Art Friday by Michael: Eigenstate
Continuing Michael’s interest in scientific visualisation, this piece represents branching states of a quantum-physical system. It begins with a single element in the centre of the piece, which spawns several child elements—the superposition of several possible states of the system. Every half-second or thereabouts, a child element itself spawns children, and the process iterates, building up a “cloud” of superposed possibilities. On click (or after fifty generations, in this version) a random youngest-child element is selected, and the system collapses to show just the single path that leads from the child to the original—the reified, observed eigenstate. The system then rebuilds after a short pause, evolving into a new complex state.Sounds pretentious? It is, a bit. A fullscreen version of this piece —which collapses the waveform on movement detected by a camera—was an entry in the Macquarie University World Year of Physics Art Prize.
Less mass, more energy
There’s a temptation to try to optimise your business by cranking out the same thing, efficiently, again and again. It’s the agribusiness model: get good at doing one thing, then do it as cheaply as you can in the greatest volume. Because you need to keep volumes high, you need to market to people who don’t actually want or need your product – and that’s just what it is, a generic product, the same as the last, the same as the next.
But agribusiness monocultures are boring and brittle: they’re prone to disease, and they’re easily wiped out when the market shifts.
We’re more like hunter-gatherers: we improvise, adapt, try new approaches. For us, a new project is an opportunity to explore different ways of doing things: to learn from the past, but also to try to build for the future. It means we need to have a broader range of skills because we do different things at different times. We stay agile and light. It’s more diverse, and it’s more interesting.
Designed by humans
Michael Honey
Max Wheeler
Nathan McGinness 
Daniel Edmonds On our bookshelf
Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design
Michael Bierut writes, we read.
XS Green: Big Ideas, Small Buildings
Tiny buildings that make us happy. And the world too.
Design Like You Give a Damn
Low-cost projects from around the world providing shelter, health care, education, and access to clean water, energy, and sanitation. Do more with less.
Phaidon Design Classics
Essential 3-volume compendium of 999 industrially designed objects, in chronological order. Arrived in a box the size of a microwave.
Edward Tufte: Beautiful Evidence
Beautiful Evidence is.
Interesting
Small team, smart people
"I’ve seen it both ways. Working in a teams where the vast majority of the staff were multi-disciplined, and in teams where each section was clearly its own echo chamber to the point where it felt like the considerations of one team would always be ignored by the other. I can tell you that the former was not only infinitely more productive, but that the results were exponentially better."
Inventive Labs
Virginia came to visit recently. Props from one lab to another.
Helvetica
Not the font (that goes without saying!), but the film. We found it ideal for a typographically nerdy DVD night. Bring your own beanbag!
NZ field laboratory?
We wish that were true. But have a look anyway - it's a cool project.
BLDGBLOG
Your brain will effervesce with architectural goodness.
Unit 3/1, The Metropolitan,
1 Gordon St,
Canberra City ACT 2601 Australia
Telephone +61 2 6162 0241
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