Capture by Rand, Broughton and Quintenz-Fiedler is an opulent manual that plumbs the depths of photographic theory, presenting it with clarity and extends the traditional analogue into the digital discussing the aspects that make working digital unique. This is a principle-based approach that posits that full appreciation of the theory can lead to free and creative exploitation of the your potential. Its not hands-on workshop approach. This is more of a conceptual approach that discusses the factors you should be considering when undertaking digital photography. Its all about the science of image and light.

The biggest challenge with this approach is that you have to take the time to read, consider, ponder and to approach the creative process in a linear fashion. This calls for a specific way of learning and applying that suits only a particular sector of the photographic community. This is by no means a criticism, as a linear thoughtful approach Capture is a brilliant execution. However, when trying to describe who will benefit from this book it must be noted that for the hands-on, workshop, see and do type, this may not be the appropriate manual.

The Beyond section in particular is very well presented. It identifies the some of the challenges and trends at the cutting edge of digital photography today. The book is aimed at the contemplative photographer who will take the time to appreciate the science behind the practise. The photography presented in the book is stunning in its own light. The photographs have been superbly selected by the authors (some from their own portfolios) which really enhance the pleasure of the experience.

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I came across this one in a book on the Rush Library. Not that earth shattering, but something about the textual overlay caught my eye. Could be the use of text rather than colour and legend, or rather than icons to represent the use of the space. Well done.

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There was a time when the the brilliant illuminated manuscripts of Irish Monasteries represented the passionate collection of the works of the solitary monk/artisan/craftsman. The intricate knot patterns are a study in a real pattern language. Years ago, when my creative juices were sought a middle ground between a clear systematic approach and yearning to find break out of these same systems, I discovered the work of George and Iain Bain. — father and son. The elder Bain made a lifetime study of finding the patterns in the knotwork and devising techniques to allow others to appreciate these and to replicate these celtic masterworks for themselves. His son built on these techniques to devise a an even simpler way of creating the elabourate designs. I was hooked and produced some large scale knot patterns. I also discovered the wonder of doodling in square and triangular knot patterns. At one point I even delved into zoomorphical celtic artwork and dicsovered and even larger challenge.

As of late I have not spent the time to keep up with my knots. You’ll note that the logo on the top left corner of this blog is actually a very simple celtic knot. A decade ago I started using Abobe Illustrator to assemble these knots and developed a certain technique to accomplish what I needed. When I did the Randomosity logo I aimed for simplicity, not just for aestehtics, but admittedly because I had lost my familiarity with the technique. This morning, I wanted to throw a quick knot on an icon for the iPhone/ITouch dashboard and felt I needed a knot. To my dismay I couldn’t find my original artwork for the logo and was about to turn to Illustrator to craft something quickly. I happened to do a quick search and stumbled on The Celtic Knot Font. While I may have toyed with the idea of putting little knots into a font (in my font design days) I don’t think I thought of taking the Bain system and assembling a font that could be used to create patterns using individual letters as the building blocks. The creator (knotworker) Daniel Isdell has crafted a brilliant system! I immediately had to purchase one of these fonts to play with. The craftsmanship is superb and the wealth of tutorials and examples at the site get you up and running immediately. They have fonts in a variety of formats (outline, inverse, obverse and now 3D) available. The most simple pattern uses the nine keys to the immediate left of the keyboard and produces one of the most familiar patterns. You simply choose a font size and ensure that your leading is set to 0. Instant knot pattern. This is very, very impressive and cool.

