andy doro thesis blog

Despina asked me to do some use studies of how people use tables. so i took some photographs around my apartment.

table studies:

laptop, wireless mouse, external harddrives, alarm clock, desk lamp, cellphone.

lamp, alarm clock, cellphone.

I really like the looks of the History Tablecloth. Apparently this is "electroluminescent material printed onto a flexible substrate." I need to figure out how to do this. The hexagon/honeycomb pattern references both the cellular phone system and beehives. Also, the description applies partially to this project:

When items are left on the table for more than a few minutes, the cloth starts to glow beneath them, creating a halo that expands over a period of days. When items are removed, the glow fades quickly. That’s all it does.

The History Tablecloth makes visible a significant aspect of home life—the history and movement of objects on domestic surfaces, emphasized by ethnographers as an important resource for domestic coordination. Rather than bringing new content into the home, the History Tablecloth embodies a suggestion that domestic technologies may make powerful effects simply by pointing out the richness of existing phenomena.

By visualizing an important aspect of the home, the Tablecloth is designed to provoke people to think about how they use their homes. The system doesn’t imply a value judgment about moving objects or leaving them still, however. People might be reminded to tidy up more often, but equally they might simply enjoy the patterns that emerge when things are left on the table over time. The Tablecloth doesn’t dictate peoples’ reactions or suggest what activities they might pursue. It isn’t for anything, and that’s the point. It simply creates a situation that is novel and potentially significant, and leaves people to find their own meaning within it.

like sand, or snow. the table recoups a time when we lived in the jforests or deserts, our actions left marks which fade over time.

my requirements:

• a simple desk, rectangular
• white lights - simpler, prettier
• diffuse light. light through frosted acrylic.
• it will need electricity, the table will need to be plugged into an AC outlet but this can be turned into an advantage, since with desks these days you want some outlets at the bottom anyway.

other possibilities:

• printed lights
• somehow recouping lost electrical energy ? probably not efficient