DACS.Open.

Between each of the workshops there is a 2 week period of making things. Chris (me) goes back to what we’ve joking called “the shed” to make something. It seems like a non-confrontational way to talk about software development. It’s about tinkering towards a thing. What will come out aren’t products, they’re more thinking models; very much in the same way that architectural models aren’t very small buildings, they’re ways of seeing all sorts of interstitial things without having to make a building.

I’ve tried as best as I can to categorise how I do this and to think about how we tell the story, our first workshops are after all about audiences and story telling. Over the next two weeks as we look at showing more of what came out of the second workshop - the artist’s thoughts on the two things I made. We’ll do some daily diaries of what’s being done now on the projects as we and the artists refine them, try them on for size and use them. It’s all part of understanding the storytelling of making.

What I’ve known for a while but not really worked out is at this phase of a project how little time I spend with a computer. The breakdown seems to be roughly this.

A lot of walking, thinking and observing. From walking and looking at local art galleries and how stories are told within them, to understanding the grids I was seeing around me as a way through thinking about the grids and interfaces I’d need to build.

The walking bit is very important for me, I do some of my best thinking when walking but you also see elements around you that inspire or help you think differently about a problem. One of the prototypes involves geography and I find it harder to think about geography when I’m indoors. My moment when I realised how that prototype would work was very much a walking moment, thinking about how maps and results relate to each other in different, more human ways.

I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about some key phrases which came out of the workshop as they feel very, very important.

This latter set of places in which artists curate has led to some thinking about the sorts of navigations users may want to do, but also in the sort of data we’ll need to capture and the sort of experience they’ll have in terms of the shape of the data that comes back out. I’m trying to find ways of letting the artists curate in such a way that the user of the site has four key modes of finding things; filter, search, random and serendipitous (loose divergent filtering).

I’ve spent some time sketching out some grids and what the grid might contain and thinking about how grids of heterogenous objects work, we’ll say some more about this on Monday in a couple of posts about quilts. 

Part of this has involved thinking about some interesting interfaces that are around us, for example the concepts of Live Tiles from Windows Phone 7 and how these tiles are effectively pulling information from deeper within the application and surfacing it, it feels very fascinating within the confines of this project somehow.

And taking some of those sketches into code.

At the end of the time we had two very crude prototypes, one we’ll show on Monday, one we’ll show in a week or two’s time.