However (and there’s always a but) when reflecting on the nature of celtic ‘knoticisme’, part of the knot journey is the journey itself. So in that sense I am cheating and I feel like I am. The reality is that I must again find and take the time to play with the knots, imagining them in my own mind and then making the transformation myself from imagined through my fingers into fruition. The creative journey is a very meditative and restful pastime. The tool is wonderful and for many uses this is the appropriate tool. If I were creating a website, or constructing a needlework pattern for further crafting, then this is part of a bigger process. When part of the joy of the process is in the imagining, this tool may eliminate that and this is where I feel I am cutting corners. This is not a criticism of the tool itself (I think it is brilliant and applaud the systematic devising of pattern that went into it), merely a reflection on the nature of the process and of when the tool subtracts from the end result. But that is very contextual and I am simply reminded of the tremendous gratification and satisfaction derived from the hours spent crafting knots with ink and paper.

What would the pre-medieval Irish monks think?

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I hadn’t been to the Digg Labs area in a while. Wow. They have a wonderful assortment of story and author visualization tools available there that are both mesmerizing and thought provoking. Navel gazing is a wonderful past-time and methinks that Digg is making a concerted effort at perfecting the art. I am particularly attracted to the new Arc tool. Its shows story popularity in realtime and also makes a link between stories dugg by the same users. Thicker vectors indicate story popularity. Interesting.
The Stac visualization is also extremely cool. A collection of stories represented by bars of varyiong shades based on popularity spread across the bottom of the screen and then as they are dugg, weight blocks fall from above reinforcing the story title. Just neat. And as before far to mesmerizing.
Its a quick way to gauge popularity and user activity. The animation is smooth and entertaining. Popular of course has nothing to do with my interest or relevance, but the visualization is effective in conveying the info and it does make a fine screensaver. Apple’s new RSS visualizer in Leopard is another cool infofeed screensaver. Visually stunning.

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So…48 hours back on a Macintosh laptop and I am in seriously danger of getting drunk on the kool-aid again. What is it that pulls one back? Having never really left was part of it. I simply was being interdenominational.

I have my iMac in the living room and an HP Media Centre in the den. I conduct most of my daily work on my laptop though. I am a happy user of an IBM ThinkPad X32. I did not come to the X32 blindly. I started using ThinkPads on a daily basis back in 1999. Before that I was that bane of the Windows world: the Mac bigot. I had a 128K Mac in 1984 and traveled the Apple path, working for the largest reseller in Canada, winning PowerBooks in contests and acquiring a small, but respectable computer museum of around 50 machines — mostly Apple. I have since divested myself (involunarily of most of them — retaining, some of the more exotic — my 20th Anniversary, an Apple II, an Apple III, a Mac clone, a ream of PowerBooks, a few Newtons, a Lisa of disputed ownership etc.) But it was 1999 that changed things for me. It was just before the Mac became the visible majority. Clearly Macs were and still are the minority, but they are quite fashionable to wear in public and if you are in education, they have an inflated popularity.

This is not to pass judgement on technical abilities, quality or value, but at some point, we hearty pirates remained so in name, but not in substance. You aren’t taking a chance by buying a Mac anymore. There’s no extra steps that we have to do to fit in. In many cases, the other side makes the effort. Its a real shift, but one that’s even more so apparent when you are on the other side.

In 1999, corporately we had to bridge the Windows and Mac world. So our desktops stayed Mac, we put a Windows-based machine on each desk and our salespeople got Windows laptops. Then so did I. Now, a ThinkPad is about the best you can do if you ‘have’ to embrace the Windows platform. The sleek black slab has the aesthetic appeal — and it screams that you are on the dark side — if you are there, you might as well sing it proudly — its the Mac approach to being on Windows.

I started with a T series Thinkpad. Sleek, slim and powerful. A great machine. After two years I faced the choice of going back to Mac, but after weighing the options, it made sense to get another ThinkPad. I had a fully kitted out G4 at the time and I had a need to run some Windows stuff. Emulation sucked. We lived that lie for a long time — much like the marketing speak that convinced us that PPC architecture could grow infinitely whereas Intel was going to hit the ceiling in 1995 and die a horrible death. Yeah…ironic, eh?

