Hey ___,
I know you've been curious about some of the stuff I've done at Dynamicland. It might be a while until you can make it out here and visit in person, so I'll try to explain one project of mine, Geokit, from top to bottom, to give you some of the flavor.
I'll discuss what Geokit actually is and what you do with it first, and then I'll explain how it's made. That explanation might help you understand how people make things in Dynamicland in general. It's the kind of detail that isn't covered in the zine or on the Dynamicland website.
I sort of hope you read this, come here yourself, and reimplement Geokit better.
Geokit is a 'kit' or 'library' for building and viewing maps.
One Dynamicland researcher, Luke Iannini, writes about his experiences with Geokit:
The real estate group that owns the building Dynamicland lives in uses their purchasing power to influence the city to improve infrastructure to the underserved areas of Oakland they develop in. The head of this initiative was visiting the space, and she began describing her work while we were gathered around the lunch table, which happened to have Geokit spread across it looking at Oakland. Without breaking the flow of conversation, I dealt the transit card to display the bus routes, and she grabbed the “zoom and pan dial”1 without any instruction to zoom in on a portion of West Oakland — noticing a huge hole in route coverage she’d never seen before where she knew there were tons of working families. We spent the next 15 minutes exploring as she taught me more about the city's transit details than I ever knew I wanted to know. In another case at a party I learned that a person I’d just met grew up in the same city as me (Tucson, AZ) when she searched for it to print it out, and we then bonded deeply over looking at the incredibly stark racial divisions in North and South Tucson that we knew from experience but had never seen laid out in raw data. I’ve never had experiences like these in any other medium. Buildings don’t tend to have detailed racial, transit and elevation maps of every city in the US on the walls. In theory you could pull this data up on your personal iPad, praying there aren’t any embarrassing notifications and hopefully remembering what you were even going to look at by the time you’re past the lock screen looking at 24 rainbow-gradient icons and red bubbles, but I am personally not in the habit of pulling out my devices in the middle of parties. In both of these cases these just-dynamic-enough maps were places at the party, just like the appetizers table and the piano, where people could casually gather, play and converse.
Geokit lives on a shelf when it's not in use, so I'll take it off the shelf and lay it out on a table:
Taking Geokit off the shelf. Some other kits below it; general tools on the right
Inset map (right) shows a zoomed-in view of the dial's location on the big map (left)
Geokit's parts (full size)
