Visualizing Portus #UoSFLPortus

Right, I think I might have reached the limits of Lego Digital Designer.

And I’m only about a third of the way through visualizing the Grandi Magazzini di Settimio Severo. I started with the excellent notes and drawings made by Grant Cox and Christina Triantafillou especially for as after a couple of us on the Portus MOOC started modelling building five. From that I created a Lego model of a single warehouse space – a guess a “Magazzino”. The drawings suggest that along one range, these were mostly of consistent shape and size, so having made one magazzino, it was quite easy to make two by stacking one on top of the other and then 22, by placing eleven stacks side my side. My fiddling with real Lego last earlier this week had prepared me with an idea about how I’d clip each unit to the next. Even with virtual Lego its important to make sure it all slots into space.

Then I created a staircase, which, according to the drawings, is a little narrower than a magazzino. THEN I created the entrance large tunnel, which on reflection, I think I should have incorporated into the construction of the staircase. But then that’s the beauty of modelling, trying it out helps you understand more about how it fits together.

Sometimes it also raises more questions while answering others. On Grant’s drawings, the front (courtyard) opening of the tunnel is depicted under and single arched opening for the upper story. But on the rear facade, the opening is depicted spanning two arches of the upper story. Is this an error? Given that Grant has been doing this stuff longer than me, I think not, but I’d love to have a look at the data upon which he based his drawings.

Anyway, though I’d like to work a bit more on that staircase/entrance arch conjunction, I’m ready to share where I’ve got to so far. And it might be as far as I’m able to go. LDD was getting very sticky as I attached the 22 magazzini to the staircase/arch model, and slow almost to to the point of unresponsive when I tried to put the other twenty units onto the other side of the arch. For the last few hours my poor computer has been trying to make a building guide, which would tell me how many real bricks I’d need, and also allow me to share the model, but its already fallen over once and started again. So I don’t hold out much hope!

Anyway, here are a few screen-grabs I made before I issued that fateful instruction.

Click to view slideshow.

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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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