I had two goals for myself during Open Research:

The first was to give myself some freedom and space to broaden my technical skills. Coming into the semester, I was interested in what it took to generate form and pattern from web-based data feeds, and I wanted time to play in the sandbox, so to speak, and see if I could get those kinds of things to work for me. I also wanted to learn more about the math involved in programming color.

My second goal was to pursue an idea that had been rolling around in my head for a few years, which was to experiment with websites that responded to the weather outside. I had done a few experiments with this before winter session started, but I hadn't really fleshed out the conceptual underpinnings for why this sort of work related to my thesis.

The weather, on the other hand, is experience tied to a specific location at a specific time. Its an important part of how we relate to each other face to face, and its also a sort of universal experience: we all know what hot feels like, we know what windy feels like. Can representations of weather, in real time, be used in the way we interact/converse with each other online?

Weekly Studies

Survey of blogs
I spent a week collecting screen captures of blogs that I read, or that are located within the niche of the diy, design or crafting. I like this community because its members go to great lengths to personalize even the most basic of blogging templates, so that each site truly feels like a person's identity online. As a group, they have generated their own informal etiquette around commenting, friending, adding links to link rolls, etc. I see the interactions of this group as a corollary to real-world social networks. After gathering my archive of findings, it struck me that they were all so completely linear. Entries were ordered by time, stacked one after the other in endlessly long columns (so long, in fact, that more than a few crashed my screen grab plugin). Other than the timestamps, there was also no real sense of the time between entries, or of where they are from.

Pattern Sketching
Concurrently with my blog survey, I began to dip my toe into the world of pattern generated from data. First I concentrated on building systems that would alter only color based on the data that passed through them. From there I moved on to altering color + size, and finally color + position. To a lesser extent, I also experimented with pulling in tags or images from flickr. It was important to me to limit myself to using only web-based tools for this series of investigations: no flash, no processing, no imagery of my own.

observing weather conversation
After all this technical immersion, I took a step back. I needed to re-think why weather was the trigger for all of this, so that I could find the appropriate outlet for these types of pattern. I spent a week offline - sketching, writing, and yes, talking about the weather. I sat in diners, writing down conversations I overheard. I chatted up sales clerks and waiters, and teachers and students, friends and family, and built up a list of the ways we were using weather. And it turned out that I could divide things into two categories: the majority of the time we use weather to fill empty spaces, to make small talk, to fill awkward silences while we're riding the elevator or signing the check. It is an automatic, often passive but essential form of social glue between strangers. Less often, but more meaningful, was the type of weather talk the preceeded real, meaningful interaction. Calling someone on the phone, for example, you might ask about the weather first before getting to the real point of your phone call. In these cases, weather talk was actively used as an entry point into dialogue with someone you already knew, or were getting to know.

What interested me was the balance of passive, automatic small talk, and the brief bursts of active, meaningful conversation.

What now?
I decided to take these observations, and these pattern studies, and use my own thesis blog as a test bed. I sought to create a blog that visualizes this balance of active vs passive communicating, as well as break out of the linear, endless-list-of-posts construction of a typical blog.

Here's how it works: For every day I don't post, my blog auto posts for me, filling an empty entry with a representation of the weather for that day. Its making my small talk for me, filling space until I have something important to say. The small talk accumulates in stacks, so you can start to see the progression of weather from day to day. When I do have something meaningful to say, that entry remains on top of the pile of small talk, and the process starts building from the ground up again.

What happens is that a terrain of my conversation starts to build up, and if I wait too long to say something, certain parts of the archives are obscured from view. You also can see over time that the weather in Providence is changing. Drag any of the stacks around, sift through the archives, and find all sorts of unintended juxtapositions between weather patterns and writing.

The blog is also responding to current weather - the angle of the stacks sways back and forth depending on the wind speeds, and the background color changes with the temperature. It is a combination of passive small talk and active speaking, archived weather data and real-time experience. My hope is that it allows a reader to understand, perhaps to experience, a little bit about the place I occupy while I am pursuing these ideas.

Moving forward
The site as it currently stands is at best a working proof of concept. It is still missing some of the things that make it a usable interface, like navigation to secondary or tertiary pages. But I am immensely satisfied with how much I was able to learn in these series of investigations.

You might be noticing a pattern here. My daily life is once again focused on designing two of my favorite things: books and blogs. That I am designing these two things, at this time in my thesis, is not by accident. I wanted to see what sorts of intrigue emerged when I was forced to plan the linear narrative of a book, and the non-linear narrative of a website, concurrently.

Aside from making my brain hurt, it has thrown into sharp focus something I've never fully recognized in my own process, and that is the idea of modules.

Despite not having formal training as a software engineer, my love of modules comes from a strategy in software development called object-oriented programming. If you see acronyms that start with OO, chances are they relate to the use of discrete, re-usable modules of logic that can be copied endlessly, and then modified or extended individually to suit their intended use. Its extremely efficient, and its use has made a lot of our modern computing prowess possible.

I see elements of object-oriented programming in semiotics and visual systems, although less formal and rigid. And taking a quick look at my past work, modules are EVERYWHERE:

Reusable word molds that can be ordered and reordered in the landscape to create new meaning:

Cards, encoded with meta data, that allow you to sort and query printed matter:

An exhibit filled with hundreds of boxes in three sizes, each with a different level of information on them, that can be stacked in a million different ways:

A series of t-shirts printed with reasons people feel like outsiders, but become insiders because they're all a set of the same system:

"This is the story of Nancy MacIntyre, a Tale of the Prairies.

My connection to this book began in 1912, when a soldier named Felix picked up a used copy on his way to enlist in the army. He carried Nancy with him while fighting in WW1, and he became known for gathering fellow soldiers together around the campfire and reading the book aloud. When he returned to the US, he continued this tradition with friends and family, but as Nancy's popularity grew finding new copies got harder and harder. So Felix financed a special edition, and spent the rest of his life carefully choosing friends and family worthy of their own personalized copy.

Each book included a history of the Nancy's travels, Felix's connection with her, and the following instructions: "You are to read this book ALOUD to yourself and your family. Then you are to read it ALOUD to a few carefully chosen friends on certain occasions when the time is appropriate. Thus, you will repay your debt to an important era in American civilization. With all good wishes, Felix Harris."

Jump forward to 1999 -- half a century after my great grandfather settled and published his book -- I began my own generation's version of reading around the campfire:

I started a blog. It was called The OnGoing Effort, and I started it at the request of my grandfather, who wanted to know what I was up to in college. Over the last eight years, it became a place for everyone to know what I am up to, and it has become an important archive of both the trivial and monumental events of my life over that time.

If you look at these objects independently, they aren't anything special. Its not like Nancy MacIntyre is a great work of fiction. But this little book, and the tradition of reading it aloud, brought people together in a time of great turbulence, and gave them a connection to their culture and their homes that no form of technology of that time could give them. The OnGoing Effort, too, will never win any journalistic awards. But it has been a place that, in equally turbulent times, has connected me to friends and family all over the world through writing and pictures.

But if you put them together they form a sort of technological spectrum - from highly analog to highly digital. And this spectrum became the genesis of my thesis topic: what is the nature of place if both a 50-year old book and a 10-year old blog could both evoke a sense of it?

Can Do is a collection of small steps everyone can take to enact positive change in the environment, based on the belief that building a community of people interested in taking some of these small steps can a powerful motivating tool, and empower us with the knowledge of our collective impact.