Assignment: Capture relationships between objects at different scales.
The motivation behind this assignment was, in part, to build an intuition for size, scale and relationships between objects and space. We will need to hold onto this intuition when shrinking down to micro-scale. Something I found interesting while doing this assignment, which I suspect will return when we study bioinformatics techniques: as the scale between objects increased, I began approximating the density of objects in a given area rather than precisely measure the relationship.
Initially, at 1:10 scale, it was easy to measure an exact relationship between my chosen objects, books, to one another. As I moved to a sewer grate grid, I could count the rows and columns, calculate the number of rectangles in the grid, then find the relationship between one rectangle and the whole grid.
But once I got to the tiles in the ITP foyer with irregularly-shaped specks as their building blocks, I began approximating the number of specks in a given area (a rectangle), then approximating the number of rectangles in a tile, then counting the number of tiles in the foyer before arriving at a calculation. When scaling bacterial activity from a sample to a real location, I imagine we will need to do something similar.
In the realm of counting
1:10 // Height of 1 book : Height of stack of books
1:600 // 1 rectangle in this Brooklyn sidewalk sewer grate : ~600 rectangles in the entire grate
In the realm of approximation
1: 1000 // 1 oval in on the back of a chair in an ITP conference room: 1000+ ovals in the entire mesh
When I refer to “specks” in the next two examples, I mean one of the light-colored irregular shapes in the tiles below.
1:100000 // 1 speck : 9 tiles
I counted ~100 specks in a rectangular area, then approximated the number of rectangles in 1 tile. I estimated that there were ~16,000 specks per tile. So roughly 1 speck in 1 tile compared against 6.25 floor tiles would give a 1:100000 relationship.
1:1000000 // 1 speck in 1 tile: ~63 tiles (there are 320 tiles, so 1 speck: whole floor is about a 1:6000000 relationship!)
