Against Search by Lev Manovich

How to work with massive media data sets? Early 21st century media researchers have access to unprecedented amounts of media--more than they can possibly study, let alone simply watch or even search. A number of interconnected developments which took place between 1990 and 2010--the digitization of analog media collections, a decrease in prices and expanding capacities of portable computer-based media devices (laptops, tablets, phones, cameras, etc.), the rise of user-generated content and social media, and globalization (which increased the number of agents and institutions producing media around the world)--led to an exponential increase in the quantity of media while simultaneously making it much easier to find, share, teach with, and research. Waiting to be “digged” into are hundreds of billions of videos on YouTube and photographs on Facebook (according to the stats provided by Facebook in the beginning of 2012, its users upload 7 billion images per month), millions of hours of television programs digitized by various national libraries and media...
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Remember by Steven Matijcio

Remember by Steven Matijcio

Remember In his 2009 book What is an Apparatus? Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben characterized his titular inquiry as “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” (1) He goes on to explain that beyond institutions (such as schools, factories and prisons), apparatuses can also include, “the pen, writing, literature, philosophy...computers, cellular telephones, and...language itself.” (2) In this symbiotic realm of object and subject, Agamben implies a fundamental, if enigmatic relationship between people and the materials that shape us, as we shape them. Author Vik- tor Mayer-Schoenberger mines the mnemonic niches of this provocative notion further, tracing a history through what he calls “external memories” crucial to the development of human knowledge, and how humans know. From prehistoric cave paintings and ancient scrolls, all the way to the diary of his stepfather, Mayer-Schoenberger finds a thread less in specific content, and more in how...
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The Arrogance of Permanence (or Designs Should Flow like Leaves) by Aly Khalifa

The Arrogance of Permanence (or Designs Should Flow like Leaves) by Aly Khalifa

We are taught in design school that the best designs have a lasting quality. We see beautiful commercial objects in venues like New York’s Museum of Modern Art and are led to think it represents the ultimate achievement of a design project. Designers are then inspired to create solutions that might one day be next to Raymond Loewy’s Studebaker Avanti or Henry Dreyfus’ Bell Model 302 telephone. Design artifacts are important for scholarly work, but by definition, museum pieces have been removed from their context. By preserving them, their existence is isolated from the regenerative processes that dominate the earth and the universe. Yet is a Woolly Mammoth proud to have her bones in a natural history museum? She would have liked it better if she was still using those bones, and more importantly, that her DNA got passed along and her species adapted to this changing world. Establishing a permanent place in history is what so many of us unconsciously strive...
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401 Oberlin Road + 520 S Person Street by Erin Sterling Lewis

401 Oberlin Road + 520 S Person Street by Erin Sterling Lewis

Change is constant. It insinuates impermanence and can be exciting or devastating. Living in the fast growing city of Raleigh, I’ve seen a tremendous amount of change since moving here in 2002 - some exciting and some devastating. I practiced architecture for seven years before serving on the Raleigh Planning Commission. I worked on buildings that took at least a year to design and often as much time to build. The design process for each project stole part of my heart and soul, as well as most of my weekends. I did not mind, because I knew I was making places for people – marks on the earth that would last my lifetime and beyond. This is one of the great joys and responsibilities of being an architect. Before my experience with the Planning Commission, I was not familiar with the analysis, discussion, and debate that leads to change in our city, almost none of which directly addresses the value of...
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An Interview with Dan Gottlieb

An Interview with Dan Gottlieb

(Dan Gottlieb was interviewed by Shelley Smith, Master of Art + Design student) [SS] I’d like us to just kind of start with a general who you are and how you came to be here. You mentioned that you were a fine artist, so--that’s quite a career path. [DG] Yes, well, in retrospect, it feels like it’s very linear, but it didn’t feel like that along the way, all the time. So, I started out in undergraduate school as a double major, in fact. I was a fine arts major at the University of New York, Buffalo, and I chose that school because it had --one, it had a great art department, but, two, it had a great biology department, and I was totally interested in both at the time. So I was a double major in art and biology for two and a half, three years. That’s an interesting combination. Well, I always thought that it was complementary, and still to this day...
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Hopscotch by Grayson Currin

Hopscotch by Grayson Currin

Last weekend, people would not stop asking me if I was having a good time. In rock clubs, on city street corners and even at the table at which my wife and I finally sat down to have dinner around 1:30 a.m. on a Friday night: Everywhere I went, there the question (or some variation thereof) was, often presented with a latent yearning that presupposed I wasn’t really enjoying myself. “Are you having fun? “Are you enjoying yourself? “This is different. Do you like it?” “So, how does it feel?” The reason that my wife, Tina, and I didn’t sit for a sandwich until close to closing time is that we had been busy bouncing between the sets of bands and DJs, producers and rappers at the Hopscotch Music Festival, a five-year-old Raleigh institution that brings a few hundred acts and several thousand listeners to the city’s burgeoning downtown. In only the last few hours, I’d seen one musical hero (the...
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What Does Planting Tomatoes Have To Do with Fashion? by Natalie Chanin

