I've got loads and loads of work to do before I start at FXPal next week, but I just wanted to post all-too-briefly about Traces of Fire, a beautiful project from Volkmar Klien and Ed Lear in Limerick that was just exhibited in the Limerick City Hall.
The idea, as I understand it, was to use the tagged transmitters often used in wildlife habitat studies to track the migratory patterns of Limerick's inhabitants. The transmitters, embedded in cigarette lighters deliberately "lost" in carefully chosen Limerick pubs, also illuminate the social relationships underlying daily habits of travel, entertainment and (nicotine) gifting.
What I like so much about this project, besides the clarity and elegance of tracking the migratory habits of the native urbanite using techniques borrowed from zoology, is the methods it suggests for finding design opportunities in urban spaces:
From daily routines, temporal cycles and locational patterns the
shapes of habitats emerge; re-animating the data creature and the
home-range its movement suggests - a glimpse of the territory in
which the subject’s life takes place.
Leave a comment