An examination of the collections of Blythe House, archive of the Victoria and Albert Museum, by Central Saint Martins researchers in the field of design. This project is mediated by the use of smartphone technology in the creative process.
At the time of its making, this box of specimen slides, for use with a microscope or other lens, would give a considerable advantage to a child who was studying natural history. The majority of the slides are of insects, or parts of insects, but some other small creatures, such as spiders, are also included. The words and classifications used to describe some specimens, such as 'eft' (newt) or 'zoophytes' is now obsolete.
It is perhaps now difficult to realise how very important natural history was in the educational curriculum before the 1920s. The study of plants and insects, and to some extent animals, were among the few scientific subjects which were considered suitable for inclusion in the education of girls, and certainly the only ones which could easily be studied at home. Until the 1920s even the school curriculum had often emphasised natural history, since many schools had neither the staff to teach subjects such as chemistry or physics, nor any science laboratories in which to do the work.
A Microscopic View of the Different Animalcules
(Prints, Drawings and Paintings Collection)
Physical description
'A Microscopic View of the Different Animalcules'. Thirty-three numbered scientific illustrations. The twelve illustrations at the bottom of the sheet are all presented in circular frames.
Place of Origin
London, England (published)
Date
1796 (published)
Artist/maker
J. Pass (engraver)
Wilkes, J. (publisher)
Materials and Techniques
Engraving print, with colouring, on paper
Marks and inscriptions
ANIMALCULE.
A Microscopic View of the Different Animalcules.
London Published as the Act directs, 12th Novr. 1796 by J. Wilkes.
J. Pass sculp
Dimensions
Height: 28.7 cm, Width: 22 - 22.2 cm
Descriptive line
'A Microscopic View of the Different Animalcules'. Thirty-three numbered scientific illustrations. Engraving print, with colouring, on paper. Engraved by J. Pass. Published by J. Wilkes, London. 1796.
This is not specifically about the smartphone. It is about our society.
Where will we find our customers? what questions will designers have to pose to keep their angle?
who will have 'disposable' income? who will we be designing for?
please watch the vide0
The digital revolution is opening up a great divide between a skilled and wealthy few and the rest of society
The third great wave The first two industrial revolutions inflicted plenty of pain but ultimately benefited everyone. The digital one may prove far more divisive, argues Ryan Avent MOST PEOPLE ARE discomfited by radical change, and often for good reason. Both the first Industrial Revolution, starting in the late 18th century, and the second one, around 100 years later, had their victims who lost their jobs to Cartwright’s power loom and later to Edison’s electric lighting, Benz’s horseless carriage and countless other inventions that changed the world. But those inventions also immeasurably improved many people’s lives, sweeping away old economic structures and transforming society. They created new economic opportunity on a mass scale, with plenty of new work to replace the old.
The digital revolution is opening up a great divide between a skilled and wealthy few and the rest of society
A third great wave of invention and economic disruption, set off by advances in computing and information and communication technology (ICT) in the late 20th century, promises to deliver a similar mixture of social stress and economic transformation. It is driven by a handful of technologies—including machine intelligence, the ubiquitous web and advanced robotics—capable of delivering many remarkable innovations: unmanned vehicles; pilotless drones; machines that can instantly translate hundreds of languages; mobile technology that eliminates the distance between doctor and patient, teacher and student. Whether the digital revolution will bring mass job creation to make up for its mass job destruction remains to be seen.
Powerful, ubiquitous computing was made possible by the development of the integrated circuit in the 1950s. Under a rough rule of thumb known as Moore’s law (after Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, a chipmaker), the number of transistors that could be squeezed onto a chip has been doubling every two years or so. This exponential growth has resulted in ever smaller, better and cheaper electronic devices. The smartphones now carried by consumers the world over have vastly more processing power than the supercomputers of the 1960s.
Moore’s law is now approaching the end of its working life. Transistors have become so small that shrinking them further is likely to push up their cost rather than reduce it. Yet commercially available computing power continues to get cheaper. Both Google and Amazon are slashing the price of cloud computing to customers. And firms are getting much better at making use of that computing power. In a book published in 2011, “Race Against the Machine”, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee cite an analysis suggesting that between 1988 and 2003 the effectiveness of computers increased 43m-fold. Better processors accounted for only a minor part of this improvement. The lion’s share came from more efficient algorithms.
