Mutating atlas device

This project was carried out as a part of REHOGAR X PLUS. Open devices, a practical and cooperative research project lasting 40 days that approached the idea of design as an open format and resource. Starting from these two perspectives, the project served as a point of unity between experimental and collaborative investigation that traced historical references through four designs. It also examined real projects to anchor them in the present, explored their transformative possibilities up close and speculated about new contexts of living and future paths in the practice of design.

The idea behind the Mutating Atlas device is to generate a cartographic system showing all the projects and initiatives, both national and international, that have participated in the ten editions of REHOGAR Open design & Reuse

This cartography system displays two different levels of information with complementary maps: the conceptual level, that represents and visualises the REHOGAR project’s key concepts or categories, and the geographic level, with filters to help in the search process.

Participants developed a work process that can be divided into two parts:

• identifying and defining a system of categories that allow us to explain the nature of the projects, and
• formalising different cartographic categories (both analogue and digital) to describe and represent the richness, complexity and composition of the projects.

One the one hand, an Interactive Map was developed based on the Leaflet open source JavaScript library. This map harvests data directly from the REHOGAR website and marks different projects at their geographic locations. It also includes a side menu with filters based on the characteristics of the projects in order to facilitate the search process.

On the other hand, the nature of each project is depicted through an adaptation of the ball-and-stick molecular model used to represent chemical substances. Thus, the new model converts the projects into chemical substances visualised as category spheres (usually used to represent atoms) connected by lines that represent the bonds or relationships between them.

Finally, what we call Conceptual Territories were developed in order to visualise the key concepts or characteristics of the participating projects of each edition. The team decided that these category areas or territories would be drawn, given the quantitative nature of the information about the number of projects participating in each edition and their respective categories.

The entire development process and a recap of all of the sessions is documented on the REHOGAR X PLUS Wiki.

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Coordination of the workgroup:

Susanna Tesconi — Designer of learning environments and researcher.
Makea Tu Vida — provocateurs and promoters