Your research task this week is to carefully read, analyse and reflect upon the four ‘Industry Set’ project briefs.
After listening to the first lecture, and the suggestion of not overlooking the science museum brief my first thought was to choose something else. I have an inbuilt something that makes me want to do the exact opposite of what I’m told to do.
However when I read through the brief’s it was the science museum that stood out to me.
My reasoning behind this are as follows;
The Creative conscious and RSA briefs are too emotive for me. Having dabbled in social issues for one week of the part one of this module I have realised where my interests lie and what I am able to mentally cope with (or not). Whilst I do care about these things I do not want them to be the focus of my work, I think there are lots of designers covering this type of thing at the moment and I would prefer to focus on things I enjoy and that make me happy.
I had a look at the concluded briefs and decided against these, as there may be some exciting questions in there but if feels to me a bit of a wate of time to do a concluded brief, also I think I would find it really difficult not to be influenced by previous winners and entries.
I quite like the idea of a collaboration, but don’t think I know of anyone to collaborate with, other than my current employer, which I am trying to move on from by doing this course, so again it would be counter productive.
This left me with the science museum, which is of interest to me as I have a fascination with historic and scientific inventions, artefacts and discoveries, and although Teresa mentioned in the webinar about choosing something you’re not interested in and out of your comfort zone, I feel in this instance I need to go with my interests.
I had a good look through the science museum links and the thing that grabbed my attention was the Antikythera Mechanism; A unique object that was found by Mediterranean sponge divers off the island of Antikythera in the 19C. They found the wreck of a 1st century merchant vessel, onboard were many treasures including the mechanism. Studies show that it could predict astronomical positions, the earliest known example of a machine for making calculations, possible linking back to Archimedes (287-212BC). In 2005 it was x-rayed and a greater understanding of its workings were revealed, they were then able to make a facsimile of the mechanism, as seen in the film.
Ancient Greek Computing – Science Museum Blog
It does have some kind of parallels to my current work, having made globes for orrey makers, but it goes back far further in time than any Orrey information I can find through searching the science museum, and has Earth at the centre rather than the sun. It refers to analogue computing and our solar system, and I think it could be a small start to a huge amount of information; The ancient Greeks, Sky mapping , Analogue computing, technologies both historical and contemporary involving our solar system, our relationship with the planets, gravitational pull, the entire universe and life on our small rock.
This was a link I followed from the science museum blog list, but the mechanism itself is house in Athens, so I hope I am able to use it as a start point. I would very much like to be able to take a look at some of the scans and x-rays that were made in 2005.
I am not entirely sure where this will lead, but will hopefully enjoy it along the way.
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X-ray of a fragment of the Antikythera Mechanism – CHM Revolution (computerhistory.org)