Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, props, and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life. It is a manual for that which assists corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens. Support Structures is a manual for those things that give, in short, support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.

earlier, in june this year, japanese architecture studio schemata poured color epoxy

on the top board of school desks which were used in elementary schools. the now 'flat'

desks were before uneven due to time deterioration or scribbling. although the school

desks all have the same shape, they gradually gain individual character through the personal

items of the pupil, like a school bag or a hat. however, in this project, the individuality of

the desks is regenerated through colors, thanks to the craftsmanship and expertise

of nakamura shuhei. he reset the the unevenness to 'flat' with translucent color epoxy.

deep points are mirrored by dense colors and shallow points by more transparent shades.

this project is part of the 'flatproject' series.

The project also didn’t much consider the crews of low-wage farm workers that would be needed to plant and harvest the crops of the ambitious vertical farm; presumably these crews would share elevators and stairwells with the residents of the market-rate condos above.

ARCHIGRAM dominated the architectural avant garde in the 1960s and early 1970s with its playful, pop-inspired visions of a technocratic future after its formation in 1961 by a group of young London architects – Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb.

“A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge – they didn’t worry.”

So wrote David Greene in a poem published in the first issue of Archigram magazine or, as Greene’s co-editor, Peter Cook, called it “a message, or abstract communication”. It was published in 1961 on a large sheet of the cheapest available paper. Filled with Greene’s poems and sketches of architectural projects designed by Cook, Michael ‘Spider’ Webb and other friends, the magazine voiced their frustration with the intellectual conservatism of the British architectural establishment.

Your telephone may know more about your private life than you do, according to a new study of mobile phone calls. The insight opens the door to mining massive data sets from mobile phone call logs, which should allow researchers to test theories for how relationship networks make or break businesses, shape the flow of information, and even affect the course of epidemics.

Building Rome in a Day

Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million photographs. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.

The Whole Earth Effect

How did a publication with just a four-year run help shape a community so prolific that it went on to inspire Google, Craigslist, and the blogosphere; save six American rivers; and shape sustainable business practices as we know them today? Forty years after the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, this oral history of the publication, as told by those who made it and those who read it, tracks the long-lasting impact of a short-lived journal that altered the course of the world.

I Am Here Map is a Javascript library to create and embedded map to find the

latitude and longitude of a point, using the ModestMaps Javascript API.

It also supports geocoding, reverse-geocoding and automagic client positioning

using a variety of geolocation providers as well as the ability to display shape

contours for locations that have been reverse-geocoded.

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

Because design is messy and non-linear, each project we do is bespoke. We customize it for the challenge at hand. The scoping of the project plan is when our approach starts to take shape, and where our partnership with you begins.

Wile working with the GPS track data of the UrbanDiary project, in connection with the series of interviews I am conducting, I suddenly recognized the different shapes and patterns that are being produced by the participants. Really funny shapes and forms, but always with a number of strong fix points. The shape is determined by a number of factors such as the spatial relationship of destinations, the distances traveled, the amount of travel and the intensity of repetition. The first point, relationship of destinations makes for the overall shape and the last point, the intensity of repetition makes for the character of the shape.

The images are all generated from participants that have a track record of two month and are the same scale.

Easy, says Sapolsky. Let's say 10% have done this taboo sexdeed, 90% haven't. Tell your subjects that those who have done the taboo sexdeed should answer the question honestly, ie confess to it. Add that those who haven't done the taboo sexdeed should toss a coin. If it comes up heads, they should say they have done the sexdeed, whether they really have or not. If it comes up tails, they should say they haven't, again regardless of what they've actually done.

This randomizing process will allow the people who have done the taboo sexdeed to confess it, knowing that they have an alibi, should they be challenged, in the shape of the coin. As long as they understand the rules, everyone who did the taboo sexdeed should confess. The researcher then just needs to double the number of people who say they haven't done the non-taboo deed -- everyone else has done the taboo deed.

What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see--literally--the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.