informal dialogue

Are you going to Index tonight? It’s the end of year show for the UTS Architecture school, with work being exhibited from all 5 years.  Go check it out!

Today I spent some time going through earlier posts, making small tweaks or edits to image sizes – bringing the site back up to date with the new theme (courtesy of subtraction.com). Something that came to mind during this was that I haven’t been using this site as a sketchpad or notebook as much [...]

Lately I’ve been working my way through an academic requirement for all phd students at UTS, which involves submitting a progress reports on my work each and every semester. These reports are essentially a simple 4-page form but require an appended (also 4 page) report outlining what you set out to do, what you [...]

I’m currently preparing for a short piece of processing tutoring in the Bachelor of Architecture course, commencing tomorrow.  The course is a 1st year construction subject, in which the year group is designing modular structures from found objects (read; whatever they can find in large amounts at Reverse Garbage), with a  12-15 unsuspecting students are [...]

As part of the Smart Light Sydney Festival, May 2009, Tom Barker (Professor of Design, Architecture and Innovation at UTS) and Hank Haeusler (Post-Doctoral Researcher at UTS) were commissioned to design and produce an interactive light sculpture to be exhibited on the light walk in the Rocks.  The piece conceived by Tom was called Janus [...]

Filtration Fields (Joanne Jakovich & Jason McDermott 2009)
Recently Joanne and I were given the opportunity to exhibit in the DAB Lab Research Gallery at UTS, in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty building, as an opportunity to refine and showcase our collective research into realtime responsive architectural environments.

[view from inside DAB Lab Gallery, taken [...]

Gearing up for the first week of class for Computational Environments, the Master of Architecture design studio Joanne Jakovich, Bert Bongers and I will be teaching at UTS.
Last time round the studio culminated in the Skinform project, see below;

From tomorrow onwards we will be launching into a new semester, complete with a new brief, renewed [...]

The Computational Environments students created the Skinform as a major project for the studio.  It has been fully exhibited twice at UTS and also as a small teaser exhibit at Customs House.
As part of the Sydney Architecture Festival, the Skinform project was exhibited.  The project was initially planned to be installed as a fully working [...]

The Street as platform – a street rendered in data.
November has been a busy month!
Along with Anthony Burke, Dan Hill and Mitchell Whitelaw, I’ve been running an intensive masterclass studio in the Master of Digital Architecture program at UTS.  The masterclass is based on one of Dan’s earlier posts called http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/02/the-street-as-p.html, in which the notion [...]

The pixeltag project has progressed once again;
* the interface has been amended slightly to allow for yaw input (not just roll) as the ‘x’ axis data,
* the ‘cursor’ item has been implemented, allowing the user to see where they are about to draw prior to doing so,
* The up/down ratios have been adjusted to allow [...]

As part of my research into interactive architecture, I have come across some very interesting ideas for designing and implementing feedback interfaces.
One such idea was embedded in the wii remote, as discussed in an earlier post on the pixeltag project. Another such test we worked on in the interactivation lab is the connection of [...]

By Rachael Hemmings, Jessica Marsden-Smedley and Jason McDermott.
Completed for ‘Architecture, Cinema and Representation’, Autumn Semester.

Architecture Delirium (2007) from Jason McDermott on Vimeo

The Chennai Free Information Zone project is exhibited as part of the Continuum: Tactics for Contingent Environments Exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The Continuum exhibition is a collaboration between Anthony Burke of UTS DAB Architecture and David Burns of Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture.

The google-verse has recently been expanded to include gapminder software as part of the ever impressive Google Docs platform.
Below is an interactive spreadsheet example of the sophisticated motion graphs now available in Google Docs.
The motion graph is based on the Gapminder software first demonstrated to the world by Hans Rosling in his exciting and highly [...]