Challenge 3

Informated Artefact

Create an idea for a piece of dynamic artefact for the entrance foyer of Infolab21.

Inspiration: Xerox PARC had a little fountain that was linked to their stock price. I bet you can do better than that!

Background: Foyers of buildings often contain artwork. What could we create for infolab21 that is both interesting to look at as a work of art, but also embodies something of the work done in this building? The design should be an artefact that changes in some way in reaction to activity in the building. It might be used to give a sense of the pulse of the building, showing different rhythms of activity, or hints of actual work. The source(s) of the information, how to obtain, process and represent them are up to you. The timescale and rate of change is also up to you.

Foyers are places where people enter and leave, where they stand around waiting for people, and where formal and informal guided tours begin. Often people will look at the artefacts while they are waiting. People often tell their guests stories as they take them round. Maybe the artwork will figure in those stories. It might be used by the Head of Department taking a group of industrial sponsors round the building, a guide at an open day for prospective students, or an undergraduate showing her visiting parents around campus.

The artefact should be something you can just look at, without having to try and understand what it may mean. Just like other pieces of modern art it can just be a thing - pretty, strange, or ugly, that is on display for people to look at. However it also happens to be conveying some kind of information - for those who know what they are looking at.

The artefact is not a conventional piece of information visualization, where we try to make the meanings as instantly interpretable as possible. At least some of the information contained should be obscure, so that it needs someone to explain it to you, or you can only figure it out by watching carefully for a while.

The artefact can be a physical artifact that moves in some way, or purely virtual, existing on a computer screen or projection, or any combination. It should have a visual component, and it must involve some sort of change derived from data obtained somehow. Sounds or other effects are optional but you must have more than one stimulus represented in the piece.

Examples of information that might be represented. You don't have to use any of these, they are just to give a sense of the
kinds of departmental activity you might detect and use.

• How busy is the department today? Give a sense of recent research activity, such as numbers of papers submitted or accepted.
• What kinds of topic areas or problems are people thinking about at the moment?
• Which departmental web pages are popular and how has that changed over the past few weeks?
• How is the department's research linked with that in other places?

Guest judging marks will be awarded principally for:

• a working system that can operate autonomously and can change dynamically
  based on changing circumstances (artificial changes may be used for the
  purpose of the demonstration)
• robustness - could it reasonably be expected to function without extensive
  support for long periods (months to years)
• creativity in the choice of input sources, and output forms
• potential of the idea to intrigue visitors and be a focus for conversations
• Scrapheap challenge as inspiration generator: in working on this challenge,
  are there some interesting research questions, or application ideas that
  have occurred to you?