social information spaces
is296a-2
| time | thursday 4:30-6:30 | ||||||
| place | 202 south hall | ||||||
| professor | warren sack | ||||||
| sis-prof@sims.berkeley.edu | |||||||
| office hours | thursday 1:30-3:00 | ||||||
| tutor | nicolas ducheneaut | ||||||
| sis-tutor@sims.berkeley.edu | |||||||
| office hours | tba | ||||||
| course email list | sis@sims.berkeley.edu | ||||||
| course web site | www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-b/f01/ | ||||||
| student pages | www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-2/f01/assignments.html | ||||||
| description
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This is a studio course where we will examine how networked information spaces can be understood (or redesigned to become) inhabited, socially-navigable spaces. The focus of the course will be on the social navigation of information spaces, a new set of methods and techniques now emerging from the areas of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Today, collaborative filtering and recommender systems are the most widely known of existing techniques for social navigation (e.g., amazon.com's book recommendation feature). We will begin by analyzing existing social information spaces, like newsgroups, chats and MUDs. We will then experiment with a series of design strategies for remaking "uninhabited" information spaces into socially navigable spaces. Using ideas from art, architecture, film theory, anthropology, sociology and geography students will complete a series of design exercises to analyze existing physical and information spaces as well as to redesign "uninhabited" sources of information (e.g., websites, code archives, library catalogs, etc.) as "inhabitable," social information spaces. As a final project, students will be asked to create a virtual "map," "compass," or other navigation tool for an information space and/or a combined physical/virtual space (e.g., as linked through wireless devices). Readings will include Alan Munro, Kristina Hook and David Benyon (eds.) Social Navigation of Information Space (New York: Springer, 1999); and, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchen, Mapping Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2001). | ||||||
| requirements
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Every week there will be a reading assignment and a design or analysis exercise. The readings are intended to give you ideas on how to conceptualize and approach the design and analysis exercises. This course is a studio course which means that every week we will spend an appreciable amount of time looking at and discussing student work. After completing the week's assignment we will ask you to upload your work to the course website before the next week's meeting time. During the following week's meeting time we will discuss the work that you have uploaded to the website. Final project reviews will take a similar form. As a student you will be asked to show your work, be given the chance to describe what you have done, and then will receive feedback from fellow students, the professor and tutor, and possibly several invited guests. | ||||||
| grading criteria
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| readings
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books
(These books are recommended, but not required. Individual chapters from these books will be available in the course reader and on reserve at the library.) Alan Munro, Kristina Hook, and David Benyon (eds.) Social Navigation of Information Space (New York: Springer, 1999) Martin Dodge nd Rob Kitchin, Mapping Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2001) Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) course reader A collection of xeroxed articles will be
available as a reader.
online articles The online articles are available for download
at the URLs hyperlinked in the readings listed below.
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| resources
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Throughout the term we will be collecting pointers to code archives, websites, books, and articles. These will be resources for better understanding the assigned readings and for finding related work for the final projects. The resource list can be accessed through this link: resources. | ||||||
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| date | topic | readings | assignment due | |
| 29 aug | introduction | |||
| 05 sep
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social navigation
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required
Munro, Hook, and Benyon, "Footprints in the Snow," in Social Navigation of Information Space, pp. 1-14. Dourish, "Where the Footprints Lead: Tracking Down Other Roles for Social Navigation," in Social Navigation of Information Space, pp. 15-32. recommended CACM special section on Recommender Systems
edited by Paul Resnick and Hal Varian
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amazon.com
repeat the following twice: once starting with a non-fiction book from an academic field that you know well and, a second time, starting with a novel you have read (1) go to www.amazon.com
questions to consider: can you label subsets of the books by subject? for the non-fiction, academic book search, does the series of books you have found describe the structure of the academic field that you know? e.g., are the most important books of the academic field repeatedly connected to by many of the other books and thus are they "centrl" to the collection found? what sorts of recurrent patterns can you
see in the interrelaionships between books? e.g., are there a lot
of cycles? does the structure of the relations look like an abstract
tree? etc.
