http://bit.ly/qpN4QW MIT+150: Quickly (Festival of Art + Science + Technology): Fast LIGHT — operator's console for the Liquid Archive (and LightBridge?) items

Quoting from the official pamphlet:

Fast LIGHT • May seven + eight, 2011, seven pm - ten pm

Contemporary pioneers in artwork, science, and technology have arrive collectively at MIT to create a single of the most exhilarating and inventive spectacles metro Boston has at any time seen. On May possibly seven and 8, 2011, guests can interact with twenty+ artwork and architectural installations illuminating the campus and the Charles River along Memorial Generate at MIT.

arts.mit.edu / rapidly

Installations scattered all around campus (we didn't really see all of them), again pasting from the official flyer:

• aFloat
MIT Chapel • Saturday, Might 7th ONLY
Inspired by h2o in the Saarinen Chapel's moat, a touch releases flickers of light just before serenity returns as a calm ripple.
By Otto Ng, Ben Regnier, Dena Molnar, and Arseni Zaitsev.

• Inflatables
Lobby seven, Infinite Corridor
A dodecahedron sculpture manufactured of silver nylon resonates with gusts of air, warmth from light bulbs, and the motions of passersby.
By Kyle Barker, Juan Jofre, Nick Polansky, Jorge Amaya.

• (now(now(now)))
Creating seven, 4th Floor
This set up nests layers of the past into an image of the current, recursively intertwining slices of time.
By Eric Rosenbaum and Charles DeTar.

• Dis(Training course)four
Creating three Stair, Infinite Corridor
A stairwell changed by a shummering aluminum conduit inspired by the discourse among floors and academic disciplines.
By Craig Boney, Jams Coleman and Andrew Manto.

• Maxwell's Dream
Building ten Neighborhood Lounge, Infinite Corridor
An interactive mural developed by magnetic fields that generate styles of light, Maxwell's Dream is a visually expressive cybernetic loop.
By Kaustuv De Biswas and Daniel Rosenberg.

• Mood Meter
Student Middle & Building eight, Infinite Corridor
Is the smile a barometer of pleasure? Mood Meter playfully assesses and shows the mood of the MIT group onsite and at moodmeter.media.mit.edu
By Javier Hernandez and Ehsan Hoque.

• Soft Rockers
Killian Court
Repose and cost your electronic devices employing green photo voltaic powered engineering
By Shiela Kennedy, P. Seaton, S. Rockcastle, W. Inam, A. Aolij, J. Nam, K. Bogenshutz, J. Bayless, M. Trimble.

• LightBridge
The Mass. Ave Bridge
A dynamic interactive LED array responds to pedestrians on the bridge, illustrating MIT's ties to equally sides of the river. Thank you to Philips ColorKinetics, CISCO, SparkFun Electronics.
By Sysanne Seitinger.

• Sky Celebration
Killian Court, Saturday, May 7th ONLY
Immense inflatable stars soar above MIT in celebration of the unique symbiosis between artists, experts and engineers.
By Otto Piene.

• Liquid Archive
Charles River
A floating inflatable display screen provides a backdrop for projections that highlight MIT's background in science, engineering, and art.
By Nader Tehrani and Gediminas Urbonas.

• Light Drift
Charles River
Ninety brightly glowing orbs in the river transform colour as they react to the presence of people alongside the shore.
By Meejin Yoon.

• Unflat Pavilion
Developing 14 Lawn
This freestanding pavilion illuminated with LEDs flexes two dimensions into three. Flat sheets are bent and unfurl into skylights, columns, and windows.
By Nick Gelpi

• Gradated Discipline
Walker Memorial Lawn
A area of enticing mounts develop a landscape that encourages passersby to meander via, or lounge upon the smooth plaster shapes.
By Kyle Coburn, Karina Silvester and Yihyun Lim.

• Bibliodoptera
Building 14, Hayden Library Corridor
Freshly emerged from the chrysalis of MIT's diverse library pages, a cloud of butterflies flutters above, reacting to the movement of passersby.
By Elena Jessop and Peter Torpey.

• Wind Display
Green Developing Facade, Bldg 54
A shimmering curtain of light produced by micro-turbines shows a visual sign-up of the replenishable supply of wind vitality.
By Meejin Yoon.

• String Tunnel
Constructing eighteen Bridge
A diaphonous tunnel generates a sense of entry to and from the Infinite Corridor and frames the bordering landscape.
By Yuna Kim, Kelly Shaw, and Travis Williams.

• voltaDom
Constructing 56-66 Connector
A vaulted passageway utilizes an modern fabrication strategy that generates intricate double curved vaults by means of the simple rolling of a sheet of material.
By Skylar Tibbits.

• Night of Figures
Constructing 66 Facade & E15 Walkway
A lights set up enlivens MIT architectre with amounts that maintain special or historical significance to the Institute. Can you decode them all?
By Praveen Subramani and Anna Kotova.

• Overliner
Building E-twenty five Stairwell
Taking cues from a stairwell's spiraling geometry, Overliner transforms a familiar and active passageway into a moment of surprise and repose.
By Joel Lamere and Cynthia Gunadi.

• Chroma District
Corner of Ames and Major Streets.
Lanterns react to website visitors by passing audio and coloration from a single to an additional, growing in intensity alongside the way and illuminating the path to MIT's campus.
By Eyal Shahar, Akito van Troyer, and Seung Jin Ham.



