My Desk - Interviews and Photographs

The space we work in is subject to personal adjustments and preferences. To the extend possible it gets customised and personalised. This is, if working in a large corporate company not always posible to the extend desired and often is reduced to putting up a photograph of a loved one or a colourful coffee mug.

However, how do we choose our workplace if there is a lot more freedom, how do you create your working environment at home? The MyDesk interview series is looking into this and unveils freelancers work desks and other workflow secrets, of course with great snapshot.


Image taken from the desk of / Photograph of Robb Ogle's desk. He lives in Ontario. Prior, three years were spent in New York after seven years in Boston as a graphic designer and occasional typography professor. Even before that, a lot of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin happened. He is fascinated by words and pictures of words.

Kate Donely describes her 'Desk' projects as "A site dedicate a site solely to canvas of the Desk.

A Desk is where we work. Symbolic. Physical. Present. A second and third home. A Desk is a platform. A hearth. Roots are planted. It’s where hours upon hours pass."

The interviews are often very detailed and can be intimate about routines and habits. Very quickly the individual persona shows through. But still the rules for the contribution are very clearly sated "Please, don’t stage it. Don’t clean it (a messy desk doesn’t make a messy mind). Don’t make it something you or your work is not. Keep it real".

THe guardian for a ong time has this as a image with a short text in the Review section of the Saturday edition. Sometimes it was called 'a writer's room' or 'an artist's room'. For example there was Richard Sennett's writing room published on Saturday 25 April 2009.

In the interviews the desk owners get usually very personal and affectionate about the arrangements on the table. The intimacy of the scenery is real and almost always each object has its very own story and reason to exactly feature in this way.

Robb Ogle explains about his arrangements "Ugly little vinyl pitbulls from a bubble vending machine atop one of two Behringer Truth monitors which sound like heaven. Little Nemo in Slumberland vol 1. from Sunday Press Books sits against the wall. Off to the left, rolled up poster by Derek Hess.


Image taken from the desk of / Photograph of Adrian Tomine's desk. was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He is the writer and artist of the comic book series Optic Nerve, as well as the books Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Summer Blonde,and Shortcomings. His comics and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times and McSweeney’s, among others, and he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

"It appears you are quite organized." And Adrian Tomines replays (see his desk above) "Other cartoonists make fun of me for having such a spartan, tidy studio. All my friends have these amazing rooms filled to the rafters with books, toys, artwork, etc., and then my studio looks like it belongs to an anal-retentive architect or something. It’s probably some low-grade OCD thing, but I actually have a hard time working in a cluttered, pack-rat environment."


Image taken from the desk of / Photograph of Noa Scalin's desk. Noah Scalin is a Richmond, Virginia based artist & designer. He is the creator of the Webby Award winning art project Skull-A-Day which was the basis of his first book, SKULLS.

The importance of the little bibelots is very present in these documentations. Sometimes the technical equipments can play this role and has an individual story, mainly in the case of geeks, but very often additional elements such as figures and collectables, which appear to have no apparent use, occupy these prime spots in the workery scene. It is all about inspiration.

For the full list of reported workspaces see fromyourdesks.com

Drift - Morphing City

The ever changing perspective as we navigate the urban landscape is an important feature influencing the perception and in many ways influences how the space we create as we go along are experienced. It's not as if the street is existing, but it is renewed every time as a recreation of itself with a specific take.

Buildings feature in this process consciously as a back drop and the immediate focus is put on the objects whizzing about, to avoid potential collisions. The trajectories of these has to be continuously monitored and one's own path adjusted accordingly. It is a sort of negotiation between the elements that make use of their power to take decisions and with it continuously generate situations.

However, this consuming activity might in the long run is not be the main focus. Unconsciously the main focus might lay on the static frame and the defining elements as parameters of the room for action.

In this beautiful time lapse Theo Tagholm shows an interpretation of this spatiality of places from the perspective of one subject.

As it says in the description "I drift, half awake, half asleep. Moving through the city I recall but have never been to."
The clip is produced by Theo Tagholm, a video artist. He's got some other great video work. As linked here earlier with the clip Still Moving.

London 365- 2010 - One Year of GPS Tracking

It is one more year since the last summary of personal tracking was posted. This year it is a consistant 405 tracking record as compared to a mixed device record the previous year. This matters in so far as the 405 performs very well and the data processing job is a simpler for the cleaning part. The down side is that it is slower for the processing part since there are very detailed records with loads of points. THe previeous year can be found at Plymouth365 and oneYearLND_2009.


