[design] [dis]content .5

To: design-l
Subject: re: Microsoft's eHomes
Date: 2001.11.27 12:44

Brian,

I've been sending most of the last week or so organizing the domestic (cad)
databases in Quondam's collection in preparation for a forthcoming
exhibit/publication simply entitled Domestic Databases. Right now I'm just
checking out and becoming more familiar with what Quondam has, but I'm also
trying to evaluate what kind of potential such a collection of data holds.
For example, might architects find it interesting and useful to design
homes/housing with such databases at hand? Or, might the product of
architects be a house design plus an accompanying 'domestic database'?

What if more and more homes have walls of large screens -- instead of paint
or wallcovering, just select what you want the wall to look like from the
database -- family portrait gallery today, museum gallery tomorrow, live
feed from the space shuttle the day after. Design here is no longer about
controlling the way things look or are arranged, rather about providing
choice and potential.

These are just very preliminary ideas, and not exactly original, but the
point is that architects could well be more and more the designers of
domestic content. As for the Microsoft model, wasn't Bill Gates business
aesthetic already made clear when he bought the rights to millions of images
to institute CORBIS?

Steve



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