What Does Planting Tomatoes Have To Do with Fashion? by Natalie Chanin

This essay is adapted and reprinted with permission from EarthPledge Publishing. The Alabama tomato is truly a wonder. It takes on the color of the deep red soil, and the taste borders on sweet and tart. I grew up eating these tomatoes straight out of my grandparent’s garden in Florence, Alabama, and after having lived in Europe for more than 20 years, I still think Alabama tomatoes are the best in the world. So when I moved back to my hometown in Florence, to a place called Lovelace Crossroads, I was eager to have a garden and grow my own. I quickly realized I could not remember the details of how to plant a tomato, so I consulted Mr. Jay Arnet, an 87-year-old family friend who has the most beautiful kitchen garden. He taught me how to lovingly remove the bottom branches from the seedlings, dig a hole that seemed too big, fill it with compost and water the plants. They...
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Terra Incognita: 1000 Cities of the World by Catherine D’Ignazio

Terra Incognita was a Latin term used on maps from the Age of Discovery to denote unexplored territories. It's a perspectival term. Because, of course, there were people like the Tupinambá actually living in those seemingly unexplored lands on Martin Waldseemüller's map. The places the Tupinambá knew intimately -- where they fished or hunted or celebrated or slept -- were not Terra Incognita to them. But to the Europeans embarking on their voyages each new cove and settlement was a curve or mark to be made on a map. It was a matter of perspective. A matter of technology. Some small matter of hubris. It remains a question of all of these things in the Information Age. The optimism and hubris of Big Data appear to be unrivaled - What don't we know in the age of Big Data? By tapping mystic rhythms with our fingers and staring into squares of light we traverse great oceans of distance. As we...
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Blur by Elizabeth Diller, Richard Scofidio and Charles Renfro

Blur by Elizabeth Diller, Richard Scofidio and Charles Renfro

Location: Yverdons-les-Bains, Switzerland Scale: 80,000 sf (7400 sm) Status: Completed 2002 Awards Progressive Architecture - P/A Design Award - 2003 Swiss TV and B. magazine - Golden Rabbit for Best Building of 2002 - 2003 The Guardian - Top Ten Buildings of the Decade - 2009 Summary Blur is an architecture of atmosphere—a fog mass resulting from natural and man-made forces. Water is pumped from Lake Neuchâtel, filtered, and shot as a fine mist through 35 000 high-pressure nozzles. A smart weather system reads the shifting climatic conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction and regulates water pressure at a variety of zones. Upon entering Blur, visual and acoustic references are erased. There is only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing nozzles. It is a habitable medium that is formless, featureless, depth-less, scaleless, massless, surface-less, and dimensionless. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for visual fidelity in high-definition with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition. In this exposition pavilion there is nothing to see but our...
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Accessing the City: The rise of tactical urbanism by Matt Tomasulo

Accessing the City: The rise of tactical urbanism by Matt Tomasulo

by Matt Tomasulo {abstract} Matt Tomasulo is a graduate of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at North Carolina State University, with a Master of City and Regional Planning from UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the founder of CityFabric in Raleigh, which has a mission “to engage as many people as possible in conversation about their city.” Tomasulo’s most recent venture, Walk Raleigh, is a bottom-up campaign to engage residents and community members in a movement to recognize the walkability of Raleigh. Since Walk Raleigh has gained national and international exposure for its “spontaneous / tactical urbanism,” Tomasulo has been asked to speak around the city and country on the subject of engaging communities in recognizing the walkability of their own urban environments. His article, tentatively named Accessing the City will address “how now is such an opportunity for anyone to have a large-scale impact through small-scale interaction. Walk Raleigh will be used as a case study to examine how the contemporary age...
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The Hand and the Mind

The Hand and the Mind

by Juhani Pallasmaa {abstract} Juhani Pallasmaa is an architect and visiting Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, U.S. as well as the current Plym Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign inChampaign, Illinois. Also a former professor of architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology and a former Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture, he is the author of numerous books, including Archipelago. Essays on Architecture, The Eyes of the Skin – Architecture and the Senses and The Thinking Hand, the last of which is required reading for all architecture students in the College of Design at NC State. Pallasmaa is the current director of an architecture studio, Arkkitehtitoimisto Juhani Pallasmaa – in Helsink, Pallasmaa Pallasmaa’s article is a variation of the preface to The Thinking Hand, written for the Student Publication. In the article, Palasmaa considers the interrelationship of technology, handwork and how we think. “During the past century and half”, Palasmaa argues, “the mechanized and automated...
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Transforming Design Education

Transforming Design Education

By Deb Littlejohn, PhD {abstract} Deborah Littlejohn is a design researcher and educator. Her research is guided by questions that address the field of relations among networked technology, new information environments and design pedagogy, and the ability of people to learn, adapt and change. Her dissertation was a grounded theory study on the outcomes of relationships among curriculum, faculty beliefs, and the particular circumstances of the learning environment in innovative U.S. design programs. Littlejohn has taught design at several U.S. programs in the areas of interaction design, motion graphics, typography and graphic design. From 2001–2006, she was a Resident Design Fellow at the University of Minnesota Design Institute where she led an investigation of leading practice in type design that resulted in the internationally-distributed publication Metro Letters: A Typeface for the Twin Cities (2003). A desire to promote the value of research in design education and contribute to the field's ongoing dialogue has been extended through Littlejohn’s participation in design conferences, invited lectures, student...
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