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| 12 sep
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legibility:
remembering spaces
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required
Lynch, "The Image of the Environment" and
"Three Cities," in The Image of the City, pp. 1-45
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asking directions/constructing a map
in this exercise we will be attempting to apply kevin lynch's methods to the space of the uc berkeley campus. as i explained in class you should do the following. (1) stand at the edge of campus. if you didn't pick a position at the end of class time on thursday, that's fine. just pick a position on piedmont, bancroft, hearst, or oxford -- or else in the center of campus if you prefer. (2) pick a set of destinations on the other side of campus. for example, if i was to stand on oxford, i might pick the stadium as one of my destinations. also, pick a few destinations in the interior of the campus. what we want to find is directions across the campus. some of your respondents will inevitably give you directions around the edges of campus. some responses like this are fine, but we don't want all of them to be directions around the outside of campus. (3) while standing at the edge of campus, ask people on the street for verbal directions to one or more of the destinations on the other side of campus. take notes. maybe it will be easiest to tape people with a tape recorder and then transcibe their responses later. or, maybe you can do just fine by writing notes on a pad as they tell you the directions. or, maybe you have a good memory for oral instructions and you can just write the directions down after you get them. (4) get fifteen sets of directions. you will probably have to ask more than fifteen people for directions since some people will not know the destination you ask for, or will not know campus well enough to tell you the way. (5) read the sections of lynch's book and note that he identifies five elements of the city: (1) the path; (2) the edge; (3) the node; (4) the district; and, (5) the landmark. he has invented icons for each element. they can be found on page 145. when you construct your map, just use the top row (labeled over 75% in lynch's table). (6) look through the fifteen directions you received. try to translate what people said into one or more of lynch's elements. for example, "follow this road until you see sather tower" might be translated into one path (the road) and one landmark (sather tower). (7) now, draw the icons you derived onto this map:www.berkeley.edu/map/maps/large_map.html some of the directions you received from people will be geographically incorrect and, consequently, they will assume -- for instance -- that parts of the campus are connected together in ways that they factually are not. that's great! these are the kinds of things we are looking for: where do people's cognitive image of the campus match (and not match) the actual geography of the campus. draw a series of icons for each of the fifteen directions you received. don't bother to try to average them out first and then draw the map (as lynch does). rather, just draw all of them out so that we can see graphically the sorts of overlaps that exist between one person's directions and another's. (8) put your map up on line so that we
can access it via the web. next class meeting we will look at everyone's
map and try to put them together into one map. hopefully we will be able
to assemble a social -- i.e., cognitively aggregate image -- of the campus
by adding all of your map-images together.
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| 19 sep
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legibility:
understanding spaces
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required
Maglio and Matlock, "The Conceptual Structure of Information Space," in Social Navigation of Information Space, pp. 155-171 Dodge and Kitchin, "Spatial Cognition of Cyberspace," in Mapping Cyberspace, pp. 166-181. recommended Nicolas
Ducheneaut and Victoria Bellotti, "Ceci n’est pas un Objet? Talking About
Objects in Email"
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talking about things/mapping newsgroups
from verbal directions
With the exercise we will be examining how well Lynch's method works in cyberspace. In the readings you will see how Lynch's method is one of a variety of ways that have been proposed for describing the spatial cognition of cyberspace and its conceptual structure. In doing the exercise, it will probably strike you that Lynch's methods can be usefully supplemented (or even replaced) with the methods of Maglio and Matlock, Dodge and Kitchin, Ducheneaut and Bellotti, or perhaps, one of the methods discussed in the readings, e.g., Lakoff and Johnson. For example, instead of the elements Lynch uses, Maglio and Matlock try to understand people's webpage navigation activities in terms of what they call "image schemata" like TRAJECTORY and CONTAINER. When you have finished this exercise you will have adapted or invented a menu of your own "elements" or "image schemata" that you observe in a set of email messages. (1) Pick a corpus of email messages. You will need about 50 messages to do this exercise because many of the messages will not contain the sorts of directions or references we are looking for. As I mentioned in class, I think "how to" sorts of newsgroups concerning programming and programming tools might be some of the easiest places to find messages containing directions. I have found good directions in, for instance, the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.java.softwaretools. However, you may use whatever source of email messages you want. You can even use you own email inbox if you prefer. (2) Now, go through the messages and find all the examples of cyberspace directions you can. By "cyberspace directions" I mean pointers that one person writes for another in order to direct them to some web page, online resource, email message, etc. You will probably also find directions to places in "actual" geographic space (e.g., directions to someone's home or workplace); ignore these for the time being. Here's several examples from the newsgroup comp.lang.java.softwaretools First a question is posed by a newcomer to the group: MESSAGE 1: Just learning Java but I have not found an editor/compiler/viewer that I like. I need an editor, a compiler (with error reporting), and a way to view the output in Java 1.2. The best that I have found is Forte Comm. Edition from Sun but I would like a little more hand-holding along the lines of indentation and correct form. I have also tried Emacs(old version I think) & MS Visual J++. Any suggestions (links to downloads) appreciated. Note that this message itself contains implicit directions to virtual objects (e.g., Emacs and Java 1.2). Message 1 garners several responses, one of which is Message 2. MESSAGE 2: jbuilder works well for most things, building, debugging, editing. The editor is not fantastic, but easy to pick up and use. Think there is a stripped down free version at www.borland.com. Notice how the "cyberspace direction" offered by the second author is essentially a combination of a name of a particular object, a particular piece of software -- namely "jbuilder" -- and a URL. Take a minute to go to the URL specified to determine whether this person's "directions" are vague (i.e., akin to vaguely pointing "over there") or quite specific (e.g., perhaps "jbuilder" is right on Borland's home page and so the URL is akin to an exact geographical coordinate, a "GPS reading." Depending upon the specificity of the directions, how the directions are worded, and how we interpret these directions, we might take Message 2 to be pointing to a LANDMARK or a NODE in Lynch's terminology, or perhaps some other sort of element mentioned in the readings (or even an element that you need to articulate yourself). (3) Keep track of the directions you observed by noting the elements they refer to and, if the directions are complex, the sequence of elements narrated by the direction givers. (4) Bring to class next time two things: (a) A list of elements that you have found in the email-based, cyberspace directions you observed; for each element observed, provide an example and devise (or borrow) an icon to denote the element. If Lynch's method works just as well in cyberspace as it does in physical space, perhaps all you will need are examples of his elements. If such is the case, you might then just borrow his icons. But, I imagine that you will need to go beyond his repetoire (even as we needed to do in discussing the physical maps of campus in last week's class). (b) A map: draw a map of some portion of cyberspace using the icons you have devised for the elements you identifed in the email-based cyberspace directions. For this you will need to limit your set of online places (e.g., the set of websites) you will include on your map. As an example, I might do the following for a discussion of the Java language: first gather "directions" to a variety of Java software components or classes, then try to draw my icons on top of an existing hierarchical map of the Java classes. (For those of you unfamiliar with Java, note simply that the Java classes are organized into a hierarchy that can be drawn as a sort of inverted" tree, or indented list. To "draw on top of" such a hierarchical tree map might be to note some sections as NODEs, others as LANDMARKs and articulate PATHs between them). |
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| 26 sep
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legibility:
reading spaces
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required
Metadesign, Dusseldorf Airport Project, www.metadesign.de Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, "A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas," in Learning from Las Vegas, pp. 3-73. recommended Norman,
"Banner blindness, human cognition, and
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reading the street