Image by single-blogs / London overview of the 2010 GPS track record. A one year drawing of movement on a daily basis, recording all activities and trips. For a large version click HERE.

The map also shows the previous year in green, since there is a striking similarity and in order to highlight the differences this seemed to make sense. The similarity goes as far as the two records being more or less the same. I expected a similarity, but not to this extend.

There are differences only on a very small scale. There is one major change in routine that dominates the differences between the two years. My son has started school and the trips to the nursery near the work place have been substituted by trip to drop of or pick him up at the school near our home. This changes the spatial practice and with it the pattern. However it is not as obvious since the directions of movement stayed more or less the same.


Image by single-blogs / London Bloomsbury zoom of the 2010 GPS track record. A one year drawing of movement on a daily basis, recording all activities and trips.

To update the zoom in to the leisure area around Regents Park here is an updated version showing the different visits to ZSL. In 2010 there appear definitely a shift in interest focus. Never been to Australia this year.

As pointed out in last years post, the capacity to recall events using the lines as memory triggers works very well. I can basically over the whole year piece together my steps. Being this for example in the bottom left corner some of these trips to the Natural History Museum, Royal Geographical Society or in Hyde Part visits the Diana Memorial.


Image by single-blogs / London Regents Park zoom of the 2010 GPS track record. A one year drawing of movement on a daily basis, recording all activities and trips.

Territoriality - Mapping Individual City Perspectives

How do we identify our selves with the spaces we use and how do we navigate with the many obstacles the urban environment contains?
Living in the city means to constantly negotiate spaces as well as navigate space. This becomes more difficult under the density aspect as well as the mobility aspects. Also the cycles of change are very short and frequent adaptations require constant reorientation.
Aspects of repetition and routine play an important role in the navigation of everyday situations. Being familiar with the aspects makes this task a lot easier. However, as soon as there are changes, new features or temporary obstacles, those have to be integrated.
Even more difficult such tasks are for people with disabilities. Here people also have to deal with obstacles built into the urban landscape, simply because someone ignored additional needs.
Megafon is a project to investigate and map these obstacles using collaborative and user generated methods.


Image by megafon.net / Geneva obstacle map 2008. Based on Google Maps with clickable content. Click on image for the interactive map.

They work with focus groups and equip their participants with a camera and GPS to document their experiences in everyday situations. The images were uploaded directly to the internet feeding in to a realtime map of the city. Two of these cities are Barcelona, Spain and Geneva, Switzerland. The resulting maps a very detailed and visualise a very specific perspective on the city.


Image by megafon.net / Barcelona obstacle map 2006.

Body and the Creation of Space

I have been talking a lot recently about the creation of space as a synthesis of body and body movement. The idea is directly linked to observations or better visualisation method used for the UrbanDiary data.
The track log is simply points with a lat/long coordinate and a time stamp. However it can be assumes that around this location up to certain distance, depending on physical objects, the environment is experienced. Regarding the sequencing along the clock time information, these experience multiply and over time create a spatial corridor.
Purely by thinking of the body as a physical object moving you can imagine the same creation of ‘space’. This idea heavily draws on the use of memory, of the fading ‘space’ and the imagination of possible ‘spaces’.
To illustrate this idea of choreographed movement here is a series of dance moves that create the space along a clearly defined stepping sequence.

Image taken from chas.utoronto.ca - T'ai-chi footwork


The instruction to Thriller - taken from Nada Mas

For the Thriller instruction here is the original for more facial expression! check it out.

Thriller from Mauro Firmo on Vimeo.

If you have noting to do over the weekend here is the step by step youtube instruction.

Whate Shape Are You? - Update

As an update to the ‘what shape are you?’ post, here are some new shapes. The Project now counts twenty participants so we also have twenty shapes.
All shapes are produced over the period of two month and are represented here at the same scale.
As previously noted these ‘drawings’ depend on the location of important destination relative to one another and on mode of transport as well as frequency. The mental picture of the city that each individual builds up while interacting with the urban fabric is tremendously different. Linking back to the visualisation ‘The Naked City’ the phsychogeography of the city is very much dependant or a result of this as produced through the derive.

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Image by single-blogs for UrbanDiary - (click for large version) - Different shapes produces by participants of the UrbanDiary project over the same period of time.