There’s no substitute for documentation written, organized, and edited by hand.

Author Lisa Iwamoto explores the methods architects use to calibrate digital designs with physical forms. The book is organized according to five types of digital fabrication techniques: tessellating, sectioning, folding, contouring, and forming. Projects are shown both in their finished forms and in working drawings, templates, and prototypes, allowing the reader to watch the process of each fantastic construction unfold.

Tokyo Cabinet is a library of routines for managing a database. The database is a simple data file containing records, each is a pair of a key and a value. Every key and value is serial bytes with variable length. Both binary data and character string can be used as a key and a value. There is neither concept of data tables nor data types. Records are organized in hash table, B tree, or fixed-length array.

“A Beach house designed by Tatiana Bilbao for the artist Gabriel Orozco’s family. The house, which has a round pool on the roof, was organized around the conceit of camping. Like a tent, you must exit each room to the exterior in order to get to another room, such as the toilet or kitchen. “For Gabriel, it was not architecture; it’s more of a living sculpture,” Bilbao says, noting that she collaborated with Orozco on realizing the artist’s initial design.” Architectural Record

Maps, especially old hand-drawn ones, are beautiful and intricate visual objects. They are also documents where information has been selected, organized, and often manipulated to fit different purposes. Through history mapmakers have put their parons interests at the centre, and chosen map-projections that stretches or reduces continents the way they saw most beneficent. Today this is well known, and my map project follow the same pattern, - being subjective and egocentric to the extreme. They are also documentation of various personal investigations, - explorations that creates narratives related to the short stories of Borges and Calvino.

For the moment I´m not working with maps, but I´m still mapping.

karlcow said...

Fascinating and very interesting. I may add another law to your experiment, though it would have to be repeated again to see if it's working.

Law 3: A fractal pattern encourages participation.

A fractal pattern is simple enough that the gratification is direct. One can draw a small shape which already makes sense to the person. (I have participated!). But because of the self-structure of fractal pattern, one is participating to a bigger scheme. Sense of collective achievement with grand goals.

Once the structure is big enough, it becomes visible, organized and then it is an object of power, which in return is its weakness. (Colonial states versus Guerrilla/Terrorism). Wikipedia becomes so big that it fights for copyright or have editors censoring content.

Though I kind of disagree with the conclusion of blogs versus wikis. Blogs are indeed easier to maintain but would it be because wikis are not really object of the commons, aka, there is still someone owning the object, it is a property of someone in the end.

I wonder also if there is a density rule in action. A tribe in a large forest with free will to move as they please versus a piece of land with a lot of people. There is very little destruction when the space is infinite. Take the drawing above and imagine a space which is infinite (possible in digital space), would participant try to destroy the work of others or just go further away to do their own drawing?

May 20, 2009 1:50 PM

Barcamp Event and Content Management System: This is a web-based-wordpress-powered system aimed at helping people running unconferences manage their event's content in a more organized manner.

A card catalog designed to hold all of the songs on my iPod, 7,390 songs. Each song is cataloged on a single card. The cards are organized in reverse chronological order, that is the songs I listened to most recently are in the front of the catalog, and the songs I haven’t listened to in two years exist at the back. The piece is seven feet long when closed and just under fourteen feet when opened.

This experimental O'Reilly Product Metadata Interface (OPMI) exposes RDF for all of O'Reilly's titles, organized by ISBN.

>Click Opera stores information that I no longer have in my brain; when I connect to this information, I have a way to remember.

This, you can't know and that is the irony. There are things which are still in our brain but we don't remember how to access them. Then suddenly one day, they come back to the surface.

What is happening with the external storage is not the storage by itself, but the search functionality on this external storage. I can have thousand of photos, but if there are not slightly organized (no dates into it for example), there are just a useless pile of bits. The fact that they contained structured information help when we need to access them with tools.

A simple creation date of the file can achieve that. We relate the date to memories of places. Either in your brain or somewhere on the external storage if you write the list of things you have done.