In this exercise we will contrast the signs of Metadesign with the signs admired by Venturi and Scott Brown in Learning from Las Vegas. To do this, we will take Venturi and Scott Brown uite literally and "read" a street. (1) Pick a street that is a commercial street on which both pedestrian traffic and car traffic flows. Now, pick four blocks of this street to "read." For example, it might be interesting to "read" Telegraph Avenue from Dwight to Bancroft. (2) Now, with paper and pencil -- or the inscribables of your choice -- walk down one side of the street. At each building note the address, the signs and lettering you can see in the window, and the street signs, graffiti etc. immediately visible to you as a pedestrian. Try not to get too detailed. Remember you are trying to note down what you might read if you were walking down the street at a normal pace. If something is in 12 point type stuck to the bottom of a door, you probably wouldn't normally see it as a casual pedestrian. So, as a rule of thumb, I would try to limit yourself to only noting the lettering that is as tall as (or only slightly smaller than) the lettering on the street signs you will see at each corner (i.e., the signs that designate the names of the streets,; e.g., the sign that says "Durant" on the corner of Durant and Telegraph). The point is to write down everything you can read off of one side of the street as a pedestrian. Note one other thing than the signs: note also the relative size of the buildings. Thus, keep track of the number of stories of each building and note if any of the lettering you are reading is very large and thus some significant fraction of the height of the building upon which it is written. (3) Go back to your starting point and cross the street. For example, perhaps I traversed Telegraph from Dwight to Bancroft (south to north) on the west side of Telegraph. Step 3, for me, is to go back to the corner of Telegraph and Dwight and then cross the street so that I am now on the east side of Telegraph. (4) Traverse the same street, the same four blocks, in the same direction, but on the other side of the street. However, for this traversal I want you to note what you can see on the other side of the street. In other words, in my particular case, I will be walking down Telegraph on the east side of Telegraph, but I will be looking to see what I can read on the west side of Telegraph. What I want us to do here is "simulate" the driving experience. I would ask you to drive down the street and take notes as you go, but I think that would be difficult and dangerous and probably illegal -- so I won't ask you to do that. Instead, by walking the street on one side and looking to see what you can see on the other side, I hope that we will see less than a pedestrian on the other side of the street and about the same amount of signage as would be perceivable from a moving vehicle. Make sure that you are going in a direction that is possible for a car. For example, Telegraph -- at the four blocks I am walking -- is a one-way street that can only be traversed by a car from south to north (i.e., from Dwight to Bancroft). (5) Next draw a rough "space-scale" map like the ones shown in Figure 12. To draw this map, use your notes you took from the opposite side of the street: i.e., use the notes to rough-out what the scale of the street might be at the speed of a car. (6) Draw an atlas of the street. This atlas might be a very simple street map like the one Venturi and Scott Brown use to plot the Vegas Strip signage in Figure 28. Or, it could be something like the Ed Ruscha elevation of the strip shown in Figure 33, if you are willing to take pictures of the buildings and the paste or Photoshop them together. Or, if you are into using video or Quicktime VR, you might want the "atlas" to be a sequence of video like that shown in Figure 45. The easiest thing to do is to do something like that shown in Figure 28, but try something else if you'd like to. (7) Write on the atlas you have -- in the position where you found it on the street -- each piece of text you noted as a pedestrian. Now, write on it each piece of text you saw as an "automobilist" (i.e., in your traversal of the street from the opposite side looking across the street). You might want to do this like Venturi and Scott Brown did it in Figure 28. E.g., with the "automobilist" visible signage in larger, boldface type and the pedestrian visible signage in a smaller, plain typeface. Or, perhaps you can make the distinction with different colors of type, etc. Pick a visual scheme that you find appropriate for the task of recording your two "readings" of the street. (8) Bring to class next time the "space-scale"
map of step (5) and the combined pedestrian/automobilist map of step (7).
Send Nicolas a URL to both of these maps so that he can list them on the
course website.
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| 03 oct
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geometry and topology of physical spaces
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required
Alexander, "A City is not a Tree" Hillier and Hansen, "Buildings and their
Genotypes," in The Social Logic of Space, pp.143-175.