By now, most individuals who perform in the developed globe have gotten employed to the idea that the previous nine-to-5 regimen is progressively getting to be a thing of the previous — a great deal of folks have shifts that commence and finish at diverse moments, or they use career-sharing and other kinds of flex-time. Some really do not even have classic work at all any much more, many thanks to the evolution of the “gig economy” and the boost in freelancing. All of which raises a query that seems even a lot more suitable with Labor Day close to the corner: Are defined hrs of operate an anachronism that is holding us back again? Or is the freedom to work whenever we want one thing that is nevertheless reserved for a select couple of, and/or a trap that triggers us to function far more rather than a lot less?
Flexible operate is some thing that would seem increasingly well-known with programmers and other on the web employees, for causes that Zach Holman of the software package repository GitHub referred to in a current publish on the GitHub weblog, entitled “Hours Are Bull****.” Holman stated that for most of the personnel who operate on the support, there are no defined functioning several hours whatsoever — every person is on their personal timetable and they work every time they need to have to in order to resolve the issues that want to be solved. As he puts it:

Hours are wonderful ways to determine productiveness in several industries, but not ours. Functioning in a startup is a considerably diverse knowledge than working in a factory. You can’t throw a lot more time at a issue and expect it to get solved. Code is a inventive endeavor… We want workers to be in the zone as often as feasible. Mandating particular times they require to be in the office environment hurts the chances of that.

Unstructured function is not for everybody
That type of technique, which management consultants like to call a “results-oriented workplace,” may possibly be fine for a imaginative endeavor like programming or design and style, or even for corporations (like GigaOM’s) that include brain-driven operate these kinds of as composing. But does it make any feeling for other organizations and industries? When Holman’s report obtained handed close to in our workplace, my colleague Stacey stated that this look at of unstructured perform only performs for specific men and women — people without having children, for instance (who often have relatively rigid schedules governed by school, etc.) or other obligations that demand them to work on something nearer to a nine-to-five schedule.
Others argued that a less structured schedule really helps make these items simpler to deal with instead than more challenging, given that workers can depart when is necessary fairly than waiting for the whistle to blow at 5.
Although there is lots of research that shows both workers and organizations advantage when several hours are more adaptable, not everybody — regardless of what company they work in — is likely to want to work a totally unstructured timetable. And for some men and women, a specific program isn’t just some thing that they want for external factors: a task with out defined parameters may possibly really *enhance* the pressure they really feel, and therefore make them a lot less productive or effective (a friend I know utilized to set on a fit and then walk down the hall to his office environment at house, just to simulate functioning in a normal workplace, simply because he necessary the discipline).
There is one more chance that Holman’s description of the new unstructured workplace brings up, some thing we’ve created about a whole lot at GigaOM, and that is the influence that this can have on the “work-lifestyle balance” of workers. Says Holman:

By making it possible for for a far more flexible function schedule, you develop an atmosphere where staff can be thrilled about their function. Eventually it ought to lead to more hours of operate, with those hours staying even much more effective. Functioning weekends blur into working nights into doing work weekdays, given that none of the operate feels like work.

If you can function any time, you can perform all the time

But if it does not experience like work and you can do it any time, how do you guarantee that you are not operating all the time? This is an problem that has been exacerbated by our more and more constantly-on, often-linked, mobile-product-carrying tradition — expertise personnel of all kinds find themselves answering email messages or responding to text messages at all hours of the day and evening, doing work on weekends, and so on. And the increasing globalization of a lot of industries has just accelerated this phenomenon, given that some staffers or agreement workers may well be in completely diverse time zones.
In some techniques, this needs much more discipline on the portion of the employee themselves: to set boundaries and say that he or she won’t be accessible at certain moments, or to turn off gadgets throughout meals and on weekends — something I and other people at GigaOM have written about in the prior, and a thing that continues to be an ongoing battle. If your function is also a thing you take pleasure in performing, then your perform can expand to fill almost each accessible second if you let it. But in the long operate, that’s not great for workers or companies.
One factor is distinct, nonetheless: this phenomenon is not heading away — if nearly anything, it is rising, as a lot more perform becomes knowledge work, and as much more firms consider to adapt to a cloud-centered and worldwide world (versatile hours and an improve in freelance or contract work also has actual rewards for firms in terms of lower fees, some of which are pushed down to the specific worker, this sort of as the charge of health positive aspects).
When perform is anyplace, businesses require to alter as well
Firms like VMWare are hoping to support figure out how the nature of operate modifications when it occurs in “the cloud” and the workforce moves in the direction of what CEO Paul Maritz calls the “post-document era.” Instead of sitting at desks shifting paper around, more folks are operating in ways that are difficult to outline, that involve streams of information that don’t commence or stop at specific times. And organizations like Rypple are hoping to re-engineer the human-sources specifications in that kind of workplace, so that measuring performance isn’t carried out the moment a yr or every single 6 months, but in one thing shut to true-time, making use of social equipment that make much more sense for such an setting.
Some firms have taken the unstructured perform concept to its logical conclusion when it comes to standard institutions these kinds of as vacation: Netflix has what it calls an “unlimited vacation” policy, which makes it possible for personnel to just take time every time they want it, offered they organize to have their operate finished when required. Social Media Team, a Toronto-based mostly consulting firm, is an additional that has taken this strategy — one particular that CEO Maggie Fox referred to in a current website article.
The passing away of the 9-to-five workplace may possibly not fit everybody, and a completely unstructured operate timetable might not become the norm for all industries any time quickly, but there is no problem that it is progressively widespread. And adapting to it is likely to require distinct abilities — not just from employees, but from the companies that use them.
Publish and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr end users Seattle Municipal Archives and John Lambert Pearson
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Signal up for a no cost trial.
Flash examination: Steve Jobs
The Long term of Workplaces
The Future of Perform Platforms: An Overview