Yesterday, Chaim, Emily, Andrea, Astrid, Marko, and I sat in the library and brainstormed a veeeeeeery rough list of human capabilities and endeavors. Here's what came out. (and here's the spreadsheet it was generated from).
Part of this was just for fun, but to me the real point was to start rolling toward what will eventually be a kind of inverse representation gallery -- what humans can do rather than what representations we've come up with that use those capacities.
I imagine that one day this will be a gallery in the lab, called something like The Designer's Field Guide to Human Ability. The gallery should provide utility as a reference guide and also serve as inspiration for our designs ("here's all the things we could be drawing on!").
My hope is that as much as possible the gallery would try to demonstrate human capability with experiments readers do rather than just explaining them second-hand. My model here is the paper on preattentive vision.
Since cataloguing all human ability is probably a hopeless endeavor, this should be a wiki gallery that any of us can add to or change with minimal effort. My model here is the art assets and sticky notes I always see in collaborative workspaces:
For the most part I want the gallery to live in the physical world, but I think there should also be a tiny rectangle ("rectingle"?) version for the convenient disassociation from physical space. Eventually readers (individuals or groups!) should just be able to download the space into their living room or workspace or whatever, but we're not there yet. I want this gallery to be like the nascent research gallery, browsable in the physical world but able to follow links and get more context quickly, through lasers or touch or laser touch or whatever. (By the way, lasers are nice and all, but can we have a touch-based backup?)
In general, I think making spatial/rectingle wikis trivial to create is a good place to start. I've been emailing with the folks that made the list of physical visualizations to see if I can get them to serialize their database for me so that we can have that gallery in the lab. I could imagine lots of these spatial wikis thrown up ad-hoc when needed around the lab.
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As for yesterday's work, it was fun to try to make a collaborative brainstorming space:
Everyone was sitting around the couches staring at their rectingles, but I had a projector up that showed the latest images people were adding to the spreadsheet. This was an attempt to create an object of shared attention. It kind of worked. There were definitely times the group was all looking at (and often laughing at) something on the projector, but most of the collaboration still took place in rectingle land, and, significantly, in people saying out loud what they were adding to the spreadsheet.
Anyway, that's all I've got for now. My main focus will be on bubble sort for the next several weeks, but I look forward to more experiments in spatial media.
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On June 11, 2015, I made a poster of all of these, because why not?