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social logic interface maps for buildings
Read the Alexander article and then the chapter from Hillier and Hansen. Pay special attention to the diagrams on pages 150 and 151 of the Hillier and Hansen chapter. The diagrams on page 151 are permeability maps for the buildings shown on page 150. This week's exercise is to draw two such permeability maps. (1) Draw a permeability map of South Hall. Make "carriers" -- as Hillier and Hansen call them on page 148 -- for each of the doors in South Hall which lead to the outside. Due to limited access to various rooms in South Hall, you probably won't be able to do all of South Hall, but do as much as you can manage given your incomplete access. Devise some means of representing the stairwells and the main staircase (perhaps just by including them as separate nodes in the diagram). (2) Pick a cafe. Do two things: a) Sketch a floor plan of the cafe. If the cafe has more than one floor, then only sketch a floor plan for one floor, the floor that leads out to the street. Don't worry about being too accurate. All your sketch has to do is indicate where the walls, doors, counters, and spatial dividers are. If it looks feasible, try to include in your sketch some of the tables. (b) Draw a permeability map of the cafe. Make a "carrier" for each door out of the cafe, but then continue the map to the outside of the cafe; i.e., into the street. The point of this is to indicate how pedestrian traffic flows out of the street and into the cafe (and vice versa). Next time bring (1) your permeability map of South Hall; (2) your floor plan sketch of a cafe; and, (3) your permeability map of the cafe that continues out into the street. We will use these maps next time to, firstly, diagnose the traffic patterns within South Hall and, secondly, suggest alternatives. If we could remodel the interior design of South Hall, what might be good to do? We will then compare cafes and, especially, compare the different ways in which cafes interface with the street. Again we will consider possible redesigns: Might certain cafes be redesigned to better support pedestrian traffic and social interactions? |
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| 10 oct
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geometry and topology of information
spaces
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required
Chalmers, "Informatics, Architecture and Language," Social Navigation of Information Space, pp. 55-79. Dodge and Kitchin, "Mapping Synchronous
social spaces," in Mapping Cyberspace, pp. 142-165.
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an email thread is not a tree
In this week's reading Chalmers makes the point that Hillier's social logic can be applied to electronic spaces as well as to physical spaces. Dodge and Kitchin give several examples of cyberspace maps which also closely resemble the permeability maps of Hiller's social logic. Before you do this weeks assignment, you might want to have a look at three sites to get some more ideas about approaching the problem outlined below. The first of these sites is Dodge's www.cybergeography.org,
especially those parts of the site which contains a large number of
The second of these sites is a series of
design sketches by Judith Donath and her students. The design sketches
show a series of possible ways in which Usenet newsgroups might be mapped:
Finally, have a look at my Conversation Map. Here is this week's exercise. It is designed to get us to think more about Alexander's claim that a city is not a tree. We will be thinking about this issue in terms of the architecture of email spaces, namely the spaces of email threads. (1) Return to the corpus of email messages that you used for the exercise of September 19th. Or, if for some reason you happened to use a corpus of messages last time that are not threaded (e.g., messages from a weblog are sometimes not threaded; messages from listservs are sometimes only poorly threaded, etc.) pick a corpus of email messages that are threaded. In case this isn't clear, I mean by "thread" an email message, all of the replies to it (which are also email messages), all of the replies to replies, etc. Email "threads" are -- formally speaking -- "trees" because when one composes an email message, that email message can only be composed in reply to one "parent" message. In other words, in all of the email clients I know of, if one hits the "reply" button, the email client opens an editor with a blank message in it that is a reply to one and only one other message. If one looks at the RFC for the format of email messages, one can see that this "tree" structure is built into the very architecture of email messages and the clients and servers that handle them. It is this "tree structure architecture" of email threads that we will be investigating in this week's exercise. (2) Arrange your corpus of email messages into thread trees and draw a visual representation of the thread trees. Perhaps the visual representation will be simply a list of indented lists. It might also be a series of radially-diagrammed "spiderweb" like I use in the Conversation Map; or, a set of inverted tree diagrams like we often see in linguistics texts to diagram the structure of a sentence. Or, it might be something completely different. Borrow some ideas from the sites listed above, or come up with something entirely new if you can. You don't have to write code to diagram out the email thread trees. Just sketch them out by hand if that's easier for you. (3) Look through the messages closely. Look at how the messages are connected together in ways that either (a) reinforce the thread tree structure of the messages; or, (b) break or transcend the thread