Doors 7: The Value of Half Formed Spaces

In one of the more imagistic pieces of thinking presented at the Doors 7 conference, Philip Tabor of the Bartlett School of Architecture made a plea for data spaces in which half formed thoughts can be nourished and developed.

Data visualisation has taken a variety of forms, he said, but most support only one kind of task: they 'seem ideal if people seek specific information' and are 'essential in comprehensive overview and fast retrieval'.

But what of those more vague tasks, where encountering and thinking about data has no immediate or apparent purpose? He described the value of this kind of 'musing': immersing in a semi-random cloud of stuff to feel we are keeping up with events, where we might stumble across valuable ideas, maybe even answers to unasked questions. He pointed out that Einstein's description of the space in which he operated was prelogical, playful, absorbed through muscles as well as mental processes.

Solution spaces are imaginary, psychologically charged spaces – constructed by the body, made from physical substances, but structured by invisible forces, he said. Mental space in part corresponds to physical space, but it is heavily interpreted.

As a consequence 'clearly expressed information is death, it constrains half formed thoughts' he said. 'We can harden the edges but only when we are ready for ideas to coalesce.' Picking up the running theme of dashboards as a way of bringing order to networks, Tabor concluded: 'I’ve got dashboards, I need more clouds.'

Tabor was speaking at the Doors 7 conference "Flow: the design challenge of pervasive computing" (see UN story: Pervasive Computing gets Perceptive Treatment).

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