I thought that while we had all the spec for the new longhill seat in a 3D app, i might as well animate it.

This is my latest iteration of the design for Longhill School's new seating object or Longseat.
The design has been changed a lot, but now it is ready for us to start making it - although have drawn the thing so many times now I feel like I have already made it. The upside is that just like riding a bike, I now am completely at one with my 3D software, the downside is that I begin to wonder how to go about meshing, extruding, metaballing or even doing some boolean functions on most household objects - I'm sure it will wear off. Anyway here are the images.

I have been working on producing a video tutorial on making treehouses for the new startup website out of the Oxford Garden School.

 

At the covered walkway there is a need for planters, but the curved seat is not to extend here, therefore I have provided some ideas for simple seperate planters - based on the minimum of labour to construct them. these planters have yet to be arranged within the space adequately (issues of escape routes and crowd flow).

 

At the meeting it was decided to attempt a planter design that used the same tube construction as the rest of the scheme.
These involve bending the pipe to a loop then stacking the loops until the desired height is achieved.
The most common HDPE pipe is 63mm in diameter - the prefered planter height is circa 700mm
Therefore 11 loops stacked and bolted make a workable planter.

The stacked tube planter will be made rigid by filling the bottom 63mm (pipe height) with concrete.
an additional depth of vermiculite will be added - and the rest will be growing medium.

I have constructed a single loop to the minimum diameter that the pipe will follow, it is a simple, low tech process just the sort of thing that a large group of student helpers can deal with..

 

The preliminary cost of the planters based on 11 times loops of black HDPE pipe (63mm diameter SDR17) is as follows
a 1.6m diameter planter (4m of tube per hoop x 11 hoops) = 44m @ £4.44 per metre = £196.00
a 1.8m diameter planter (6m of tube per hoop x 11 hoops) = 66m @ £4.44 per metre = £294.00
these estimates do not include wastage, but as the entire structure uses the same material this can be offset.
nor do the costs include the bolts, concrete or vermiculite but these are minimal perhaps an additional £20 per planter.

Where these planters meet the seating structure, the rails for the seats become a continuation of one of the levels of tubing.

There will be costs for the 83 leg tubes which I expect to be significantly higher than the track (42m approx of 355mm pipe).

The rendered images that are attached have not yet had the variations in height added to them - the final version will undulate between 200mm high and 700mm high.

There is scope for cost savings - the height of the planters, and the average seating height, could be lowered.
The number of elements could be reduced.

At the moment any subject that touches on the psychology of spaces and how we perceive them is of particular interest to me. Today I found yet another to add to the collected psychogeographies and phenomenologies.
Nudge theory, as it is rapidly becoming known, is currently being hyped as a political tool, thanks to President Obama and the British PM's mention of it as something they subscribe to.

The gossip about it makes it sound much more interesting than it actually is, promising a sort of NLP for architects and landscape designers. In fact it has a far more shoddy pedigree, being the discipline that supermarket planners use to get us to buy an extra bunch of raddishes.

The name Nudge comes from a book that Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein wrote, called 'Nudge', that draws upon psychology and behavioural economics to inform 'choice architecture'. As far as I can tell they seem to have aggregated a bit of Heideggerian philosophy with a bit of political theory and liberal economics to come up with a 'how to' book for anyone interested in manipulating the public in areas such as shopping and healthcare.

Perhaps they have identified a phenomenon, but it is unclear whether they have anything to say about its mechanics, and are simply reconciling it with the three theoretical disciplines that they are attempting to fuse.

It might be worth delving deeper, and no doubt I will, but my first attempts to find information has made me realise that I am looking for procedural clues, not for behavioural explanations. Still Nudge may feed the spatial psychotherapeutics project that seems to be developing amongst my practise.

some refs:
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's books website and blog - www.nudges.org
Nudge on wikipedia take-it-with-a pinch-of-saltia

Big Societies begin at home.

