Accident Designs

I recently gave a lecture on Second Life at Building Lab DK. They have been involved in U_Build, a project that unites the construction and the game industry and utilizes user-driven innovation and dialog. Among the collaborators are Mutopia and IO interactive. IO has technology that would be able to support an interactive platform. Technology that is mature in relation to the technology supporting Second Life. However Second Life is still very relevant for the project, especially if you see it in a perspective where technology is allowed to improve. Second Life has an already established user-community and the grid enables interconnected collaboration and almost unlimited technical possibilities. So even though the technology isn’t mature, the grid already has its advantages.

Which has very good intentions on how to use Second Life and its community, they don’t fully succeed though because they do not have something to offer the users in return. Therefore the users do not get involved in the project.To look at a case of an ongoing successful presence in SL that manages to build an active user community we investigated Pontiac. Motorati as Pontiac’s presence in SL is named relies on mainly competitions and customization. Users can customize there own vehicles and compete in races organized by Motorati which is of value for Pontiac in the ideas and user involvement they achieve but also just as general marketing.Adlast we looked into how Keystone Buchard and some of the projects he is involved in mannages to use SL. He is a pioneer in using SL in his field which is very relevant for Building Lab DK.

Read and see more at http://archsl.wordpress.com/

Think further than your source of inspiration.

Some years ago Linden Lab saw the possibilities of a metaverse as in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Knowing that they had created a limitless world they created grass for people to walk on. Soon people all around the world signed up and created their own avatars. Few were walking around as furies angels or bots. But a lot of people created a virtual replica of an ordinary real life person. These virtual avatars moved into there new homes build on a strong foundation made of virtual concrete though now gravity exists.

Generally it seems that the Second Life citizens are duplicating reality. Perhaps we want to visualise our real life dreams. Ad least it seems we are amazed with realism and that our interpretation of realism as a description of SL’s content is commonly positive.

I believe that some of the reason for our strive to make SL just the same as RL resides in our imagination. Every new idea is based on inspiration, the originality of the idea depends on our minds ability to travel away from our source of inspiration. Most of us naturally have our inspiration IRL.

Therefore i try to get my inspiration from other sources. I could build a realistic house and afterwords decide what its going to contain, but instead i try to figure out how a place should function. When i know that i let the function and contents inspire me. In all cases i seek inspiration from unconventional sources and that usually brings me to a better and more original result.

I believe Second Life is going to move away from reality and that accident designs and other developers will continue to find new uses for the new dimension.