers Point and the rest of The Rocks up on the hill. The tomason is tucked in next to the two remaining arched bridges at this point.

Browing some New South Wales state archives, I came across a couple of relevant images: the first showing the construction of the major sandstone wall along what would become Hickson Road (I think) and the second showing the construction of the adjacent bridge, taken in 1911.

Note the steps aren't visible in this photograph. Interestingly, note that also the houses on the street above the wall (High Street, appropriately enough) remain fairly unchanged, at least structurally, though their backdrop is rather different now. Big fan of these houses; more to follow.

Who knows if the steps were bricked up as part of the bridge construction, or afterwards. Either way, I declare them Sydney tomason. As the Barangaroo development unfolds, I'm quite clean to plant trees or a green wall in it, or use it as temporary exhibition space, bounded as it now is on all sides.

On Tomason, Or the flipside of dame architecture [greg.org]
Thomason group on Flickr

Yahoo-like logo

2008-08-19T11:39:09+00:00

Does that yahoo-like logo seen in Cuzco (Peru) help people to be more confident with the product/service delivered in that shop? The reliance on existing font to promote your brand always amazes me.

lightning

2008-08-19T10:38:40+00:00

Lightning turns the sky into graph paper. L-- shouts 'this way,' and his bright eyes target me with reflected horizontals and verticals. The thunder plays four/four in my gut. We trip on curbs and scrape along walls, running - ricocheting - down narrow city lanes. There's a deeper sound, God making a plosive, the opening of whale song, and then light, and I realise it's another negentropy bomb, on the next street. Nothing for a second. In the gloom the city looks identical but raised to a higher octave. Potential. 4. 3. 2. 1. Then the world exhales and drops into regularity. A creak as the building next to us attempts to adjust to the sudden order imposed on its far side. The crystal structure spreads, architecture aligning, physics gentrifying, roads straightening, square paving slabs unfolding from one another. Another creak and a slump this time, L-- is caught in dust and rubble. I crouch over him; there's blood on my hands as I hold his head and the lightning is the same shape as his body. 'They're homogenising us out of existence,' he says. His teeth are red. 'Find the Deterritorial Army. Tell them the layers of emergence are becoming too tightly coupled. Tell them objects are no longer sufficiently mobile on the substrate. Don't wait.' It smells of wet brick; mysteriously I think of ferns. L--'s blood is thickening into hexagons. I turn and run.

Imagining the Recursive City: Explorations in Urban Simulacra

2008-08-19T08:10:49+00:00

IMAGINING THE RECURSIVE CITY: EXPLORATIONS IN URBAN SIMULACRA by Prof Mike Batty and Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith

Cities are microcosms of societies, worlds within worlds, which repeat themselves at different spatial scales and over different time horizons. In this essay, we argue that such recursion is taken to an entirely new level in the digital age where we can represent cities numerically, embed them within computers, scale and distort their representations so that we can embed them within one another, even believing them to be ‘computers’ in their own right.

We begin with the conundrum of recursion, showing how its occurrence in cities through spatial similarity at different scales, leads to worlds within worlds. We illustrate these ideas with a large-scale digital representation of the core of a world city,London, showing how we can generate different realizations of the city for different purposes. We embed these representations within one another, building virtual worlds, moving from the material to the digital and back again, using the digital model to represent the material world in different ways, and finally printing – fabricating the model.

Our message is that digital representation opens a cornucopia of possibilities in representation and communication through a variety of devices which in turn can be embedded in the city, Escher-like, and which indeed are rapidly becoming the city.

You can download the paper here (1047Kb).

Worth a thousand words, etc.

2008-08-19T08:49:54+00:00

I’ve long been of the opinion that there are terms of art floating through the various interaction design and user-experience conversations I’m a party to that should never, ever be exposed to the end user. That is, however useful they are to us as designers, they’re so technical, jargony or obscure that they should neither show up in a product or service interface, nor its documentation, nor all but the most granular and geek-centric of its marketing materials. By no means am I alone in thinking this; I’d imagine this is as close to conventional wisdom as one can get in this disjoint field.

What I might have missed, though, is that there are other people even within a design organization who might not sling the lingo with such ease. Not that these folks are in any way limited or less than fully competent at their jobs, it’s just that they’re not as au courant regarding the minutiae of my own particular field as I might like. (And why should they be? It’s not like I live and breathe market-segmentation strategy.)

Case in point: I must say that it’s been surprisingly difficult, in various conversations with folks not immersed in the IxD space, to get across the essential distinction between context-aware applications and location-based services (LBS).

