Jasonmcdermott » Architecture

Like lego?

Jason — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 01:21:34 +0000

Clearly not as much as Mike Doyle does! His blog has lots of behind the scenes images, well worth a look. (via TFIB)

Index

Jason — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:24:52 +0000

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!

ozchi 2009

Jason — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:53:06 +0000

I’m heading down to Melbourne tomorrow for the 2009 OZCHI conference with Frank Maguire, Bert Bongers and Dan Hill, to attend and present (with Frank) some research work we’ve done recently. I’m looking forward to it, one of the add-ons for this conference is a workshop on Street Computing organised by the ubiquitous Marcus Foth. Dan and Andrew will be presenting some of their research, as will Bert – so it’s shaping up to be a really great day tomorrow. To anyone who’s going to be at the workshop, I look forward to meeting you, the same goes to anyone else floating around the conference…Catch you later in the week, hope this bizarre Sydney weather doesn’t get the better of you!J

simple metro

Jason — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:00:23 +0000

For students in the 11217 introduction to construction class;Here is an example of a simple metronome counter which moves a line up and down a sketch window over a period of time. You should be able to follow the comments included to see how you might plug your sensors and motors into this sketch to easily arrange for your motors to move a) automatically left/right over a period of time and b) increasing in intensity based on a reading from your slider/light/proximity sensors.For the purposes of instruction and demonstration, i’ve connected the line movement to simple mouse input – move the mouse left/right to influence up/down motion – so you can see how your sensors might influence pre-programmed movement.Give this sketch a try…Give it a try, it should help in automating your systems, note also that this will mainly work with the simple motors we’ve given you (that cannot move through more than 360 degrees), not continuous movement motors.[UPDATE] this is the same sketch, ~~embedded using the superb combination of hascanvas + processingjs~~ using processingjs. Move your mouse left and right over the sketch window to modify the metronome speed of the line.

Smart Light Fields

Jason — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:46:11 +0000

In addition to my involvement with the janus project for the Smart Light Sydney Festival, Joanne Jakovich and I were invited to collaborate with the NSW Department of Planning in an ambitious short term project during the festival. The Department of Planning, along with Metropolis and D-City had the initiative to setup a small amount of resources for live event data tracking to be visualised for the duration of the festival. Our first taste of this was in an email inviting us to join, with a specific aim towards generating realtime visual information using passive bluetooth tracking technology.I’d worked before with bluetooth tracking (in the 2008 UTS MDA masterclass Street as Platform), and I’d recently mastered the small monster of embedded MySQL insert queries so it felt quite appropriate to combine these two techniques in producing the visualisation. In essence, the project asked for the following;

Networked and located sensor nodes, tracking any visible devices nearby
Central storage and collation,
regular output of recent activity (the last 3 hours)
visualisation of current activity and any paths of movement picked up by the sensors

The project had been allocated resources for sensor nodes, internet connections, software programming and some kind of visual output – in this case a projector. Joanne managed to secure space in Customs House for the project to live, we arranged for the hardware and software combination to be installed and we were off the ground. Ben Coorey (who had been a stellar student in the streetasplatform masterclass) came onboard to help us produce the visualisation in what ended up being a solid fortnight of work. We went from concept through design and installation in just over two and a half weeks – not an insignificant feat!This project marked a first in many regards – it was the first time I’d worked in this capacity as an artist/designer with an external client, providing data surveillance and visualisation with aesthetics and information. It was the first time I’d been given access to such a large data set, with potentially hundreds of thousands of visitors making their way to the SLSF precinct during the three weeks of festival activity.It happened to produce the first meaningful coalescence of a body of researchers Joanne and I had been working to pull together for the last 6 months – into the newly founded and launched anarchi.org. We were now an organisation, able to pull in assistants and coders, all within the framework of a budgeted project, able to provide payment for their time. This mightn’t seem like much of an achievement, but having worked with friends and colleagues for some time now (relying on generosity and willingness to help), it gave me a huge sense of pride in being able to offer a small sum of money to repay the hours of work put in.See Also;anarchi.org http://www.designbuildblog.com/2009/06/16/smart-light-fields/http://www.australiandesign.org.au/

Filtration Fields

Jason — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:45:30 +0000

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.The filtration fields exhibition in the DAB Lab gallery was a realtime interactive installation using simple camera tracking to measure daily activity within the DAB courtyard. The exhibition was as a prototype test for ideas on the overlap of surveillance information and participation in architecture by its’ inhabitants. Our premise for the installation was that the architecture of the DAB Lab gallery and surrounding courtyard space would be given eyes and ears, a brain to consider and a mouth to speak its’ mind. The exhibition space of filtration fields was, unlike all pieces held in the DAB Lab, not the space of the gallery itself but the outside world upon which it had a threshold. The silent box would become an active element in the architecture of the courtyard, no longer only passively inviting people inside but actively seeking to make its opinions known. The void space of the courtyard would act as a performance stage for the activities and life of the DAB, and the natural bookend to the void was an appropriately matching wall of glass facing the space of the gallery.

