Interactive Project Maps

About the Maps

The BuildDigiCraft network participant and interest map is an interactive visual database map. Participants, teachers and experts can be filtered by type as well as by ISP participation using interactive buttons. Participants can be grouped by their university or by their shared interests, again with the help of interactive buttons.

Personal data, except for the names of the invited input speakers, is anonymized. The external input speakers have agreed to share their data and video recording of the lecture publicly.

 

About the used visual database tool:

Kumu is an online tool for visual databases, offering free open access for publicly used data. It allows for the creation of interactive multicriteria-databased network maps, with which complex relationships can quickly be visualized, clustered or systematized.

 

Participant Interest Map

Participants, teachers, experts and universities can be seen in the below Participant Map. There is a diverse range of disciplines and fields involved in the production and understanding of the built environment. This is reflected in the multitude of disparate interests held by the participants of the ISP workshops of the Build Digi Craft Project. There was an intention to forge a deeper understanding of these interested, discover new connections and draw new insights from the analysis of this emergent knowledge base. The task of capturing the depth and heterogeneity of interests, fields and disciplines, their hierarchies, categorisation and representation was approached through the use of a digital tool by the name of Kumu. This platform allows the creation of parametric presentations that represent complex relationships of the data through programable nodes and connections.

Using the application documentation, curricula vitae and provided works of the participants, Build Digi Craft utilised a text-based method of capturing participant areas of interest. Within Kumu, participant are anonymously represented as a node with their primary discipline given as a label and a colour denoting their educational status. Universities an expert speakers are also represented with their emblem or photographs and name. Buttons that filter by workshop participation and educational status were provided at the

 

 bottom middle and right. In the top right, two features are given: the first is a ‘University’ button that simple demonstrates the functionality of bringing each participant into relationship with their respective universities. The second is an ‘Interests’ button that produces nodes for each collected interest and links them to their respective participants.

The results of the ‘University’ feature allow a user to understand the connective mechanism and better understanding the more complex results of the ‘Interests’ feature. Upon pressing the ‘Interests’ button the Kumu Participant Map springs together, creating grey interest nodes from the data and reordering the participant around them. The positioning of nodes and connections is achieved automatically through push and pull forces of the nodes. The initial pattern resembles a rhizomatic ball, however this ball can be zoomed in on, clocked on, moved, pulled or picked at. Against the grey interest nodes, the participant colours form various constellations. Interest Nodes show highly and less shared interests. From this structured visualisation, central knowledge nexuses became observable and seemingly foreign participants and disciplines can be seen to hold connective interests. It provides a visualised structure to the plurality of diverse fields that constitute the knowledge base that informs the processes and shapes the results of the Build Digi Craft’s project.

Interest Hierachy Map

Participants, teachers, experts and universities can be seen in the below Participant Map. Attention was directed to a second representation of the Build Digi Craft knowledge base that would address the categorisation and hierarchy of knowledge. Categorisation can describe broader and narrower scopes and these can have many sub- and super-categories. The gamut of interest, fields and disciplines captured in the application documentation and participant works was brought into the Kumu tool for representation. Levels of hierarchy were created based on the size of scope of the interests. Knowledge was broken down into discipline (olive), field (blue) and interest (green) with this respective order

of hierarchy. It should be noted here that this selection is highly subjective and Lines of division are burred, overlapped and highly debatable. Some interests fall under more than one field and likewise, some fields under multiple disciplines. Despite the impossibility of categorisation in absolute terms, this process provides a rhizomatic image of the categorisation and hierarchies of the Build Digi Craft knowledge base. With this representation, we have extended the order that categorisation gives to complexity and depicted the avenues, side streets and laneways of the knowledge base we are leveraging for the Build Digi Craft Project.