Data Visualization
Eric Field
A picture is worth a thousand words -- or 20,000 data points?
As data, data, and more data increasingly become a part of our everyday lives, even for Architects, we need to find ways to see it, analyze it, and draw insight from it. Architects are trained in the visual and spatial reconciliation of complex systems -- we think visually, we act by drawing and making, and we build associations spatially -- so this places us in a unique position to contribute this way of thinking and reasoning, t ...
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"1+1=3"
Eric Field
Joseph Albers once described the phenomenon when two objects are placed next to one another. At first, the two objects are discrete – each has its own form and identity, and exists in its own space. There are clearly two independent objects. Then as the two objects, usually two very like figures, are brought closer to one another, they begin to interact with one another in our eye visually. The space between them, and the interaction between them, at a point suggests something new - a third ...
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Building Behavior: a digitally altered phenomenology
Ryan Lewandowski, with Eric Field, Jeana Ripple, Lucia Phinney
How are our physical lives and activities being translated into the digital realm, and vice versa? My thesis is an investigation into this emerging dialogue of the spatial and inherently aspatial digital, to see how our perception of physical space is implicated by the integration of responsive digital technologies. ...
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an app for that! - Solar access visualization
Eric Field
Performing solar access and shading comparisons for different conditions can produce a lot of data. We have the base, unshaded condition, then with one shading device, then another, and so on. Orientation may play a role - which windows are gaining the most sun (and do we want it or not (see the Those Windows??? post earlier)), and what about season and temperature? Sometimes we want solar gains (winter), other times we don't (August in Virginia).
But the data is just raw. 8760 hourly poi ...
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Those windows???
Eric Field, with Michael Britt
As the ecoMOD 4 design was developed into ecoMOD South - affordable prefab housing prototypes in Abingdon and South Boston, Virginia - we continued to study and simulate the models under their new conditions.
Solar access continued to be a significant concern for design - both positive and negative - as the houses turned, shifted, and aggregated into groups. At this point in the design, considerable attention was paid to the southern facades and their solar access and shading, as these are e ...
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Managing Solar Access
Eric Field, with Melissa Pancurak and the ecoMOD 4 team
In designing a building for passive energy, one of the greatest potentials available is on-site solar access. Direct energy from the sun - both to heat spaces directly via solar access glazing (windows) and by placing photovoltaic solar panels on the roof or other surfaces - provides on-site energy that can significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the need for mechanical heating in some spaces.
During the design process for ecoMOD 4, sited at a very difficult 42 degree angle from the sun due ...
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Environmental Risk Mobile Website
Kate Bird, with Eric Field
Federal, state and local agencies responsible for protecting human health and the environment face challenges in communicating information about environmental risks to residents in a way that it is meaningful and understandable, and at a time and place at which this information is relevant and actionable. In addition, opportunities to capitalize on knowledge held by residents on conditions in their environment are difficult to capitalize on and are often missed. In many cases, people’s perceptio ...
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Cape Coast Castle Analysis
Jason Truesdale, with Louis Nelson and Eric Field
Founded by the Swedes in the sixteenth century, but significantly expanded in the eighteenth-century by the British, Cape Coast Castle was the hub of the British African trade in slaves. The purpose built dungeons at Cape Coast were the final stop on the African leg of the journey of slavery for hundreds of thousands of Africans as they were carried from Africa to the Caribbean and mainland British colonies, and later to the United States. This project creates a digital model that reconstructs t ...
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TempAgency, temp occupancy
TempAgency, with Leena Cho, Rychiee Espinosa, Matthew Jull, Seth McDowell
Over the 2012-13 winter break, TempAgency - Leena Cho, Rychiee Espinosa, Matthew Jull, and Seth McDowell - took over the Insight Lab, making the lab into their own "temp occupancy" of a design studio.
They were working on this year's PS1 design competition, as part of the MoMA Young Architects Program International. TempAgency were 2013 finalists, with their entry "My Hair is at MoMA PS1".
Utilizing the entire lab space from the Research Corner and whiteboard wall to the labs complement o ...
