Physics + Museums

"Museum visitors are surprisingly mobile: They move through a space in zigzagging patterns. One might even humorously point out that this is not the sort of walking in a straight line that police officers ask for when they’re conducting a sobriety test.  This is the erratic track of people who are intoxicated.  While rooms with a certain shape seem to affect patterns of movement, people make different choices and move differently.  Some people like to turn left, others right; some people like to move in small increments along a wall, others to move across a room and back again.  (With regard to people who move in opposite ways, I’ve always been impressed by how quickly my wife and I lose each other in a museum.  Before cellphones, we would part ways in the first five minutes and it would often take two or three hours before we found each other again.)" "In essence, physicists have found ways to describe and analyze events that are not specifically predictable, but that, when they’re repeated over and over again, turn out to obey recognizable principles. What would we find, Andrew asked, if we simply mapped the movements of visitors through a museum? What kinds of patterns would we find if we gathered enough data? Could we discern a recognizable pattern that had a shape? What would these patterns of movement reveal about the act of looking?

The preliminary results of asking these questions are provided by the three diagrams in this post. Perhaps there are studies of this sort that have already been published, but I haven’t come across them. Admittedly, Andrew’s diagrams are not precisely accurate—he worked freehand, without exact measurements—but for that very reason they have a wonderfully expressive quality: I must confess that part of what appeals to me about them is simply their beauty as drawings. Even without knowing what they’re about, we can sense that they contain information and they record something mysterious and interesting. In fact, what they record is not difficult to explain."

Read more here at the Smithsonian Blog.

The Theatre of Making

As stories, they are all the same: This thing is special because of the way it was made, and (usually) because of the skill/passion of this person who made it. The unspoken premise is that there is a class of consumer craving “the story behind” the object. The further premise is that this class of consumer is expanding all the time; more people want to know more about the things they buy, and so on, because global manufacturing culture has alienated us from our objects. Actually, this premise often is spoken. The knife-maker, in explaining the satisfaction of making something useful, mentions “the details” that make his objects superior to those made quickly “in Germany, by ten different robots.”

Read more at http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/the-theater-of-making/34348/

Vernacular Typography

Vernacular Typography is a digital archive and community-based initiative dedicated to the documentation, preservation, and promotion of vanishing examples of lettering in the everyday environment. It seeks to explore, protect, and support the typographic environment in cities around the world that retain their rich traditions of vernacular signage. http://blog.vernaculartypography.com  and  vernaculartypography.com

 

Some of my favorites:

 

I'm fascinated by.... Skeuomorphs.

Last night, I was wondering why my iPhone dings like a vintage bell when I get a text message. Why does new technology use sounds that are antiquated? With the development of new technology you would think new sounds would replace old sounds. When they invented the telephone, it rang the way it did because it's mechanisms required it to do so. But now.... Why does my mobile phone still use that ring? What is this phenomenon? What made that ring special amongst all the other telephone rings in history?

I have found the answer!

A skeuomorph play /ˈskjuːəmɔrf/ skew-ə-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.[2] Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar,[3] such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with a circular town name and cancellation lines.

An alternative definition is "an element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material but was essential to the object made from the original material".[4] This definition is narrower in scope and ties skeuomorphs to changes in materials.

 

 

Must find out more.