So, unfortunately, I went Windows for mobile and OSX on the desktop. I would argue that Apple makes finer laptops than desktops and I had my usage reversed. But, without the material resources to have one of each, it was one of the other. Over time, I became more mobile and I toyed with smaller laptops. I wanted to stay Thinkpad and I picked up a cheap X30 to play with. Sweet. I weighed off the advantages of the more powerful T40 and the convenience of the X30. In the end I managed to find an X32 that was the perfect compromise. Nearly the power of the T40 in the footprint of the X30. I was stuck with three laptops (a rough luxury — but one I couldn’t afford). Managed to find good homes for the two and moved to an X32-centric universe.

The little black slab has been a trooper (and still is). Earlier this year I pushed it a little too far and have done some irreparable heat damage to it running SQL routines that should have been done on any of the other boxes, but there it chugged for 12–14 hrs at a time handling some monster databases. But it has survived and despite two catastrophic failures, it soldiers on…and then came last Thursday.

A very good friend agreed to trade his original 12 inch Powerbook in exchange for some work. I am stuck on size and Apple doesn’t have an ultra-notebook these days. There are rumours everyday and we hold our breathe, but I knew that the little PB was really the machine that interests me. No, its not intel-based so no multiple OS. No, there’s no iSight built in and right now I am running on 384Mb after adding 128. It has a small drive and it’s the original 867Mhz model. But it is one of the sleekest pieces of kit tech that I have touched in a long time.

Why is it so cool? Well, its got to do with the whole experience. Its starts with the superficial. It looks better than anything else out there. No question…nice little rounded corners, appropriately lit and oriented apple on the hood. It slips in an out of a knapsack as it should. No square corners to make you have to jiggle. It just goes sloooop. Perfect. The tactility if supreme. It’s cool and sleek, it’s hot and solid. The little light in the latch that throbs when it is sleeping is the subtle little touches that make a Mac special.
The keyboard is amazingly good. Now, I am coming from the gold standard in laptop keyboards and the one in the Powerbook is pretty close to being as good.

As I gush along through this, I have to comment that finding those neat little OSX only apps that I really couldn’t benefit from over the past few years is a special little secret treat. Stock trade like iLife and IWork are increasingly visually refined, but lets not fool ourselves, they are crack cocaine. Apple uses them to sell hardware and the most recent versions push the limits of this older hardware. But the subtle touches remind you that they are just shy of black magic. The fact that the little mail swoosh was lost on me running on a desktop Mac. With headphones plugged in I sent some mail and it audibly passed right in front of me as it winged it way to destination. That that sound is stereo is just too cool.

There are some negatives. I am still not happy with the trackpad, but I am not as displeased as I thought I would be. I do wish it was one of the later models that allowed for two finger scrolling. I do miss that from the Thinkpad. I still believe that the touchpoint controller is the most natural input device that I have ever used. Similarly, the control key (and that I have to use it to be able to pretend like I have two buttons on the trackpad) is a pain. CTRL/Opt/Cmd is too many modifier keys for me, especially when coming over from Windows. I am used to using CTRL-C there and use CMD-C on the Mac, even though the other key is there. Three is too many. Yeah, its got USB 1.1 rather than 2.0 and image transfers suck, but to be honest, this machine makes you want to work around these shortcomings.

Over the past few years, I have bemoaned the switch to OSX from previous MacOS’s. I called it the primary school pencil approach to interface. Everything too big…visually impressive, but wasteful of precious screen space and indicative of imprecise interaction. Sitting using OSX again (and I am reflecting on NextStep here) there’ more detail than I superficially enjoy on the desktop. On this cute little laptop, I realize some subtlety that I missed by appreciating from afar.

I am typing away on the PB right now, using OSX-only Ecto to compose blog posts and even though I am running 10 main apps under 10.4 in this miniscule amount of memory, its still working. There’s something impressive in that.

