Amarcordi, tangible memory cues for personal stories

Personal memories shape individuals’ identities and inform their decisions. Since the beginning of time, technology has been used to aid human’s natural recall capabilities. The tools which are used to record them, have inevitably shaped and influenced not only how people remember, but also what they save. Digital media have provided great opportunities and power of handling personal memory collections, but have also introduced several controversies. The accumulation of huge unsorted digital archives is becoming inevitable: selecting pictures and files is now work rather than pleasure. Companies are starting to address this issue with new products and features, but this raises the question whether something so important as memories should be left in the hands of private corporations. This thesis addresses the need to find motivation to curate memories from my past with a personal and artistic approach. It argues the importance of defining a strong objective to encourage such hard work. I achieved this through the realization of a physical and interactive project: Amarcordi. It consists in modular magnetic embroideries, each one representing a cherished story from my past. The visual and tactile language I designed represents not only people and facts, but also emotions and moods. Findings show the effectiveness of the project in inspiring me to recollect and reflect, giving me the opportunity to look at events through different perspectives. A surprising benefit was also creating an innovative way to share those cherished moments with dear ones

MACE: connecting architectural content repositories to enable new educational experiences inside a collective external memory

In the practice and learning of Architecture and Civil Engineering, it is fundamental to access a big amount of learning material. A considerable part of the knowledge which once was written in books is now being moved to digital media. Today, most of the contents are produced and presented in digital format only. Spread around the world, digital content repositories containing a big amount of notions exist, but are oftentimes unknown and disjointed. As a consequence, they are not very efficient resources for learning at the moment. The European research project MACE (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe) aims at connecting digital architectural repositories by harvesting their metadata and enriching it through the integration of content and domain, context, competence and process, and usage and social metadata. The network created will allow for federated access and search over all connected repositories, allowing a new way of exploring notions and knowledge in the architectural domain, using the web as a "collective external memory

E-learning in didactic workshops. The virtual atelier system ‘T-Labs’: storage, conceptual metatagging and sharing of the architectural design knowledge

In the Faculty of Architecture of the University IUAV of Venice, the e-learning experimentation in architectural design teaching started in 1999. Since then, our research group developed a virtual atelier system based on prototypes called “TDraw” (Spigai et al. 2003) and “WITarch” (Spigai et al. 2004): informatics tools for the on-line revision and storage of students’ design tasks. The didactic experimentation provided important information about the mechanisms of learning process and knowledge transmission in the didactic atelier: this kind of teaching methodology produce a large amount of notions, a rich information flux that can be factored in single learning objects and raised to a collective knowledge. At present, our research group is improving and combining the previous instruments in a single tool: the new “T-Labs” system (Spigai et al. 2006); through this system, starting from the interrogatives that arise during the teacher-student relationship, each student can found possible design solutions, which would be exemplified by the students’ design tasks annotated and commented by the teacher and stored in the system. The experience matured in these years acts an important role in the new MACE project; in fact, the analysis and the observation of the atelier activity brought about the definition and the validation of a series of conceptual categories through which is possible to map the architectural design generative process and the whole architectural design subject

Semiotic based facetted classification to support browsing architectural contents in MACE

The research project MACE1 presented in this paper aims at organizing already existing architectural and engineering digital archives stored in European repositories. The new settled interconnections will be driven both by usage and by structured-knowledge; moreover, contents and interconnections will be accessible in an intuitive and interactive way. The goal is to create an ensemble of findable, accessible and reusable information, hence forming the basis of a meaningful, extensible network of architectural information

MACE: connecting and enriching repositories for architectural learning

Education in architecture requires access to a broad range of learning materials, so as to develop flexibility and creativity in design. The learning material is comprised of textual and visual media including images, videos, descriptions of architectural concepts or projects, i.e. digital artifacts on different aggregation levels. Until now, repositories storing such information have not been interrelated and have not provided unified access. Consequently, finding and retrieving architectural learning objects is cumbersome and time consuming. In this paper, we describe how an infrastructure of federated architectural learning repositories will provide unique, integrated access facilities for high quality architectural content. The integration of various types of content, usage, social and contextual metadata enables users to develop multiple perspectives and navigation paths that support experience multiplication for the user. A standards–based, service– oriented software architecture, and flexible user interface design solutions, based on embeddable widgets, ensure easy integration and re-combinability of contents, metadata and functionalities

MACE: connecting and enriching repositories for architectural learning

Education in architecture requires access to a broad range of learning materials, so as to develop flexibility and creativity in design. The learning material is comprised of textual and visual media including images, videos, descriptions of architectural concepts or projects, i.e. digital artifacts on different aggregation levels. Until now, repositories storing such information have not been interrelated and have not provided unified access. Consequently, finding and retrieving architectural learning objects is cumbersome and time consuming. In this paper, we describe how an infrastructure of federated architectural learning repositories will provide unique, integrated access facilities for high quality architectural content. The integration of various types of content, usage, social and contextual metadata enables users to develop multiple perspectives and navigation paths that support experience multiplication for the user. A standards–based, service– oriented software architecture, and flexible user interface design solutions, based on embeddable widgets, ensure easy integration and re-combinability of contents, metadata and functionalities.status: publishe