Week 3 – Dan Hills Lecture

Dan Hill ( http://www.arup.com/) lecture was one of a series which explore the city. The lectures look at design and how to unpick a city. Dan Hill’s lecture was particularly concerned with how the communication of data can be enhanced through urban design. This particular lecture was great for all of those in LAB: 8 with Kier and Ian Guilt as Hill talked about ‘making the invisible, visible’. Hill believes that this will occur through the culmination of more data and information being revealed to the public, ‘Urban informatics’. That patterns of behaviour, patterns systems and the high importance data holds in our city will be an important way that it manifests itself.

He gave a great example of a model to depict different information (or data of interactions) to a client, to allow them to sense their building, workplace or city. This model was one he created for a library in brisbane, where he created a model of wifi connectivity. Allowing 10m per bar, he created a model which formed a structured based on the 1 or 4 bars of wifi access. This demonstrated the notion that we should be looking at new ways of seeing our city, or structures. Data is important to shape the way we look at our city and as we find a sustainable city, Hill believes they will delve into data content for success in their sustainability.

Later on he talked about the “Masterchef Effect”, but I think it is appropriate to comment on here, after the discussion of sustainability. This new coined term ‘the Masterchef Effect’ demonstrates the spike in our food industry thanks to Australia’s top ranked and viewed show Masterchef. No only did interest in dining out, cooking or careers in the kitchen increase. Individual products and specific produce increased in sales based on the nights previously created meal. For example, Pink Ling Fish sales at Coles increased by a mammoth +1421% after it featured on the show. What is interesting to think about is, imaging if this could be used to deliver a sustainable market. Where mainstream television could have a mass market influence to make this a greener world. As Hill states “it’s definitely something to think about”!

Email traffic, was another way that Hill expressed we could look at data, and it formed a great visualisation. He stated that Universities are a great source of data, and it’s true, but most of the time who have no idea what you are walking past when you shuffle past someone else’s class room. The Facade of buildings could become a display and an informative space, creating a place through real time information running through the city.

So far, this has been my favourite lecture and I am sure will continue to be so. It provided insight into the world of urban planning and interaction, whilst triggering a response of great interest in me. The idea of making the invisible, visible and viewing the world or representing it differently I found very intriguing and want to bring into our own project.

Sourcing around the campus

Today in the tutorial, Chantel, Tiia, Dylan, Martha and I all decided that we would focus on the library as a hub of information and it’s lack of use in it’s real vast potential.

Kier and Ian asked the groups to look at a range of motivations, emotional states and temporalities. We chose to look at relaxation. We also came up with the Pro’s and Con’s to various areas that you can relax on or around campus – by placing us at the persona level we engaged with the various areas as you can see in the image next to this paragraph. It was great to finally get our ideas down on paper and to be able to see where each individual group member placed emphasis.

The newly released Commonwealth Bank Property Guide, was an application of Augmented Reality that I mentioned in my Essay, and is one that I think applies to this lecture by Dan Hill. The guide allows users to make “smarter property decisions with virtual reality insights into any australian home, anywhere” states their media release. The bank, aligned with the partnership of realestate.com and RPdata.com has allowed insight into 95% of all residential properties in Australia. The Ap helps users retrieve past sales histroy, current property listings of recent sales, all mapped onto the real world in real time via the phone’s camera. The great feature and an added advantaged to our new property “sixth sense” is that it allows you to drop back into a more “bird’s eye view” to see information on homes that meet your “dream home” criteria. So essentially Augmented Reality is allowing your goals become more achievable by allowing you to see these dream homes and steps for you to purchase this. But imagine if Commonwealth bank could get the data of plumbers, builders, tilers, painters, etc to demonstrate how much work has been currently needed on this place in the past. Giving you another danger sense, not for heat or bad taste, but for a leaking roof or expensive maintenance. http://www.commbank.com.au/personal/home-loans/i-phone-app/

I also wanted to create a simple info-graphic for my essay which explain the various realm of reality through to the virtual. To do so I looked at whether the objects or the environment is real or virtual to distinguish the difference: please see the below info-graphic I created.

Reality to Virtual, Info-graphic

I also created a small timeline for the group, which we could use in our interim but also to mark our progress against.

Timeline_project management