Everyone gets LBS, more or less: it’s the ground on which Interaction Design Cliché No. 2 is built. You’re in a particular place, and there are things your device can do in this place that it’s not capable of elsewhere. Straightforward enough, right?

But what is “context” if not location? What could that possibly mean? It turns out that this is not at all an obvious distinction, and that understanding what an interface designer might mean by “context-aware” is actually built on, uh, shared context. (It’s like rain on your wedding day, or summink.) And since that shared context is, in this case, absent, it behooves the designer who wants to work effectively in a heterogeneous organization to do a better job of explaining these important ideas to everyone else around them.

That’s why I’m so grateful that this set of images has popped up. Minor quibbles about the form factor aside, I think the scenario depicted is just about right.

In fact, designer Mac Funamizu has actually nailed two separate things here. The first demonstrates precisely what I, at least, mean when I use the words “context aware”: but for some residual core of basic functionality, the device’s capabilities and available interface modalities at any given moment are largely if not entirely determined by the other networked objects around it. If you pair the device with a text, it’s a reader; at the checkstand, it provides a friendly POS interface; aimed at the skyline, it augments reality.

Why this argument is so self-evident to longterm IxD folks and so relatively hard for anyone else to grok is, I believe, a function of the fact that we already take for granted the (rather significant) assumption from which it proceeds: that the greater part of the places and things we find in the world will be provided with the ability to speak and account for themselves. That they’ll constitute a coherent environment, an ontome of self-describing networked objects, and that we’ll find having some means of handling the information flowing off of them very useful indeed.

That the world, of course, looks nothing like this at present is a given. I do think it’s coming, though, as the marginal cost of instrumenting reality-at-large dives below the value derived from harnessing such dataflows in aggregate. Accept that, and the utility of an easy-to-use context-aware mediator like the one here depicted should become very clear indeed. (Inside baseball: let me make it absolutely clear, however, that I don’t believe anything like the semantic Web as its apologists currently understand it will ever exist.)

The second thing Mac got right is more subtle, and it’s a line about the evolution of mobile devices that I think is deeply correct. It’s that the device is of almost no importance in and of itself, that its importance to the person using it lies in the fact that it’s a convenient aperture to the open services available in the environment, locally as well as globally.

Mac happens to have interpreted this metaphor particularly literally, but there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s certainly a defensible choice. The business lesson that drops out of it, though - and of course I would think this - is that the crafting of an impeccable user experience is virtually the only differentiator left to a would-be player in this market, with clear implications for allocation of organizational effort and resources.

At any rate, I find Mac’s vision infinitely more convincing than another, far weaker near-future UI concept that’s been making the rounds lately. The idea of mobile device as context-sensitive pane isn’t even “futuristic” to me, to be honest: just a very convenient way to explain to the people around me what it is I believe we now have to build, and how, and why. Thanks, Mac.

Links for 2008-08-18 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-19T05:17:41+00:00

Paris Visualizes Air Quality Via Color-Changing Balloon [Inhabitat]
"The tethered helium balloon will change colors to express air quality data collected from six sensors placed around Paris. Three projectors situated in the balloon’s center display atmospheric air quality by changing the balloon’s color from green (very clean) to red (hazardous), and a high-powered laser sweeps the lower half of the balloon to display traffic pollution"
Links, Tangents, Grids and Foam (Olympic Arrays II) [the teeming void]
"The Water Cube's hypermodern image rests on an aesthetic of "natural" variety and multiplicity - and after a week of the Games it's unquestionable that these structures are fundamentally machines for producing images (televisually, and literally, in the case of the Cube's illumination). But that aesthetic rests in turn on the modern industrial logics of the grid: modularity and regularity."
things magazine on Australian architecture ...
"There's currently a certain amount of soul-searching going on within the Australian design media." From a few months ago but still pertinent.
Crime mapping test site [Metropolitan Police Service]
"The purpose of this site is to help show where crime is occurring at a local neighbourhood level. It has been developed by the MPS in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Mayor of London. This is a live test site (known technically within the industry as a 'beta'). It is intended to test the functionality of crime mapping, with a view to adding further features in the near future, based on your feedback." Not really hi-res enough is it.

Digital Urban Gear

2008-08-18T13:44:47+00:00

Are you a fan of Digital Urban? Do you wish you had a unique urban logo on your messenger bag or on your hoodie? Well now you can with the new and exclusive range of Digital Urban merchandise.

Thanks to our friends over at Cafe Press you can now purchase a range of items from apparel to baby wear, housewares, hats and bags and even badges all with the Digital Urban logo.

