Taking place in the capital’s most exciting venue, the Truman Brewery, a vast reclaimed industrial site in Brick Lane, Tent London is the most comprehensive and diverse design event of the year, showing art and architecture, vintage and contemporary design by emerging and established designers from around the world.

Open Tables is a software application and a spatial environment, which researches and facilitates collaborative working between individuals and groups. The core purpose of Open Tables is to explore the potential for new kinds of collaborative working to emerge in spaces that combine analogue and digital modes of interaction: engaging both the mind and the senses in the navigation and production of information.

Come and see us at Tent London to talk to us about the project. We will be available at the stand throughout the exhibition.

Tent London opening times:
Thursday 18 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Friday 19 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Saturday 20 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Sunday 21 September: 11.00 – 17.00hrs

For more information on Tent London, please visit their website @ www.tentlondon.co.uk
To find out more about our project, please visit project’s website @ www.opntables.com

Open Tables (OT) is an experimental new kind of collaborative working environment. For the Tent Urbantine installation we have defined four research topic areas, looking at contemporary design issues around sustainability, workplace environments, and ubiquitous computing. However, OT can be set up to research any topic depending upon the needs and interests of the client/participant/co-designer – whether bike design or stock markets – and we anticipate producing many OT variations in the future.

At the heart of Open Tables is the OT WebApp, the central repository of discussion material. It’s purpose is to organize information in a way relevant to the topic discussed. Items are collected off the web from a number of defined web feeds. Items are collected and collated into topics using the tags that the describe those items. The WebApp allows OT participants to browse items, filter by topic, tag and mark relevant or rejected depending upon whether you think this item is relevant to the discussed topic or not. You can also leave comments for each item.

Within the OT physical installation the content is interacted with through a series of physical spatial interfaces. The WebApp has a number of XML outputs which allow interface devices at the installation to communicate to one another. Item modified in the physical installation is automaticly updated on the webapp. This also works vice versa. Whilst the information displayed on the webapp is in a particular, already familiar web format, the same information in the installation is displayed through a series of spatial and physical conditions, aimed at promoting social interaction.

On the web, the OT WebApp can be engaged with through the OT website. Feel free to browse/tag/relate items. All information is collected and displayed in the space relevant to generate discussion. If you register you are also able to add items yourself as well as subscribe to our newsletter to be notified where next physical installation will be taking place.

The four research topics that OT is currently running are:

SUSTAINABILITY IN EDUCATION

RESEARCHING RECYCLING

GLOBAL NETWORKS AND THE INTERACTIVE EVERYDAY

COLLABORATIVE WORKING ENVIRONMENTS

If you have a blog, or would like to recommend a website which addresses any of these issues, and you would like to have your content fed into the OT system for the Tent Urbantine installation, then please submit your feed to info@opntables.com

The feeds that you submit to the Sustainability in Education topic will be feeding into a live EU funded research project into design education, and will be shown at the DEEDS 360 degrees conference (http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/events/deeds-360degrees) in Brighton on Saturday 20th September 2008.

For more information about Open Tables, please visit http://www.opntables.com or our blog http://blog.opntables.com or drop us an email at info@opntables.com

Open Tables is a Working Architecture Group [WAG] project. http://www.wag-architecture.co.uk

If you would like to follow Open Tables development, we have set-up a blog that is regularly updated.

http://opentables.tumblr.com/

You can also read more about this year’s Tent London here and about our project here.

Battersea Liquidwood Station

Photo Voltaic powered fans at the base of each chimney draw air into the new heart of the building. Here CO2 and sunlight is used to feed a mix of specially selected (and possibly GM) micro organisms and algae in tanks, producing an organic sludge: Liquidwood. This sludge is pumped around London, and when combined on-site with a specially designed enzyme, solidifies to produce Sludgecrete, a revolutionary new building material as strong and plastic as concrete, with the environmental credentials of wood. Whereas conventional concrete has a high carbon footprint, Sludgecrete actually takes carbon out of the atmosphere and ties it up in buildings.

The proposal is an example of the the ability and need for architects to imagine, specify and demand sustainable near future materials and technologies. This project started as a speculative ideas proposal. However discussions with some research biologists suggest that the project is indeed viable, and so we now consider it a live research project. We are looking for biologists and materials scientists to partner us for future research funding bids… interested individuals should contact jon@wag-architecture.co.uk

Intellectual Property rights associated with the names ‘Liquidwood’ and ‘Sludgecrete’ remain with WAG Architecture Ltd.

NB An exclusive article containing images of Battersea Liquidwood Station will be appearing soon on Dark Roasted Blend

WAG: project instigators and architects

Project description: When the railway embankment running north from Liverpool St Station, parallel to Mare Street, was constructed in the nineteenth century, the century long relationship between John Soane’s exquisite St John’s church (built in ) and Bethnal Green High Road was broken. The utilitarian steel bridge that now crosses Bethnal Green High Road 5m above the pavement level, all but blocks views of the church from the high road, and completely destroys the place that must have existed between the calm white stone of Soane’s modest masterpiece and the chaos of Bethnal Green market streching out in front of it.

WAG have developed a series of optical and digital installation proposals for the railway bridge that will allow a sense of the space of the place that might have existed there during the 18th and 19th centuries to be discerned. WAG’s first ideas examined the possible construction of a huge periscope which would sit like a lid over the bridge, bouncing reflections of the hidden view of the church over the bridge. Other kaliedoscopic variations of this machine attenuated the verfremdung – or alienation – of the originary scene.
However, whilst these analogue proposals had an elegant visibility to their mechanism, this same visibility would literally sometimes block other parts of the church view not currently obscured! WAG therefor settled upon a more sublime digital option. A bank of video cameras fixed to one side of the bridge record hidden views of the church, which are played back in real time on a continuous digital screen which lines the other side of the bridge. As this screen is digital, it is of course possible to discuss what other content it might carry. This might include local community content, commissioned video art, and advertising (which might pay for the project.
The intention of the project is not to simply make the bridge (modernity) invisible, but rather involves something like a dialectical aufhebung – or sublimation – of the lost view of the church building. The project hopes to encourage thinking about the role and ownership of images and views within the public realm, and to provoke questions about the experience of historical space.

WAG have started discussing the idea with Spacia and Railtrack, who own the property.

This piece of work is part of the Democratic Billboard, an ongoing WAG research and development project. This series of urban, architectural and art ideas explores the possible future development of the emerging media, advertising and communications infrastructures within the public spaces of the metropolis.

WAG are currently nearing completion on site for this domestic extension and remodelling.

The proposal is reinstating the garden and emphasises the connections between outside and inside. A series of different transitions have been created, ranging form a small courtyard between living room and kitchen to a completely open front connecting the garden and the dining area.

Internally the historic layers of the Victorian house have been uncovered and carefully framed within the modern finishes.

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