 

Courtesy of an unknow Tumblr

Spot the grassy knoll.

Got through Gatwick straight away.

In the last few days a new phenomenon has occurred, technology has met the needs of the individual to take direct political action in a new and powerful way. Take one look at @op_payback #payback @anonops #anonops @anon_operations or any combination of them on twitter and the sheer extent of activity is amazing, better still follow it all by going to http://collecta.com/#q=%23payback

Until this week any civil society with a bone to pick, or a cause to stand for has had to march to protest, send letters or risk unpredictable direct action. Our democracies have grown up relying on the powerlessness of individuals, setting the hoops for organised opposition to jump through, ensuring that the debate is always in the dialect of the state, expressed in ways that don't disrupt the status quo too much.

The Wikileaks issue is on the face of it all about freedom of information, the response by governments has been the usual mix of denial, coercion, diplomatic negotiation and financial sanction. Whether or not this is the right course of action is debatable, as is the validity of the accusations levelled at Julian Assange himself, but these debates have almost become irrelevant compared to the big story, one that possibly rivals the Dreyfus affair or Watergate in magnitude. I use those two examples because they share common ground with the events of December 2010 'DDos Day'.

By an ironic twist we see a press that is frightened for its role amidst online competition, actually mis-reporting events that concern its most sacred mantra 'freedom of the press' (see Watergate). At the same time we have governments that have failed to grasp the changes that an online society will increasingly demand from it and we watch them seriously underestimate the sophistication of public opinion regarding the matter.

Until now governments could afford to wage a slow campaign to restore public opinion, using a discrediting strategy and eroding groundswell support until it was negligible, a lumbering technique, but a time honoured one, that ensures success provided the peeved masses have no immediate access to power. The problem governments face today is that the masses can move far, far quicker than the machines of state can handle, and they have found a unique, rich source of power, simple immediate communication.

So it is that a small group of people, familiar with the internet, made an existing online tool available, LOIC (Low Orbital Ion Cannon) is an open source software application that allows for streams of data to be focused at a chosen host. At some point a control was added (called Hivemind), that allows the choice of host, or target, to be got from an external source.
Both of these are legitimate applications, a communication tool, and a peer to peer networking tool, combined they make a basic tool for running DDos (Distributed Denial of service) attacks, that can be told its target from the internet.
The effect of this synthesis of two existing mainstream applications was that anyone capable of installing microsoft word on their computer, could use it, and the worlds first app of civil disobedience was born.

With the Wikileaks issue being such a buzz on the social networks it didn't take long for news to spread that anyone could, if they wished, protest directly by uploading and installing "LOIC with Hivemind". By December the 9th 300,000 people had done so.
At this stage The Press were still reporting that a small group of hackers were causing trouble, when in effect it was a sizeable section of the public that were responsible for the sustained attacks on Paypal, MasterCard etc. Targets that were popularly identified with exerting pressure on Wikileaks to stop.

It is useful for the villains to be a 'small' group of nasty 'hackers' because they can be marginalised and hunted, in the hope that the true extent of public dissatisfaction with their governments behaviour doesn't become widely known. However the mechanism and the tool is now out there, it will become more sophisticated as time progresses, and it will probably become a mainstream method of protest. I can see it now, version 8 of Microsoft Riot. Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain, the time when governments held the key to democratic voice is passing, the sooner they recognise that they have to put their money where their mouth is, and use the internet as a truly democratic tool, the better.

There is a certain poetic in this whole affair; the freedom of information that Wikileaks is championing, and most states are attempting to silence, is the same medium that is growing exponentially with social networks on the web, and has enabled this form of civil disobedience ~ ironically, it is data itself, that is being used as a projectile to cripple the targets.

The trusted weapon of governments, financial sanctions, is precisely the same weapon that the protesters have used, but there is one big difference, none of those protesting are financial entities, nor is Wikileaks, they have far less to lose than the businesses and governments that are facing the disapproval of the public.