Head over to our new store for the full range of goods and for a limited time if you send us your photograph with some Digital Urban merchandise we will send you our choice of an item from the shop free of charge (while stocks last).

OoO Notification Limbo

2008-08-18T14:25:58+00:00

The emails that arrive in the work inbox during the time frame just prior to going on vacation but before setting an out of office reply. With everything else that needs to be done before leaving - there's no way to respond in person, but equally there's a deeply ingrained social compulsion to provide some kind of acknowledgment.

How the social boundaries of who is notified of what continues to blur: as work email goes increasingly mobile; as there are more ways to notify; as we build up an understanding of sufficiently trusted sources of notification information.

Bending Light / Lens Hacks

2008-08-18T11:32:14+00:00

Telephoto mobile phone lens hack by UK artist Kerrin Mansfield with more the photographic results here.

BLDGBLOG

2008-08-18T15:28:01+00:00

The Milky Way is made up of thousands of "substructures such as streams." These "streams" are really clumps of stars – moving at a shared velocity, in a shared direction – that were "ripped" from other galaxies, "most likely small galaxies that were pulled in to create the Milky Way." Streams at the center of the galaxy are thus the oldest, as "you probably build a galaxy up from the inside out." Indeed, the sky is criss-crossed with rivers that flow from the remains of structures unspooling elsewhere.

Street typewriting in Peru: the public scribe

2008-08-18T07:14:22+00:00

Another category of service you find on the street in Peru (as well as other countries) is the public scribe (in Ayaviri above and Arequipa below). Generally sat somewhere at a desk or on stairs, aided by a typewriter, he/she serve the needy illiterate to writer different things, especially administrative pieces of work. A sort of surrogate to the written world, the public scribe seems to be an important component in the large bureaucratic and technical systems in Peru composed of photographers, photocopy shops and internet cafés.

The Basement Maze of Leavenworth, Kansas

2008-08-18T15:28:01+00:00

[Image: The "underground town" beneath Leavenworth, Kansas, courtesy of KCTV].

It was reported last week that an "underground city" had been discovered beneath the streets of Leavenworth, Kansas. "Some Leavenworth residents have been unknowingly walking around above an underground city," we read, "and no one seems to know who created it or why."

I have to admit, though, especially after looking at the slideshow, that referring to this alternately as an "underground town" and an "underground city" seems like quite an overstatement of the case; it looks more like a few connected basements at most.
But how are you going to get people's attention if all you've discovered is a few empty rooms beneath Main Street...?

(Thanks, Ian!)

Hands on

2008-08-18T07:14:22+00:00

The NYT had a good piece about how digital designers rediscover hands-on activities. With examples from Adobe and Mike Kuniavsky’s Sketching in Hardware gatherings, the article describes the renewed interest in manual tinkering “or innovating with the aid of human hands”. Some of the reasons for that described in the article:

“
“A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation,” says Bill Burnett, executive director of the product design program at Stanford. “You can’t simulate everything.”
(…)
The hands-on part is for me a critical aspect of understanding how to design,” said Michael Kuniavsky (…) Such experiences hone instinct and intuition as opposed to logic and cognition, advocates say, and bring the designer closer to art than science.
(…)
At Stanford, the rediscovery of human hands arose partly from the frustration of engineering, architecture and design professors who realized that their best students had never taken apart a bicycle or built a model airplane.
(…)
“Students are desperate for hands-on experience,” says Neil Gershenfeld
(…)
“People spend so much time in digital worlds that it creates an appetite for the physical world,” says Dale Dougherty, an executive at O’Reilly Media“

Why do I blog this? Beyond the obvious interest in this interest in bricolage, these remarks echo a lot with my personal experience with students. Few years ago, in a course about interactive table, we asked master students to design tables per se: drawing shapes, cutting huge pieces of woods, adding a beamer, etc. and they really loved it saying that it was the first time they had to design something physically in their engineering school.

Impromptu Protection

2008-08-18T01:50:10+00:00

Incoming rain.

Beyond Phucked

2008-08-18T11:32:14+00:00

Steampunk City - Maya

2008-08-17T14:33:54+00:00

Details are slightly sparse on this one apart from it was modelled and rendered in Maya and features a city designed around the 'Steampunk' theme.

According to the wiki - Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

There is something about Steampunk cities that fits 3D animation so well:

The movie above was uploaded to YouTube by rkrehe20

See also Cities in Games - Midgar Visualisation.

Fixie Wheel Personalisation

2008-08-17T16:02:15+00:00

Tokyo nights with the Pedal Mafia.

Logo's Twixed

2008-08-17T16:02:15+00:00