Bedroom Mirror

Here's a couple of photographs of the mirror that I made for our bedroom in Cambridge. The room was quite small and we felt it needed something to make it seem bigger. These pictures are actually in our new Toronto apartment where it serves the same purpose. Oh - and for you literalists out there, I didn't make the mirror itself, just the frame.

Cyborg Domesticity Images

Below you will find the images that I produced to accompany the paper that I presented in Venice in December at the First International Conference on User-Centric Media. The paper was about the traditional behavioural and symbolic role of the hearth in the house and what the potential fate for this is in an increasingly nomadic age. The images hence represent three semi-whimsical attempts to imagine technologized portable hearths:

Nomadic spaces such as an airport waiting area can be very disorienting.

What if you could access your own personal existential grounding tool through your smartphone?

What if you could share that with others, creating a focal point for gathering?

Perhaps you could use this nifty little smartphone easel in order to do this.

Alternately maybe some sort of infrastructure is required in order to orchestrate communal gathering and sharing of narrative (creating cosmologies in common within which to situate us).

Couldn't this commuter infrastructure do with a little hearth?

Like this? Rather than everyone concentrating on their own little windows into their own little worlds, maybe they could all plug in their smartphones into this infrastructure in order to create something akin to a hearth where these disparate worlds could be blended, remixed into something new.

It could look something like this for instance.

Or maybe, rather than a fixed infrastructure, it could be portable, like this router.

This fabric router can be unrolled onto the ground, kind of like a picnic blanket. It would create a local network for digital communication between nomads and then it could create a shifting, dynamic image out of the information flowing through it. Again, our worlds are shared and remixed, sort of similar to the effect of sharing stories around a fire. . .

Perhaps such a technology could look something like this.

Having Mastered Architecture, a website

I am conscious of my drop in production (curation? publication?) at this site recently, but I have been very busy with other things and generally my production of things has dropped off a bit. Hopefully this will change in the near future.
In the meantime you can check out my new website at http://dprpatterson.com if you are interested. Making this html monstrosity has been a primary reason why I have not been posting things here recently.
Probably the most interesting things on the new website are my recent academic work. This includes my article on Purdy, some photos of my Purdy exhibit that I showed in Cambridge, the extended abstract of the paper I presented in Venice in December (with images, which I will soon post here as well) and my thesis document, which can be found there in its entirety.
Oh, and did I mention that I mastered architecture? I finally submitted my thesis to the University of Waterloo, officially, at the end of January.

More Pictures from the Cyborg House

I recently defended my Masters Thesis in Architecture. In preparation for this, unbeknownst to my committee I spent quite a bit of time preparing these images as illustrations of what the house of the future might be like. To those unfamiliar with the project it's important to keep in mind that I was not reinventing the whole house, just pieces of it, so do not be alarmed by the baseboard and hardwood flooring :)

Also, just to be clear, this is whimsy:

mirror of the future

hearth of the future

toilet of the future
table of the futurebed of the futurewindow of the futurecabinet of the future

Lincoln Memorial in DC

I caught this photo of the Lincoln Memorial down in DC last week. The Lincoln Memorial of course is an important symbol of freedom in the epicenter of the land of the free. It is designed in the manner of a Doric temple, turned on its side. Within is a giant-sized statue of Lincoln, sitting majestically in a chair, looking out over the Mall.

Between Technological Flesh and The Technological Field

My thesis is available for perusal electronically here:
https://rcpt.yousendit.com/754357419/72a0997afd66d36a2e2aa37e141cf82e

Get it while its hot! 242 pages of burning technological love. The link will expire, I believe, on Tuesday the 20th of October.

The updated abstract can be found here. This link will not expire, nor is this abstract a working abstract any more.

Images of the Cyborg House

Here are a couple of new images from my thesis project. The focus of my thesis is not exactly design-oriented, but these are a couple of diagrams that I have recently generated for possible inclusion in the work. The first is a better version of the image featured in the last post; the second is a vision of the Bed of the Future.

The bed of the Future is fully automated, and responds to your needs. If you would like to sleep supine, the bed flattens out, but if you would like to read in bed it positions itself upright. This enables a great deal of individual flexibility for you and your bedmate. You may have the two halves of your bed in completely different positions to fit your body, your temperament or your mood. If you wish to be intimate, at the flick of a switch the two halves snap into alignment!