MNKE Business
Around 50 people braved the chilly February Minnesota weather to attend Mapping New Knowledge Ecologies (MNKE), a workshop at the University of Minnesota Design Institute on Saturday, February 10. The event brought together experts from the fields of interactive design, statistics, architecture and locative media to discuss how the University's new College of Design might use new mapping techniques and technologies to reveal knowledge assets and indicate potential new hybrid lines of inquiry emanating from the College.
Structured as the opening conversation of a long-term mapping project at the University, the workshop was split into a series of morning presentations by the guest panelists, and an afternoon of breakout discussion groups, each groujp assigned with the task of proposing potential knowledge mappings of the University. (Panelist Josh On's efforts to instigate a social network map of the attending group in the spirit of psychiatrist Jacob L Moreno are pictured above: participants were asked to place a hand first on the shoulder of the person they'd known longest and, second on the should of the person they thought "the world should hear more from".)
By 5pm, mapping proposals were proliferating, ranging from a wiki-like website to which researchers looking for collaborators would post notices, to a mapping of foundation and grant money flowing into the University.
A full MNKE report will follow soon.
PRESENTERS:
Mark Hansen, associate professor, department of statistics, UCLA, Los Angeles and co-creator of Listening Post
Laura Kurgan, director, Spatial Information Design Lab, GSAPP, Columbia
University, New York
Josh On, web designer and activist, creator of www.theyrule.net, San Francisco
W. Bradford Paley, founder, Digital Image Design Incorporated, New York, creator, www.textarc.org
Marc Tuters, graduate fellow, Annenberg Center for Communication, USC, Los Angeles
Moderators:
Janet Abrams, director, Design Institute
Peter Hall, senior editor, Design Institute
Attending guests: DI staff, U of M faculty and graduate students
For more background on the panelists, please see the four articles listed below.
Space is limited, RSVP to design@umn.edu by February 8 at 4 p.m.
RECOMMENDED READING
Laura Kurgan:
Rap Map by Lauren MacIntyre, The New Yorker (Talk of the Town) 1/8/07
Architecture and Justice,by Eric Cadora and Laura Kurgan.
Josh On:
Social Networks, Class, Visualization, and Change by Josh On, Ars Electronica 2004
Brad Paley:
Tales from the Laboratory Floor: Mapping Science by Peter Hall
Stock Options by Janet Abrams, ID Magazine, June 2000
Mark Tuters:
Beyond Locative Media by Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis,
The Locative Utopia in TCM Locative Reader, 2004
Mark Hansen:
Orange and White by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, March 03, 2003.
Screen Capture: Mapping the Wireless World with Mark Hansen by Andrew Wagner, Architect Magazine, October 15, 2006.
Mark Hansen's Home Page