structure. An example of connections that reinforce the thread structure are the quotes embedded in email messages that refer to previous email messages. It is very rarely the case that an email message contains a quote from a message that is not above it in the email thread tree. An example of connections that transcend the thread structure are the conversational "themes" that can be examined in the Conversation Map. By clicking on a theme in the middle menu of the Conversation Map, it is possible to see how one theme appears in multiple threads and thus connects the threads together in a non-treelike form. Other examples of connections that break the tree structure of the threads are the sorts of "directions" that you diagrammed for the September 19th exercise. Other linguistic phenomenon (e.g., the use of pronouns, anaphora, or cohesion in general) and social phenomenon (e.g., the list of message authors in a given set of threads) cross-connect the email threads together in a way that transcends or breaks the tree structure of the threads. Pick a couple of such tree-breaking or tree-transcending phenomena to follow. (4) Now, visually diagram out the connections between or within trees that break or transcend the tree-structure of the threads. The Conversation Map means of doing this is to allow one to -- for example -- click on a node in the social network and see all of the threads containing a person's messages by highlighting the threads with white ovals. But, there are many other possible ways of showing connections between and within the threads that can show how the tree structure of the threads is broken or transcended. Again, either borrow an idea from one of the sites above, or come up with something of your own. |
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| 17 oct | pattern languages for physical architecture | required
Alexander, A Pattern Language (excepts) |
patterns of design at a cafe
Return to your cafe; i.e., the cafe you visited for the October 3rd exercise. The point of this exercise is to see and imagine the cafe using a different view point, a different set of "lenses." I.e., the point is see how the cafe looks and might be imagined to be using Alexander's "pattern language" methods rather than Hillier's "social logics." I think you will find that Alexander's methods allow one to talk about materials and borders in ways that were more-or-less impossible with the social logic. By "borders" I mean the connections between spaces like windows, half walls, etc. Read through the patterns. Note how they differ in scale from patterns about streets and arangements between sets of buildings down to the scale of window sills and the placement of lights. If you want to see a list of all of Alexander's 253 patterns, have a look at his website: www.patternlanguage.com. It is listed on the course resources page. The website contains an online version of the Pattern Language book for members' use, but visitors can see the table of contents and read a short overview by Alexander. Join the site if you are interested in it. And/or have a look at the Environmental Design Library where several copies of the Pattern Language book can be found. For this exercise we will be using 36 patterns, all -- hopefully -- of use in analyzing, designing, and redesigning a cafe. For this exercise you will either need to produce a series of quick sketches or you will need to take a series of photos. If you don't have the means to do either sketches or photos, talk to me and I will try to figure out how to round up some equipment for you. The exercise has three parts: find Alexander's patterns, note which ones can't be found at the cafe, and -- finally -- invent your own pattern. So, return to your cafe. And, make a copy of your floor plan for use in this exercise. At the cafe, or in its close vicinity, look for each of the 36 patterns described by Alexander. For each pattern you find do three
things:
For each pattern you cannot find
at the cafe do two things:
Now that you have written, sketched or photographed something for each of Alexander's 36 patterns, I want you to invent or discover a pattern of your own -- one not mentioned by Alexander (at least in the sub-language of 36 we are dealing with this week). Possible candidates for new patterns are, I think, issues of (i) sound and noise -- what does the cafe do to maintain a sonic atmosphere condusive to conversation; (ii) furniture and the spacing between furniture -- is there a logic to, for instance, the way the tables are laid out in the cafe?; (iii) new technologies -- might the cafe implement a set of design patterns to facilitate or discourage cell phone usage or laptop computers? These suggestions are just suggestions. You can probably think of many other areas ripe for pattern development. Once you have a pattern in mind, write it up using the format of Alexander's patterns: picture + description of environment/context + description of problem + description of solution + possible pointers to other patterns or issues. Next week we will have the pleasure of
a visitor from Alexander's studio: Demetrius Gonzalez will meet with us
next week to discuss the patterns we have found, not-found, critiqued,
and invented or discovered.
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| 24 oct
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pattern languages for information architecture
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required
Tom Erickson, "Lingua Francas for Design: Sacred Places and Pattern Languages" Doug Schuler et al.,"Shaping the Network Society: Patterns for Participation, Action, and Change" See, especially, the page on author
advice and also the page on patterns
which lists and links to various examples.
