2011, in development

A series of single screen iphone apps that pose some questions about touch as an interface to digital media. The first in the series, Touchpixels, reveals the hexadecimal code behind all of the pixels that are touched within the current gesture. The second app, titled Noncube, presents a three dimensional cube. The cube can be rotated by dragging left and right but is rendered in a way that emphasizes its flatness onscreen.

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2011, with Ben Campkin

A panel discussion exploring relationships between the internet and London which run as part of UCL's 2011 CitiesMethodologies exhibition and events program. Featuring: Matt Brown, Editor of Londonist, an eclectic online city guide; Mark Eves, creator of MyCouncil iPhone app, a tool to submit in situ feedback and complaints to councils on the fly; Kieran Long, prolific London-based architectural journalist who streams his critique through a highly active twitter feed; Tim Hardy, member of the Sukey collective, developers of an ad hoc live mapping service for use by demonstrators during protests.

 Download full resolution poster

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2011 (forthcoming), with Ben Campkin

This chapter will be published this August in Camera/Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, edited by Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray and published by Ashgate. The collection is themed around relationships between photography and architecture. We argue that Google Street View is worth the attention of historians of photography, in fact crucial to an understanding of contemporary photography. We proceed by outlining a framework for how to approach Street View critically in three parts: synchronicity, systematization, interface. The discussion is built around both conversations with the designers at Google and specific visual extracts from Street View itself.

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Ongoing since 2010, with Ben Campkin and Mariana Mogilevich

Picturing Place is an interdisciplinary research project focused on the role of images and image-production in processes of urban change. It explores how images of cities — e.g. plans, maps, renderings of projected future spaces — and images in cities — e.g. billboards, community murals — influence urban change and perceptions of place. The project aims to encourage discussion amongst a wide range of urban citizens and practitioners about the roles that visual languages have in the production of the built environment, and the interactive relationships between images and cities. The project includes an online image catalogue which will expand as it progresses. A series of panel discussions are also taking place with invited contributions from a range of speakers with different interests/roles in the city and the making and interpretation of images. The initial launch event took place at the This is Not a Gateway festival, 2009, and a second panel took place at Harvard Graduate School of Design in September 2010. The long term aim of this project is a multi-sited exhibition and a conference.

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2009

Delivered at the Society of American City and Regional Planning History bi-annual conference in October, 2009 (Oakland, CA). The paper is a further consideration of the 1909 Plan of Chicago with the aim of situating the graphical and other pictorial content used to promote the plan within the broader visual cultural field of the early 20th century. I explore interrelations between the visual characteristics of the plan and a variety of contemporaneous spectacles and attractions. For example, I utilize Jonathan Crary's notion of attention to address the significance of relations and distinctions between Jules Guerin's renderings and genres which commanded great cultural enthusiasm, such as printed bird's eye views. Through this case, I argue that the visual work product of the planning profession at its nascency had a crucial role in mediating relations between mass culture and institutional authority to intervene in the practices, scope of influence, and/or the credibility of those who made crucial decisions about the built environment.

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2009

Delivered at Great Events at Politecnico di Milano in May 2009. The captive hot air balloon was a widely attended attraction at the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris. The tethered balloon was promoted as the ultimate panorama of Paris. The basic concept was a hot air balloon with a large nacelle that remained tethered to the ground by a 500 metre rope. The balloon was brought up and down from the court of the Tuileries, each time emptying out and re-selling with thirty new passengers holding tickets worth 50 centimes. The exposition was intended as a kind of a coming-out for a modernized post-Haussmannian Paris and the captive balloon was promoted as the best perspective from which to experience the re-organized city. The modernization of Paris had been at least partially centered around the objectives of vision and visuality. It was therefore ideally presented, with simultaneous access to the breadth of its organization and beauty, as an image to be contemplated and appreciated from a distance, rather than interacted with or lived in.

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2009

Delivered at MIT’s Comparative Media Programs conference, Media in Transition in April, 2009. The paper briefly details the history, formal structure, and a variety of official and unofficial applications, of the UK postcode system to life in the UK. The UK postcode is unique because it combines extreme precision with a substantial degree of human legibility. In London, if asked where one lives, it is common to respond with the first two or three digits of one’s postcode. You can eat at the N1 Cafe or go dancing at W5. At the same time, a full postcode, such as “NW1 9HZ,” constitutes a precise reference to a single specific building, useful as a sat nav or online mapping shortcut, for example. I consider the possibility of the postcode or zip code in general as an example of a non-digital, perhaps even a pre-digital, infrastructure that facilitates interactions between mobile and durable media. The UK postcode system in particular renders this infrastructure transparent and therefore, I argue, promotes a sophisticated reading of relationships between mobile and durable media. I conclude with a variety of examples of attempts to leverage this nuance for creative and critical purposes.

