About Open Tables

Open Tables is a software application and a spatial environment, which researches and facilitates collaborative working between individuals and groups. The first prototype of Open Tables will be launched as a website on September 11th at Nous Gallery, London, and as a ‘fast architecture’ installation at the Tent London 2008 design event, at the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane between 18th and 21st September.

The core purpose of Open Tables is to explore the potential for new kinds of collaborative working to emerge in spaces that combine analogue and digital modes of interaction: engaging both the mind and the senses in the navigation and production of information. A typical meeting room has a table to sit around, and probably a flip chart and projector. More creative organisations often realise the importance of providing a variety of stimuli and environments, and typically have some break out, lounge like spaces. Open Tables combines these two familiar conditions, and intensifies them by introducing web based information flows and social networking scenarios, using interfaces which are based upon digital projections onto familiar objects, provoking physical interactions with data, often using the whole body, rather than just a mouse and keyboard.

The Open Tables prototype at Tent will test a range of interaction conditions and working scenarios. The Tent installation is set up to research four set topics (however in other OT installations it will be possible for subscribers to customise the research areas.) Three interactive tables have been constructed out of hybrids of recycled antique furniture, Nintendo Wiimote and Max MSP technologies so far. These assemblages allow users to engage with the core OT aggregator software, which draws in live feeds from RSS based web sites, as well as Flickr and YouTube content. At these tables, participants can chose whether content items from the feeds is relevant to the research topic. If it is relevant they can tag it, and can add comments. In addition to these tables there are other interactive wall stations. One presents selected content in a digital post-it note format, which allows the content to be clustered, mind mapped and organised as required. On other walls the collected content is presented as informational landscapes, showing relationships between for example different content items and their tags. In addition to working at the interactive stations, participants can contribute by sending sms text and photos from mobiles, or just by engaging with the main OT website using standard computers.

Open Tables is an ecology that the participant can co-evolve with, and can co-design. It brings together and experiments with contemporary thinking from a number of diverse practices and intellectual disciplines: innovation management, mind-mapping, workplace design, network theory, interaction design and cognitive science. Specifically, Open Tables is an application and study in Extended Mind thinking. Our minds are not in any simple way confined to our physical brains, but are broadly dispersed out into the environment. We use our external environments as cognitive spaces: in a real sense, cognitive processes which start in the brain are extended out into the world, through tools, language, practices and so on. We empathise with these environments, and the information that they contain. Open Tables creates the conditions for collaborator to share their Extended Minds.

The Team

WAG: Working Architecture Group are Jon Goodbun, Filip Visnjic and Cordula Weisser.

WAG is an eco-innovative design and research practice, whose interests range from urbanism and ecology to architectural furniture and computer aided manufacture. We believe that the architectural research that WAG has been involved in, produced through our teaching, writing and built practice, enables us to articulate, explore and develop the core aims and values of our clients, in interesting and powerful new ways. Our office is near Spitalfields Market, in East London, and our portfolio includes residential, retail, exhibition, bar and branding projects, for clients including BBC, YMCA, German Embassy and British Museum.

For Open Tables WAG are leading a cross-disciplinary design team, which includes interaction designer Alexander Kohlhofer (plasticshore.com) with software developer Thomas R. Koll (ananasblau.com), Antonio Passaro (4dfuture.com), Marco Quaggiotto (256greys.com), Wei Lee and students from Schumacher College (Fabio Barone (software developer) and Amalie Lauer (engineer)).

WAG/Jon Goodbun general quote

“Whenever I try to describe the ideas behind our work at WAG, or my broader consultancy and academic research, I tend to use words like holism, ecology, and cybernetics a lot. These ideas are able to capture and describe the notion that we live in a globally networked, modern world, but that this ‘space of flows’ is fundamentally interconnected to the ‘Spaceship Earth’ that we are travelling on. We rely upon the biosphere for vast inputs of Natural Capital every year into our production and consumption economies/ecologies, and we need to find conceptual and practical ways to conceive of ourselves as personally networked into these natural and technological ecologies, in a ‘local’ way. We need to build bridges between the local and the global. The fact that both ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’ share the same etymological root from Greek oikos ‘house’, suggests that they are both in fact inextricable from the very concept of architecture – both effectively meaning ‘the science of the house’, or ‘the science of managing the home’. “

Alexander Kohlhofer (plasticshore.com) blurb

As a designer Alexander Kohlhofer embodies strong artistic sensibilities with a passion for and expertise in contemporary technologies. He has worked on projects with the British Council, the Tate Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, the Arts Council, Amnesty International and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) and many others.

He has presented at international venues, conducted workshops abroad and has lived and worked in the US, UK, Germany and Austria. Until last year he was creative director of Bafta Award winners Soda Creative, world renowned for Soda Constructor. He is also a founding member and director of Munich based Schoene Neue Kinder in Germany.

His fascination for social software is expressed in his current start ups: the award winning online multiplayer-strategy game Weewar (http://weewar.com) and the agile team ware No Kahuna (http://nokahuna.com).

You can learn more about Alexander Kohlhofer at plasticshore.com

Marco Quaggiotto

Marco Quaggiotto is working on the digital component of the project incorporating his Knowledge Atlas interactive web application.

The Knowledge Atlas is an interface prototype for the exploration of knowledge resources being designed and developed by Marco Quaggiotto at the Politecnico di Milano. The project takes advantage of the experience developed by cartography in the representation of complex and open spaces, historically able to hold heterogeneous, natural and social elements together in the same picture.

The interface becomes therefore an atlas of knowledge cartographies, designed to show a complex environment through the overlapping of different images. The concept of ‘Atlas’ in this context doesn’t depict as much a list of maps, but rather a system of representations of space, a communication device aimed at representing complex contexts through the use of many partial overlapping narrations. A tool combining multiple images in order to enable the user to act on space: navigate, describe, explore, change scale, shift focus.

For an overview of the Knowledge Atlas see:
www.vimeo.com/1164911

Thomas R. Koll blurb

Thomas R. Koll has been actively contributing to the world wide web for a whole decade. Noteably he is long-term administrator at German Wikipedia and published a bi-weekly magazine with Wikipedia contents. In recent years he completely shifted to webdevelopment which he’s currently doing for the Lomographic Society in Vienna.