Daniel Lara : Blog

Sole Journeys is a design research project to study the thresholds of walking in a driving culture. It was made in collaboration with Alex Braidwood and Ana Ramos . In order to find out more about the walking habits and motivations of people, we started looking for an oblique strategy that would reveal information.  Almost everybody in an urban setting walks in shoes and these become a kind of fingerprint.  We decided to look deeper and scan the soles of the shoes.

ENLARGE

Since the scanning proved to be a surprise and an engaging experience for most of the people, we decided to structure our short conversations by adding a short questionnaire. This was partly based on our previous research on parking meters and distance thresholds.  But after the first 17 interviews, we realized which questions were showing more interesting information and we decided to adjust the questionnaire:

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We also wanted to share the results of our project with the people that were curious about it.  We designed a website where we posted the scans as well as other interventions shown below.  We gave away cards with the website and another task in order to explore how much of an impact the scanning experience triggered:

ENLARGE

Parallel to the scanning, we took lapse movies based on walking rhythms.  For this, an infrared sensor would trigger a camera each time anybody would pass in front of the device.  If there was a lot of walking traffic, the movie would show smoother transitions.  You can see the movies at streetbureau.org. We then decided to see the rhythm of traffic and pointed the sensor to the entrance of a parking lot.

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This is a snapshot of the website. You can click on the image to visit:

With the information gathered during our research, we developed the idea of a network based on walking.  An open source device could be used to develop games, shared journeys or to  track the walked or “unwalked” corners of the world, to name some examples.

ENLARGE AND READ

ENLARGE AND READ

ENLARGE

ENLARGE

My final proposal to celebrate Street Sign Painting is to build temporary galleries that wrap around selected paintings.  This would function as a community enhancer, since it would encourage people from outside of the community to visit and notice the small businesses around the painting. If an art museum would get involved it could realize the idea of the museum going to the streets. This would trigger a sense of pride in the community and would break the static nature of the museum.

Since I am interested in the human condition I decided to explore situations were people have lost a bodily function.  For this project I decided to focus on the fact that a lot of veterans are coming back with tinnitus and to create a metaphor from that. I made a wheelchair that would trigger a bomb sound followed by tinnitus effects every time it would stop.  The user would have to keep moving to avoid the annoying sounds, the same way people with tinnitus have to get distracted to avoid hearing the buzzing inside their brains.

Technically, I used 2 xbee radios, connected to the NET Lab Kit

This project is a critical response to Alexander Roses’ creative practice and philosophy.  Alexander Rose is the director of The Long Now Foundation, and its primary functions is to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. One of the most important and famous projects is the 10,000 year clock.  It is being built and has triggered a lot of controversy.  Among other things, I believe that the clock implies that our civilization would get stuck with the Gregorian calendar.  In defense to this and many other questions, Rose says that his main objective of the clock is to trigger conversations about time.  So, I decided to make a series of cheap clocks that would trigger some time meditations:

I was assigned to research the experimental method.  It was very refreshing to refocus what is an experiment: a study of cause and effect.  An experiment is part of the scientific method.

The Team for this project was Ina Xi,  Hoon Oh, and me.

Theme:
The Greyscale between Active and Passive reading.

Attitude:
Our attitude towards this project is experimental. We are aiming to create a new way of accessing and organizing information so we can easily see patterns and connections to other areas of interest.

Concept:
We have identified two extremes while approaching reading:
Active: The user actively looks for specific information that is needed.
Passive: The user takes a serendipitous journey, expecting to find something new and interesting.
If we visualize one extreme as black and the other as white, we soon realize that people’s reading habits are situated on a greyscale: the two reading modes do not exclude each other. We think it would be very useful to sort the ocean of information according to our reading interests first, but also to have an open end to include serendipity. With our E-reader the user can choose any point between being an active and a passive reader.

The full presentation of this project is here

We had to pick a virtual place to explore and sample with the same rigor as a physical place.  I chose a diskette because I wanted to find out how it compares with other digital media.  Well, I found out that, since it has no connections to a network, it mainly behaves like a reusable piece of paper. This project was a dead end, but I became very aware of the importance of THE CONTEXT.

I chose to sample the Whittier Bridge that goes from downtown to Boyle Heights. It has panoramic urban views, a significant amount of tags and in the middle there is  an area where the homeless usually sleep. In order to discover something new about this place I started sampling the colors of the tags. While doing that I realized that the color of the bridge (the background of the tags) was made of painted patches over the tags, and that there were obvious traces of the battle happening between the anti-graffiti department and the taggers.  That battle was happening in the background, but it was larger than the personal battles between taggers.

Another interesting fact was the amount of crashes against the sides of the bridge.  In a week three accidents happened, and I did a quick forecast of the duration of the bridge. But even if I am far from the real rate of demolition, I was intrigued by the notion of the bridge being regenerated almost the same way cells regenerate in our bodies.

This is a video response to the Lecture by Chris Chafe. He was part of the Design Dialogues this Fall at the MDP. I am trying to find a junction between himself as a human animal and his work as a musician. In other words, Chafe is a human that creates music and sophisticated sonifications that help contemporary culture evolve, but he is still an animal:

The team for this project was Dustin York, Scott Liao and me. We wanted to explore how people would engage with a familiar low-tec device.  People know that there has to be another person on the other side for the can phone to work. But what happens when the can starts talking to you and clearly there is nobody on the other end? Would you still talk even if you do not know to who? Is the nostalgia stronger than the usefulness?

There were walkie-talkies inside the boxes, and we were able to see from a distance when somebody was approaching.