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2006 and 2007

Designed for a seminar series, organized by myself and colleagues in the PhD program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. For the 2006-07 and 2007-08 academic year, our goal was to re-frame the series as centered around academic dialogue (as opposed to lectures) and increase visibility and participation on behalf of the broader GSD community.

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2007

Delivered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media in Transition in April, 2007. Cartography is by definition associated with a top-down point of view. It is also, as historians of cartography have argued extensively, traditionally aligned with powerful individuals and institutions. Maps are a doubly “high” medium — they not only provide an abstracted and physically heightened perspective on geographic territory, but historically they are also instruments of an elite socio-economic and technocratic context. This paper reviews a selection of recent cartographic practices that I have brought together under the rubric of lowering. This entails the consideration of both mapping activities that engage with a vantage point situated relatively nearer to the ground as well as those that open mapping to a wider scope of participation. These vernacular, unofficial or informal practices interact with cartographic convention to produce a variety of unanticipated forms and applications. These include strategies for involving community members in spatial data, alternative graphical and interactive languages for describing space and place, methods of freeing spatial data from the control of institutions, and the exportation of location notation to objects traditionally situated outside of cartography.

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2006

“Perils of Precision,” was written in 2003 and then included in Else / Where: Mapping, edited by by Peter Hall and Janet Abrams and published by the University of Minnesota Design Institute in 2006. The starting point was to compare and contrast two distinct notions of precision in summarizing urban form. In particular, I examined an extreme example of a 3D scale model, Robert Moses’s Panorama of the City of New York commissioned for the 1964 World's Fair. The static and labored of this approach to summarizing the city is contrasted with the less visually detailed but more agile and dynamic engagement with the city defined by RealTime Amseterdam, a project to create the, “most current map of Amsterdam,” developed by Esther Polak and the Waag Society in 2002/3.

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2004

35 lines of post script code. When input to a laser printer or other postscript device, a drawing of a hand will be produced. I created this program because I wanted to share an approach to putting one’s “hand in the machine” that intertwined thinking about traditions of the handmade, the freedom of engaging with technologies at the level of code, and an aspiration toward a politic of transparency and active engagement.

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2004

Cross-references the wearer’s position with a small set of environmental, economic and social statistics about their location in space based on zip code. The concept was to provide a means for wearers to immediately juxtapose the way in which they experience the world through statistical summaries with an understanding they derive in person with eyes, ears and hands. The goal of this project was to wrestle with the benefits and limits of quantitative summaries of human experience by restoring their relationship in space with the circumstances they describe.

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2003

A re-formed newspaper that runs as memory resident software in the background of everyday computer use. Every twenty minutes it delivers a headline from that day’s New York Times to an operating system warning box with the single button “Okay.” The news must be approved to continue using the computer. This interface is an explicit embodiment of the implicit approval most of us issue by choosing to remain uninvolved.

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2002

A prototype for a community authored location aware tour of Yale University. The starting data set was the official tour given by the Yale Admissions Office but users were encouraged to contribute their own knowledge of the community of the campus so that the tour would become more reflective of a wider range of interests over time. The interface, which could be zoomed based on the user’s current location but not panned, was designed to privilege in-situae participation.

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2001 with Andrew Sloat

A commission for the Yale LGBT co-op to promote pride week. Our goals were to lend some further complexity and nuance to the slogan, “gay and proud,” and to celebrate a community built around distinct qualities rather than sameness. This project was featured in What is graphic design for? by Alice Twemlow, and was included in the exhibition The Pink and the Blue at Yale.

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2000

CD packaging for an early album by Greg Goldberg (Bot, The Mean Corner, The Ballet). The album, titled “Arts and Crafts,” is a sissy pop rumination on the politics of labor. Most of the type is sevenet redrawn by hand and scanned.

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I am interested in interactions between graphical and urban spaces from the perspectives of both civic and professional engagement. How are pictures, media, and data, actively intertwined with material conditions in cities? How have they been, and how could they potentially be, mobilized by built environment professionals and urban citizens to affect urban change? How does the fluidity of media and data relate to the stability of built forms? I approach these questions both as an academic trained in urban history and theory and as a studio trained graphic designer.

Keywords: Graphic design, urban studies, interaction design, visual culture, digital media, spatial data, civic engagement.

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I am currently Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins (London), where I teach studio units in Graphic and Interactive Design and play a substantial role in the development and implementation of the curriculum on BA (honours) Graphic Design. The core of this work is setting provocative design problems, called briefs, which serve as the basis for a critical dialogue with students about their own work and positioning, in relation to the design disciplines and socio-cultural conditions more broadly. I have also led discussion sections in postwar architectural history and architectural theory of M. Arch. students at Harvard Graduate School of Design, designed and taught arts workshops at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and developed and taught studio courses in graphic and web design at Yale. Download selected briefs / syllabi below:

 How time flies

 Error 404

 Database as language

 Currency

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Download below:

 CV Rebecca Ross

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E-mail rross@fas.harvard.edu

On twitter as handsinmachines

+44 (0) 7927 413928

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