And this brings it all together. The experience is all-encompassing. The feel, the sight, the interaction, the tactility, the sounds bring one into commune with an inanimate object in a very strangely sensual way. This Powerbook 12 is sexy. Its has its flaws, but right now these are what makes the relationship personal.

Have I returned to the fold? Seen the dark side for what it is? Well, time will tell. Right now, the honeymoon continues.

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Bill Turkel posted another great thought piece today on the Importance of Infrastructure. This post is, as his others always are, very erudite, well phrased and provoke one to think. In this case, his framing question seems to be whether one can really environmentally engineer innovation. His post suggests that letting the right people play in the right sandbox, with the right toys can yield astonishing results. He addresses the nature of how we construct personal space in order to bolster productivity, creativity and all those good things.

Ironically, I just finished browsing past an RSS feeds suggesting the close connection between clutter and depression. Turkel’s article is a raises the question of surroundings to a higher level though. He invokes Christopher Alexander, the guru of environmental design reasoning, and concludes that “the right infrastructure attracts the right people and then something really cool happens. But it isn’t possible to predict in more detail than that.” Thus, the Alexander principle of taking patterns and iteratively exploding patterns into smaller patterns, stops at some level of granularity. The challenge that he identifies is that creation of theses spaces often demands some prediction of the outcome to capture the appropriate resources.

One thing that struck me about this discussion was that my physical environment is very heavily dependent upon and increasingly augmented today by a virtual environment. Moreover, many of the folk trying to use patterns to create the best work environment have to be aware of these ties to the virtual worlds when creating the physical sandbox. Moreover, there is an intriguing connection between how one translates the ideal real world environment into a compelling and useful online existence. There’s a necessary translation between the physical and the virtual, but there is a clear connection, that if we can better appreciate, might also catalyze results.

The second arise from the fact that I am one of those that Turkel identifies as finding the coffee shop the most appropriate environment for work. I blogged on this earlier and attempted to get to this concept of the technologically augmented workspace in a public place. When I started using coffee shops to work in I was still drawn back to the home office for things like net access and other wired media. Increasingly what I can do in a public space has become more pervasive. This however has changed the nature of the cafe environment itself. Inadvertently it was a refuge from the net — now it is invaded by the net and it takes discipline to tear oneself away. Everything is fluid and workspaces have to be too.

I recall when we were working with a designer on our space for Ardesic, we were attempting to create an adaptable and accidental space that people were able to turn into one that suited their needs and the needs of the company. We tried to provide versatile function with whiteboards on odd surfaces and whiteboards on wheels and walls that moved and desk areas based on a metaphorical hug. None of this really worked. I test drove furniture at Herman Miller’s luscious showroom in Toronto and came away convinced that much of this stuff would work, but when it was translated into another space and tried to fulfill others demand, there was a mixed bag of success and absolute failure. Ultimately, although we recognize the need for personal and personalized space, its tough to harmonize this with semi-public space.

I guess I am starting to stray from Bill’s point about infrastructure before innovation, but decided that a tangent about the translation between the physical and the virtual environment is worth consider, given that project infrastructures are increasingly trying to blend the physical with the virtual to reach their objectives.

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Jim Pickworth pointed me to Hans Rosling’s series of TED talks. Clearly I have been sleeping and missed pointers to these in the past. Hans Rosling is an amazingly dynamic and fluid presenter who has embarked on a mission of data liberation. His talks have seemingly inspired the UN to release public health data that had been kept a guarded secret. Armed with this data he has created a wonderful flash based data animation tool called GapMinder. The tool is fun to play with if only purely from a visualization perspective. That he has provided UN worldwide data on matters such as infant mortality, carbon emissions and wealth, allows a layperson such as myself to explore the relationship between these variables for individual countries.

Its well worth your while to appreciate Rosling’s presentation style and to hear his message. He is a professor of international health in Sweden and co-founder of Médecins sans Frontièrs Sweden. He has lived the data. And what he presents is a startling corrective to our understanding of disparities in the world and to how we perceive progress. If you have watched Al Gore experiment with Keynote, prepare to be amazed by Rosling.

