**pictures coming soon!**

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.

In proposing these two modes of open research, I started at the beginning, spending several weeks thinking and writing about my thesis topic(s): investigating the relationship between our online lives and our offline selves. How is the way interact/converse with each other similar or different when we're face to face as opposed to online? How does my idea of place - spaces with social memory and collective experience - play out in those two planes? I have long thought that the online world is still sort of placeless - you contribute to it and consume it from anywhere, and yet it is located nowhere. As a long time blogger, it interests me that forms of unique personal identity online are rarely linked to physical place occupied by the author, beyond a tagline that says where the author is from, or a map of geotagged images.

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.

I have spent the last two weeks of wintersession thinking about how to make studies of web patterns into a real, working web site that responds to data like I want it to. More in a bit about the reasons for this sort of research, but for now I want to include a slideshow of the images I am showing in today's final crit.

Thinking about the weather, and what social function it serves in conversation, is informing the way I think about generating digital form with it online. As a part of my design process for Open Research, I have been trying to write down the different ways that I talk to people about the weather:

There was the woman who works at the risd:store, who remarked on how cold it was while I signed my credit card statement. There was Ethan, who talked about the weather while taking the elevator to unlock my classroom after I forgot my key. We talked about the weather for a full 10 minutes in my Web Design class, where everyone had to share their reactions to the recent cold spell. My radiators don't work, or Should I buy a hat? The guy who fills in for Nick (at the gravel parking lot near CIT) remarked on how cold it was when I was leaving the lot yesterday.

We're in the middle of a particularly cold spell, even for Rhode Island, and it seems like everyone here is talking about it!

As a final project for Participatory Networks last year, I proposed a small web network called Can Do, with the following mission:

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.

Beyond a working test site, I was never able to actually build this project and see how it lives out in the real world. In the year since proposing it, I have also reconsidered the idea of this as a stand-alone site. In my explorations of the notion of place online in my thesis, I have often wondered about Facebook, and why it is that its particular blend of features and tools beat out so many others like it, and somehow transformed into the social center of the internet for so many people.

Regardless of why it happened, I would like to take Can Do and redesign it as a Facebook application, to take advantage of its strong infrastructure and the built in connection that so many people already have to it. This would involve redesigning the basic flow of interaction to fit into the Facebook architecture, as well as reconsidering the graphic language used within FB.

(Week of) Jan 5:
class proposals
Research Facebook architecture
Redraw Can Do site architecture

Jan 12:
Design sketches
Coding begins

Jan 19:
More coding

Jan 26:
Finishing up coding
Small scale testing

Feb 2:
Testing, tweaking, etc.

Feb 9:
final presentations
Show the project!
Invite people to add it

Even when you have nothing in common with someone, you can always talk about the weather. I am interested in weather's ability to transcend space, and yet I feel like a lot of interactive technology acts as a buffer against the communal experience of weather instead of a conduit. I would like to spend wintersession exploring the ways in which technology can react to, and interact with, the weather outside, with the goal of using data to create a sense of place online by strengthening the awareness of, and the connection to, the natural world.

My raw materials for this research will primarily be live data feeds - such as those provided by Yahoo Weather, Weather.com, and the National Weather Service - and secondary information from sources like geotagged images from flickr and text from blog or twitter updates.

I have started experimenting with web-based versions of this idea that use rss feeds and javascript, and I would like to continue with that, as well as integrate some Processing into the mix. The thing that I find interesting and challenging as a novice programmer is how to generate form from data that doesn't look data-y. How do you introduce visual randomness into a program? I wonder if by keying off of random natural phenomena that unique form might result.

My time will be broken down into a series of experiments (vignettes?), and will be a test bed for learning some new technical skills in the process. Ultimately I want to see if I can generate interesting form and/or patterns from the weather conditions outside, that can then be used to evoke the experience of weather online or in other design work.

Inspirations:
I Wanted to See All of the News From Today - Martin John Callanan
Suns from flickr - Penelope Umbrico
Infome Imager - Lisa Jevbratt
Nine Patch Generator - Jared Tarbell


(Week of) Jan 5:
class proposals
present prior experimentation

Jan 12:
refined web experimentation

Jan 19:
final web experimentation
first stabs at Processing

Jan 26:
refined Processing sketches

Feb 2:
more Processing
start documentation

Feb 9:
final presentations: series of web and Processing pieces
poster-size printouts of the most successful?
written documentation of code/process