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Around the digital map
Eric Field
Drawings and maps are all digital these days - mostly at least - making it harder to gather "around" them to have a conversation. But not so using the digital SMART Table.
Here a group of planning students one day grabbed the Table to have a conversation. Using the same software and mapping platforms that they use everyday on their laptops and workstations, here they can gather around it and talk.
This simple perturbation of an otherwise standard technology begins to enable new things. ...
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Central Appalachia Food Heritage Portal
Eric Field, with Tanya Denckla Cobb, Christine Gyovai, Laura Gurn, Jason Knickmeyer
Parallel to the development of the Virginia Food Heritage Map is the Central Appalachia Food Heritage project. Like in central Virginia, the CAFH mapping effort seeks to catalog and display food heritage across the Appalachia region, with a particular focus on economic development efforts and opportunities.
Using data put together by Laura Gurn, this map extends the Central Virginia project into other regions, and begins to establish a larger platform for visualizing our local food systems ...
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Food Heritage Mapping
Eric Field, with Tanya Denckla Cobb, Natalie Raffol, Patrick Torborg
Begun as an
Insight Lab student fellowship with Paul Hughes, the Virginia Food Heritage mapping project is now becoming a platform for local food heritage community research!
The maps catalog the local state of food heritage - from farms and markets to various food processing and cultivation techniques, to the local region's food stories. Built on a Google Maps platform, with our own data backend, the Virginia Food Heritage map provides an initial snapshot ...
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UVA Global: On the Map
Eric Field, with Alex Kaplan, Margie Crowell
Working collaboratively with the UVa International Affairs office - now called UVa Global - Insight Lab staff produced a live visualization tool that literally puts UVa "on the map".
The mapping tool - a combination of SVG/HTML 5 drawing engines and the Google Maps API - reads and visualizes various statistics about the University's positions globally. From how many students traveled to what countries in a given year, to what international cities we travel to, to where UVa alumni are and whe ...
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Baldassare Peruzzi's drawing of St. Peter's
Kirsten Sparenborg, with Dr. Cammy Brothers
SEPIA INK ...
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Baldassare Perruzzi's drawing of St. Peter's
Kirsten Sparenborg, with Dr. Cammy Brothers
RED CHALK LINES ...
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Baldassare Perruzzi's drawing of St. Peter's
Kirsten Sparenborg, with Dr. Cammy Brothers
BLACK CHALK LINES ...
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Baldassare Perruzzi's drawing of St. Peter's
Kirsten Sparenborg, with Dr. Cammy Brothers
INCISED STYLUS GUIDELINES. ...
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New interface to the UVa Bay Game completes the game's prototype
Eric Field, with Max Brenner, Phoebe Harris, George Foster, Aaron Simon
Edward Tufte and Joseph Albers both famously cite the phenomenon of 1+1=3 about the power of graphics to achieve (or hinder) an understanding of complex information. "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" is another common saying. We gain greater insight when we can visualize the data that is in front of us - contextualize it, identify with it, and simply understand it better.
Students in the School of Architecture working with Eric Field on the Bay Game project completed an overh ...
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Insight Lab hosts Seven-University Game Play
Eric Field
On Earth Day 2011, seven Chesapeake Bay region universities played the UVa Bay Game in a distributed game held over the internet.
With seven full teams scattered across the region from Blacksburg to Norfolk to Annapolis, Maryland, students across seven universities got together on the afternoon of April 22 using their laptop computers to play a 167 player, 10 round interactive game. The game was hosted from the Insight Lab in the University of Virginia School of Architecture - the lab where ...
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Baldassare Perruzzi's drawing of St. Peter's
Kirsten Sparenborg, with Dr. Cammy Brothers
The following series imagines the chronological process of making the drawing, taping paper pieces together to create a canvas, introducing guidelines by incising the paper with a stylus, drawing with grey then red chalk, then brown ink. This analysis separates the stages and media used into: 1. paper construction 2. incised guidelines 3. grey chalk lines 4. red chalk lines 5. brown ink lines. Peruzzi's process of layering lines helps explain the extent to which he was conjecturing and innovatin ...
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