The DAB gallery sits nestled under the canopy of one side in the DAB courtyard, standing as a window into another world, a place of existence in the imagined mind of another. All of our experiences in the DAB Lab gallery were of surprise and delight, the little gallery had observed us and prepared something appropriate to show.My initial thoughts for the piece revolved around an image I had imagined of the DAB Lab gallery space existing as a small part of a sensory system extending the fabric of the whole building – the glass wall fronting onto the courtyard was in fact the glass lens of a large and ever curious eye. The rear wall of the gallery would be the retina upon which the useful information would be refracted and transferred for processing elsewhere. Other senses of the building were to be placed in the surrounding architecture outside, remote senses (microphones as ears, light/temp/hum/vibration as skin) of a much larger organism. Each of the senses would be dislocated but connected, each informing the other regarding the goings-on of people in the courtyard.As the project took shape, it became clear that the focus of the exhibition should not only be the ‘eye’ of the DAB, but rather the effort to interpret the overlay of many eyes, ears and other senses into information, all representing the happenings in the courtyard. The focus of the exhibition is not the DAB Lab itself, but the affect it could have on the lives of people moving through the space in-between. Each of the glass wall panels would form opposing viewpoints on the courtyard, illustrating different relationships between the viewer/participant and the data they created. The concept of the DAB as being a semi-conscious entity gave us the notion of eyes (an overload of information, all visual and uninterpreted for meaning) and brains (filtered information, abstracted for patterns of activity).

More to come..

SO-AD Triptych 01

Jason — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:03:51 +0000

Looking forward to the next SO-AD installation, Triptych 01 at the DAB LABGallery, (Level 4 DAB cafe courtyard, 702-730 Harris St Ultimo) on the 11th March 09 at 6pm.
A new feature of the DAB LAB Gallery opening will be a public lecture at 7pm by David Burns, so make sure not to miss it.

Computational Environments'09

Jason — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:37:40 +0000

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 vigor and an even greater expectation. We will be setting up a platform for the students to share and explain their work, so keep an eye out for that – I will post more details when they are at hand.Looking forward to an exciting, thought provoking and intensely productive semester!

Google, Koolhaas & Cloverfield

Jason — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:11:23 +0000

Call it the trifecta – today I came across a link to a google map indicating the locations of events in the 2007 movie ‘Cloverfield‘, which is rather funny and well worth a look.

Is it just me, or does it look like the google New York illustrators have taken inspiration from Rem Koollhaas’s 1978 book ‘Delirious New York‘?

The Street as Platform

Jason — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:00:46 +0000

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 The Street as Platform, in which the notion of the static street in contemporary urban planning and architecture is discussed as an anachronistic idea and one in dire need of reform. The street as platform talks about the dynamically linked nature of the modern street, where mobile communication, ubiquitous computing and traditional number crunching merge as a new kind of informational street ecology that exists just outside of our normal consciousness.As students and teachers of architecture, it could well be said that the dynamism of the street in it’s inhabitation and occupation is implicitly known and explored, but never clearly articulated as a driver – in it’s own right – of architectural decision making regarding form/content.

With this in mind, we set out to investigate the lived inhabitation of the street in an attempt to visualise and understand the hidden seams of activity, an attempt to make the invisible visible.Along with Dan, Anthony and Mitchell, we had a selection of super keen students and a handful of sensor equipment with we set about taming the data beast of Harris St. Our aim was to produce some meaningful information, based on corellated data sets gleaned and generated from our surrounds. The students searched for data on Harris st from a number of sources relative to Harris St (google, flickr, youtube, newsrolls, blogs) and then used processing to scrape, munge and visualise the data. Also included into the mix were a number of sensors we wired up to collect site specific data such as light/temperature/humidity/rainfall levels over the last week, Bluetooth devices in the vicinity, webcam images from the street as well as audio readings and a magnetic sensor.

All up the live data feeds were a bit of a mixed bag with plenty of teething problems, but over the next fortnight these issues will look to be sorted.The students presented their work on Friday to an invited panel including marcus trimble, andrew vande moere and kirsty beilharz, one of our new professors in Design at UTS. The presentations went very well, showcasing some very good work and sparking much discussion amongst the invited guests.The students have diligently been updating a blog with images of the process workand sketch ideas throughout the last two weeks, which can be found at http://streetasplatform.wordpress.com. The studio will be exhibiting some of the work at the upcoming UTS Architecture exhbition on the 4th December, so come see some of the live feeds being visualised on the night.