The beneficial effects of this rise in computing power have been slow to come through. The reasons are often illustrated by a story about chessboards and rice. A man invents a new game, chess, and presents it to his king. The king likes it so much that he offers the inventor a reward of his choice. The man asks for one grain of rice for the first square of his chessboard, two for the second, four for the third and so on to 64. The king readily agrees, believing the request to be surprisingly modest. They start counting out the rice, and at first the amounts are tiny. But they keep doubling, and soon the next square already requires the output of a large ricefield. Not long afterwards the king has to concede defeat: even his vast riches are insufficient to provide a mountain of rice the size of Everest. Exponential growth, in other words, looks negligible until it suddenly becomes unmanageable.
Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that progress in ICT has now brought humanity to the start of the second half of the chessboard. Computing problems that looked insoluble a few years ago have been cracked. In a book published in 2005 Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, two economists, described driving a car on a busy street as such a complex task that it could not possibly be mastered by a computer. Yet only a few years later Google unveiled a small fleet of driverless cars. Most manufacturers are now developing autonomous or near-autonomous vehicles. A critical threshold seems to have been crossed, allowing programmers to use clever algorithms and massive amounts of cheap processing power to wring a semblance of intelligence from circuitry.
Evidence of this is all around. Until recently machines have found it difficult to “understand” written or spoken language, or to deal with complex visual images, but now they seem to be getting to grips with such things. Apple’s Siri responds accurately to many voice commands and can take dictation for e-mails and memos. Google’s translation program is lightning-fast and increasingly accurate, and the company’s computers are becoming better at understanding just what its cameras (as used, for example, to compile Google Maps) are looking at.
At the same time hardware, from processors to cameras to sensors, continues to get better, smaller and cheaper, opening up opportunities for drones, robots and wearable computers. And innovation is spilling into new areas: in finance, for example, crypto-currencies like Bitcoin hint at new payment technologies, and in education the development of new and more effective online offerings may upend the business of higher education.
This wave, like its predecessors, is likely to bring vast improvements in living standards and human welfare, but history suggests that society’s adjustment to it will be slow and difficult. At the turn of the 20th century writers conjured up visions of a dazzling technological future even as some large, rich economies were limping through a period of disappointing growth in output and productivity. Then, as now, economists hailed a new age of globalisation even as geopolitical tensions rose. Then, as now, political systems struggled to accommodate the demands of growing numbers of dissatisfied workers.
Some economists are offering radical thoughts on the job-destroying power of this new technological wave. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of Oxford University, recently analysed over 700 different occupations to see how easily they could be computerised, and concluded that 47% of employment in America is at high risk of being automated away over the next decade or two. Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee ask whether human workers will be able to upgrade their skills fast enough to justify their continued employment. Other authors think that capitalism itself may be under threat.
The global eclipse of labour
This special report will argue that the digital revolution is opening up a great divide between a skilled and wealthy few and the rest of society. In the past new technologies have usually raised wages by boosting productivity, with the gains being split between skilled and less-skilled workers, and between owners of capital, workers and consumers. Now technology is empowering talented individuals as never before and opening up yawning gaps between the earnings of the skilled and the unskilled, capital-owners and labour. At the same time it is creating a large pool of underemployed labour that is depressing investment.
The effect of technological change on trade is also changing the basis of tried-and-true methods of economic development in poorer economies. More manufacturing work can be automated, and skilled design work accounts for a larger share of the value of trade, leading to what economists call “premature deindustrialisation” in developing countries. No longer can governments count on a growing industrial sector to absorb unskilled labour from rural areas. In both the rich and the emerging world, technology is creating opportunities for those previously held back by financial or geographical constraints, yet new work for those with modest skill levels is scarce compared with the bonanza created by earlier technological revolutions.