recommended |
patterns of interaction in e-space
Read the Erickson article and then the Schuler piece (which is actually the description of an upcoming conference). Browse through some of the example patterns given by Erickson, Schuler and links from their pages. Also, have a look at the paterns defined by Landay et al. The aim of this exercise is -- like the last piece of last week's exercise -- to have you invent or discover a design pattern of your own. But, I want you to define such a pattern for an online space rather than a physical space. What you pick for an online space is up to you, but I have two possible suggestions. Either, (1) return again to the newsgroup or email list that you have used for previous exercises; or, (2) have a look at AlphaWorld (discussed in a chapter we read of the Dodge & Kitchin book; and, also, a space that we will consider again in two weeks' time). If you pick a more text-oriented space, then I think it might be interesting to consider writing a social role up as a pattern. By social role, I mean the sort of "gift cataloger for weddings" that Erickson mentions in his article; i.e., a social role is a set of actions performed by a person. Possible social roles that might be patterns on a fact-based email list would include, for instance, "the expert," "the novice," "the stranger." Also, consider pathological patterns; e.g., "the flamer," "the troll," etc. You can write up a pathological role as a pattern using the same format. But, the pathological pattern will obviously be something for people to design around or to avoid -- a kind of pattern that Alexander and Alexander-inspired pattern writers (like the ones we are reading this week) have not really considered. If you pick a 3D world, like AlphaWorld,
then you might seriously consider whether or not the 3D architecture of
these spaces is analogous to physical architecture and try to write a pattern
around the 3D architecture of the graphical world. However, I bet
some interesting patterns are to be found around the architecture of the
3D world that has no analog in phsyical space. For example, you might
want to consider the placement and use of the portals between worlds as
can be found in AlphaWorlds and how they function or do not function in
a space like this that is vastly underpopulated, almost empty.
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| 01 nov
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physical interaction
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required
Whyte, "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" and "City: Rediscovering the Center," in The Essential William H. Whyte, pp. 247-317 |
plotting positions on sproul plaza
Read the Whyte text and then spend two hours on Sproul plaza taking notes, taking photos and/or sketching. If you want to spend one hour on the Plaza at one time of time and then the second hour at some other time of the day. This will allow you to begin to understand if the observations you make are dependent or independent of the time of day. Look for "positions" on Sproul Plaza in two senses: (1) physical positions: note, as Whyte does if there are certain kinds of people who traverse the Plaza, enter or exit it, or sit in it in characteristic patterns. Whyte, for example, uses gender and number to distinguish people and has a series of assertion about what men do versus women versus couples. Are any of his results reproducable? Note the times and positions of your observations. (2) social positions: Whyte finds pitchmen, pickpockets, "the knapsack man," "Mr. Paranoid," "Mr. Magoo," etc. in his observations of 1970s New York City Street life. Do similar social positions, i.e., kinds of people show up today on Sproul Plaza? Describe the activities of the types of people you find with words and/or pictures. If you take pictures of particular people, don't put them up for general consumption on the web; put a password on them when you put them up and send me and Nicolas the password. Note the times and positions of your observations. In a sense, observations concerning position
of the first type -- physical positions -- presume a lexicon of positions
of the second type -- social positions. Is there some way to resolve
this recursive relationship?
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| 08 nov
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virtual interaction
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required
Smith, Farnham, and Drucker. “The Social Life of Small Graphical Chats” in ACM SIG CHI 2000. |
plotting positions in active worlds
Go to the main Active Worlds page (www.activeworlds.com), download the Active Worlds browser, and then visit a populated world. You will need a Windows-based computer to visit Active Worlds. I would recommend AlphaWorld, but if something else looks interesting please feel free to go there. Spend one hour in the world of your choice. Analyze the world as you did Sproul Plaza last week. Obviously many aspects of the Active World will be unlike Sproul and vice versa. Also, I assume that your analysis will differ from Marc Smith et al.'s analysis. Read the Smith et al. article and bring
your analysis of an ActiveWorld to class next time. We will examine the
differences and similarities betwen your analysis, Whyte's analyses, and
Smith et al.'s work.
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| 15 nov
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subject-oriented design
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required
Wodiczko, "The Homeless Vehicle Project" and "Conversations about a Project for a Homeless Vehicle," in Critical Vehicles, pp. 79-94. |
homeless design
this is an open-ended assignment: (1) read krzysztof wodiczko's article on the "homeless vehicle"; (2) either (a) buy one of the homeless-produced newspapers on the street and read that; or, (b) interview someone on the street; (3) design some thing or some space by
responding to one or more of the needs you hear or read about. this
design can take the form of a (set of) drawing(s) and/or a short textual
description and/or a series of photos. you might design something
large -- like an entire plaza -- or something small -- perhaps a sketch
of a handheld device for the homeless. keep in mind the words and/or
ideas of the homeless you have read or heard.