Rosling’s GapMinder is spectacular because it has that casual demonstration of how the data is changing over time. The animation of this is compelling. But going beyond the simple time series presentation, one aspect that I really like about the software’s presentation is that it allows you to tag individual countries to create tails so that you can see global perspective with a separate layer of an individual county’s change over time.

Rosling has made complex statistical interpretation approachable by the masses and he isn’t dumbing it down to do so. In the fashion of the David Weinberger talk I blogged previously, Rosling is challenging data ownership and allowing for individual participation, mashup and contribution through data liberation.

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Information Aesthetics points to a great background article on the visual representation of taste in Ratatouille (a movie I absolutely recommend — great story, superb animation). I watched these sequences and didn’t think much about them — but what a great question : how can one visually demonstrate the sensation of taste? Additionally, how do tastes sound — the animations that Michael Gagne created for the movie were used as inspiration for the accompanying soundtrack. Is this a sign of sensory convergence? That flavours will combine and produce an entirely new visualization makes absolute sense, but how do you account for synergy or for catalytic behaviour. What a wonderful challenge to be presented with and to muse about.
There is a lot more to discover at Michael Gagne’s site. His work had appeared in a string of well known productions. Moreover, Gagne is a Québecois and Sheridan graduate — so wonderfully close to home.
I wonder what smell looks like?

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Last weekend Toronto dedicated a starkly breathtaking park/memorial to the Irish Famine immigrants of 1847. Ireland Park was opened by Mary McAleese, President of Ireland and features a rather striking memorial wall made up of glass bricks commemorating those who died during the exodus and also those who died trying to help them. The aim of this park is to commemorate this historic tragedy and also to remind us of similar events occur today. As the Ireland Park Foundation states “It is a reminder of the trauma of famine, which still exists in many parts of the world today. The failure of a harvest is an act of nature. Starvation is the result of our failure to respond with generosity to those who are hungry in our world today.” A good reminder indeed.
There is a wealth of information at the Ireland Park Foundation’s website and I found their history of the famine immigration to Toronto to be particularly well written. One of the authors behind this history Mark McGowan, whose Waning of the Green is recommended examination of the Irish Catholic experience in nineteenth century Toronto. He demonstrates rapid and voluntary assimilation into a nascent Canadian culture of Irish immigrants driven to succeed and prosper in a new land.
This is a very meaningful addition to Toronto’s parkscape and one that conveys an important message about the past that is especially applicable today. This really affirms why we study history.

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There is a great discussion at Bricoleurbanism on the absence of people-scaled spaces in Toronto’s urban streetscape. The discussion takes as a starting point construction hoarding on two sides of the street near Bloor that inadvertently created a humane street scale not unlike that found elsewhere in the world. This contrast in city scale is evident even between Toronto and Montreal. The urban core in Montreal, despite the presence of modern high-rises, and not entirely due to semi-random occurrence of buildings from the past 300 years, has this more human scale. Why? Proportions. The article at Bricoleurbanism offers a brief look at examples in Toronto that have achieved this scale and ends with a call for attention to the dehumanizing scale of our modern city. The infrastructure that allows machines ready access to and from the core also dehumanizes the space and creates the need to actually move to and from the core. When spaces are achieved they are like pearls in the streetscape and there clearly is the intention at times to create these spaces. I include some photos from New Dundee square, the sculpture park between King and Adelaide and the pleasant walk near the Dominion marketplace on Front Street.

This need for humanizing our urban spaces isn’t a new message, but it certainly does reinforce one of the causes behind the familiar scene of streams of workers fleeing the inner city in Toronto on the Go Train every evening rather than lingering in a concrete jungle.

By the way, there is also a companion set of photos from the new Michael Lee-Chin crystal at the ROM, so that those of us unable to attend the public unveiling recently can vicariously appreciate the new space.

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