All this is sorely testing governments, beset by new demands for intervention, regulation and support. If they get their response right, they will be able to channel technological change in ways that broadly benefit society. If they get it wrong, they could be under attack from both angry underemployed workers and resentful rich taxpayers. That way lies a bitter and more confrontational politics.
This research project presents important advances in timbrel vaulting, made possible through innovation in form finding, guidework systems and construction methods. A full-scale prototype has been
realized with the application of new research in the following areas:
newly developed structural design tools based upon the Thrust Network Approach
(TNA), which allow one to generate novel shapes for funicular (i.e.
compression-only) structures; an efficient cardboard box guidework
system, which allows for a vaulted surface to be described in an
accurate manner in space for the mason; and adaptations upon traditional
timbrel vaulting techniques, which have introduced strategies for
continuous tiling patterns, shell thickening, and sequencing for
structural stability during construction. Team: Lara Davis, Matthias Rippmann, Prof. Dr. Philippe Block Collaborators: Tom Pawlofsky. Sponsors: ZZ Wancor AG, Rigips.
Marc Burry is an Architect from New Zealand, currently Professor of Innovation and Director of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at RMIT University (SIAL), Melbourne, Australia.
He is also Executive Architect and Researcher at the Temple Sagrada FamÃlia in Barcelona, Catalonia,Spain.
His team’s digital explorations of Gaudi’s models which principles
are described as “Associative Geometry”, have been a great inspiration.
Here are some pages from my third year portfolio on the four Hyperbolic
Paraboloids (hypar) which shape each columns of the “triforium gallery”
at the Sagrada Familia:
Marc Burry’s cluster at the last Smart Geometry event in Copenhagen produced the great work below based on Gaudi’s technique linked to Grasshopper.
Granada, Spain
Built chiefly in the 13th and 14th centuries
The Alhambra (from the Arabic, Al Hamra, meaning The Red) is an
ancient mosque, palace and fortress complex built by the Moorish
monarchs of Granada, in southern Spain. The name is probably derived
from the colour of the sun-dried tapia of which the outer walls are
built.
After the Christian conquest of the city in 1492, alterations were
made to the buildings within the Alhambra. In particular, Charles V
rebuilt portions of the complex in the Renaissance style of the period,
and destroyed the greater part of the winter palace to make room for a
Renaissance-style structure which has never been completed. In
subsequent centuries, Moorish art was defaced and some of the towers
were blown up.
Napoleon in fact attempted to blow up the entire complex; however his
plan was thwarted when a soldier, who wanted the plan of his commander
to fail, decided to defuse the explosives and therefore saved the
Alhambra for posterity.
The Moorish portion of the Alhambra resembles many medieval Christian
strongholds in its three-fold arrangement of castle, palace and
residential annexe for subordinates. The extremely intricate ornament
detailing in the Moorish Alhambra stands in stark contrast with Charles
V’s Renaissance palace which consists predominately of white walls and
no particular striking features.
Charles Clifford, The Court of the Lions, Alhambra, albumen print photograph, about 1855. Museum no. 47:790
The celebrated Court of the Lions is an oblong court dominated in the
centre by the Fountain of Lions, a magnificent alabaster basin
surrounding by 12 lions in white marble. The twelve lions functioned as a
clock with water flowing from a different lion each hour. The
Christians of the Reconquest took apart the clock to see how it worked
and it hasn't worked since.
The Hall of the Abencerrajes derives its name from a legend according
to which Boabdil, the last king of Granada, having invited the chiefs
of that illustrious line to a banquet, massacred them here. This room is
a perfect square, with a lofty dome and trellised windows at its base.
The roof is exquisitely decorated in blue, brown, red and gold, and the
columns supporting it spring out into the arch form in a remarkably
beautiful manner. Opposite to this hall is the Hall of the Two Sisters,
so-called due to the two very beautiful white marble slabs laid as part
of the pavement.
Owen
Jones and Jules Goury, arched window from the volume ‘Plans,
elevations, sections & details of The Alhambra’, published 1837.
Museum no. 110.P.36
William Harvey, Drawing of the Alhambra, pen & ink, indian ink, watercolour and pencil. Museum no. E.1274-1963