Networks – WeWantToLearn.net

The London Housing Crisis – Survey

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As part of my research to inform my final thesis project on the London Housing Crisis, I have created a short multiple choice survey that would benefit greatly from the input of members of the WeWantToLearn community who have lived in London at any point over the past six years. The survey only takes a few minutes to complete and will directly influence the design progression of my project in the coming weeks. Please spare a few moments to participate, and/or share with friends and relatives who may be able to contribute also.

You can find the survey at the following link: Here

All survey responses are anonymous.

Thank you in advance.

Objectivism, Ecology, Ecosystems, Cybernetics, Feedback loops, Californian Ideology, Systems Theory…etc…

Three great BBC documentary films by Adam Curtis which help to understand our unit’s agenda: From Ayn Rand and Buckminster Fuller and the birth of the Californian Ideology, Ecology, Eco-Systems, Systems Theory and Cybernetics to George Price, Richard Dawkins and the Selfish Gene, see how the concept of “network” and “nature” has evolved as an ideology through modern times.

Grasshopper — Diagram of the Grasslands Experiment by George Van Dyne, showing how nature is interlinked as a system.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a series of film about how humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. It claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead havedistorted and simplified our view of the world around us.

1. Love and Power. This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy.

https://vimeo.com/38724174

2. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts. This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.

https://vimeo.com/73536828

3. The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey. This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed – so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure.

https://vimeo.com/73561591

Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares,The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora’s Box, The Trap and The Living Dead.

Interactive sea sponge components // Mark Simpson

For my burning man proposal I have developed a method to array components, based on the three sided spicule which react to light to form an interactive light based structure

These components have been developed, enlarged and arrayed to form an undulating structure with a complex array of pipework to hold the ldr sensors and connections. I am currently diagramming their hierarchy connections and array formation.

29/09/12 Grasshopper Plugin Workshop

Below are two videos made from the exercises shown at the DS10/Inter9 Grasshopper class at the Architectural Association.

The first video shows the trail left by points constrained by springs, end points and gravity. The Arch moves up and to the side, leaving a beautiful trace which reminded me of the pictures of Edouard Muybridge. It was done with Grasshopper and the free Kangaroo plugin by Daniel Piker.

The second video is a very simple example of recursion using Hoopsnake byVolatile Prototype for Grasshopper: A line rotates on another line and this new line becomes the currrent one on which the rotation is done and so one and so forth. Depending on the angle of the rotation and its location on the curve, these amazing patterns get created.

From Simplicity to Complexity

In this documentary ‘The Secret Life of Chaos’, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?

The Secret Life Of Chaos by jfhack7
(If the embedded video doesn’t appear in the post click the link – Well worth a watch)

The program covers ideas of pattern formation in nature, self organisation, feed back loops, fractal systems, evolution…etc

It reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and its intrinsic part of the laws of physics.

Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern. The natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity.

Bridging the Digital Divide with Sparchitecture

Meta-diagram (1) : Making, Powering and Connecting

The Evolution of a Spillage

Section through a Spillage

The Spindle which Makes, Powers and Connects the Spillage

Sparket Spaces (spun market)

Spearning Space (spun learning)

Spiving Space (spun living)

More than 4 billion human brains are not connected to the global machine that is internet. The enormity of this divide is cause for concern. So how do we bridge this divide? India has the greatest disparity between total population and internet users out of all the countries in the world. The majority of users are located in urban areas, the rural parts are digitally disconnected.

By trying to include an exemplar rural community in West Bengal into the global digital network, we aimed to develop an architecture that considered India’s local resources and culture. By using Jute which is a vegetable fibre that is also the highest produced agricultural product in India, we intended to show-case the communities local materials and skills. India’s cultural symbol is represented by the spindle. We took the idea of the spindle to an architectural level by developing a spinning system that would create architecture and become the catalyst for the construction of a spillage (spun village).

The community’s internet inclusion would be manifested by the setup of a blog that would advertise the community and promote their growth by attracting tourists to come and visit the site. With the growth of the community the spaces would accommodate visitors and the site would become an ecotourism destination. Ultimately, this scheme was conceived to diffuse the ideologies beyond the borders of the community, spreading local ideas. This exemplar settlement would become a precursor for change in other communities across the developing world that have the right to the internet, unleashing a cornucopia of human thought!

By Maria Valente and Anam Hasan

The Virtual Revolution

It has been recently reported that Google has launched a new unified privacy policy which took effect March 1st. All data already collected about you, including search queries, sites visited, age, gender and location will be gathered and assigned to your online identity represented by your Gmail and YouTube accounts. Now that the policy has taken effect you are not allowed to opt out without abandoning Google altogether. Before the policy took effect, you had the option of deleting your Google Web History by modifying your settings so that Google is unable to associate data collected about you with your Gmail or YouTube accounts.

A break-down of how Google tracks us and alternative search engine: DuckDuckGo.com

There is a plugin that lets you keep your opt-out status for this browser even when you clear all cookies: Cookie Opt-out Plugin

Here is an article on ‘The Deep Web‘, which is currently ‘400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web’. It’s supposedly the deep web that is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet and the internet searches we make are searching only 0.03% of the total web pages available.

An important documentary series, The Virtual Revolution, first shown on the BBC June 2010, explores how the Internet is molding almost every aspect of our lives and what is really going on behind this reshaping.

Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media: The extensions of Man, saw that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. ‘As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.’

Below is a 3D visualisation of the Experian Hitwise Network Map of internet usage in the UK September 2009. It illustrates how traffic flows between 30 of the top websites in the UK. The size of the bubble represents the website’s share of Internet visits (so Facebook and Google UK have the biggest bubbles), while the lines illustrate the amount of traffic moving between the sites (using their clickstream data).