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| 22 nov
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boundaries and
subjects (no class; we will discuss this and your
project descriptions the following week on 28 november)
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required
Henry Jenkins, "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" David Sibley, "Families and Domestic Routines: Constructing the Boundaries of Childhood," in Mapping the Subject, pp. 123-137. Guy Debord, "Theory of the Derive," in Situationist International Anthology, pp. 50-54. |
mapping your week, mapping your life
For this exercise you will draw two maps: (1) mapping your week: a map of your day-to-day routines; and, (2) mapping your life: a map of your entire life. (1) The map of your week is intended to show where you go day-to-day in the course of a normal week -- and where you desire to go day-to-day. Either draw a map, or draw on top of a map that encompasses the geographical area of your normal work week and weekends. If you commute long distances, this geographical range will obviously be larger than for someone who lives and works in Berkeley. Invent an iconography to distinguish where you go often from where you go infrequently. For example, the walk from my apartment to the campus might be indicated with a very thick line, versus my bus trip down College to visit the eye doctor. Now, once you've established where you go day-to-day, indicate in some distinguishable manner, where you desire to go day-to-day or where you desire to go more often day-to-day. For me, for example, this would include the gym. (2) The map of your life is intended to
show where you have been in the world. Invent a means to distinguish
the places you have lived for significant periods of time from the places
you have just visited. Also, distinguish regular trips from occasional
or one-time trips. You will probably need a world map for this part
of the exercise, even if you haven't been a world traveler because, in
addition to where you've been, I also want you to mark -- in some distinguishable
manner -- where you would like to go someday in your life. For me,
I would have some large mark over Amsterdam, because I would like to live
there sometime -- or at least have an extended stay.
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| 28 nov
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final project descriptions
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project descriptions Write a short description of your final project. This can be either: (1) an elaboration of one of the weekly exercises dom previous weeks (or next week); or, (2) a short description of the length and detail of the weekly exercises i have been assigning. the second option is for those of you who want to work on something we haven't covered in class. bring to class both: (a) your project descriptions;
and, (b) your mapping your week, mapping your life maps described above
as the nov 22nd exercise.
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| 06 dec
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boundaries and mixed spaces
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required
Sussex Technology Group, "In the company of strangers: mobile phones and the conception of space," in Technospaces: Inside the New Media, pp. 205-223. Kit Galloway
and Sherrie Rabinowitz, The Electronic Cafe International [website]
Paul Adams, "Network Topologies and Virtual Place" Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). |
cafes as mixed information spaces
(1) Read the required readings. Pay attention especially to the series of projects that Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz have accomplished over the past 25 years. (2) Return to your cafe (i.e., the cafe you examined for Oct. 17th and Oct. 3rd). Look at how the physical architecture intersects or interfers with other communications media. Look closely at the electronic communications (e.g., you might note people on cell phones, people using their computers on wireless networks, etc.), but look also at other sorts of communications. For example, I find it interesting to notice how newspapers circulate between clients at a cafe who don't know one another at all (e.g., I leave a paper at my table when I leave, someone else takes the tables, reads "my" newspaper and then passes it on). What is graphic to notice with respect to various communication media at the cafe is how many of them are used to support private communications. E.g., most cell phones used at a cafe are used to have a one-to-one conversation with someone elsewhere. They aren't used to support group communication at the cafe (at least not intentionally!, but maybe they could be?). Recall the sorts of "leaking" between public and private noted by the Sussex Technology Group in their analysis of the use of mobile phones. Look for places at your cafe where the public "leaks" into the private and vice versa. (3) Now design a piece of electronic technology
that could be used in the cafe to facilitate public communication between
people at the cafe and/or between people at the cafe and people elsewhere.
For inspiration, have another look at the projects that Kit
Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz designed and implemented. Your design
can take the form of a short piece of descriptive text, some text and drawings,
some photos, etc. It needn't be elaborate. I am mostly interested
in thinking about how a cafe functions as public space for public discussion
and how one might make it a better place for public discussion and interaction.
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| 13 dec | final presentations | |||