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Some Things To Look At

In terms of continuing on our course of looking at space, place and interactivity, one thing becomes increasingly important: how we interact with space is highly determined by how we create, perceive and react to boundaries. Spaces, and the devices we use to navigate them, are designed to enforce (and rarely avoid) boundaries of different kinds and in different ways. Examples as simple as walls, locked doors that require keys or password protected websites are easy to identify, but there are more coded interfaces present pretty much everywhere. Think of how something like a traffic light creates an effective boundary through a combination of legal mechanisms (like traffic police) and cultural codes (like the normative use of color). I'd like everyone to consider how your chosen space is defined and delineated by such boundaries/borders. Not just physical borders, but other forms of boundaries that can be identified with some thought.
To these ends, here are some examples for considering the complexity of borders/boundaries, and how such considerations can lead to different visualizations, and therefore different forms of interaction design.
Multiplicity is a group of Italian researchers across disciplines (art, geography, architecture...). Their Border Devices Project attempts to give names to different kinds of political borders (Roll over "Border Devices" and then select "Border Matrix")
Along similar lines, MigMap is a project by the Swiss group Labor K3000 that uses cartography as a visualization method for understanding migration in Europe. Abstract ideas and legal frameworks are given geographic form to understand overlaps and connections.
Worldmapper, produced by British and US scholars, changes the shape of world maps according to other data attached to nations, like "preventable deaths."
The artist Louisa Bufardeci creates maps that similarly rethink cartographic projections based on an interpretation of data. Look at the projects on the left especially.
A story about mapping in North America, told through a Flash movie by Jackie Goss.
Less obviously related to such mapping, but an interesting and related attempt to visualize the boundaries of the wireless, interactive space of mobile phones and RFID technology is Timo Arnall's Graphic Language for Touch. (download a PDF of his research)

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posted by ryan griffis at 10:49 AM Wednesday, February 20, 2008

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