Stephen Cairns

Using an Interactive Dymaxion Map to Convey Research Information through Visualization

Visualization is a medium for communicating information to and between people with different background knowledge. The availability of digital tools and the progress of visualization technologies enhance the potential of visual representation. But along with it, issues emerge as how to choose appropriate forms of visualization to make results generally understandable. This paper presents our approach to convey information on research conducted at ETH Zurichs Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) to a broad target audience through visualization. We first carry out a requirements analysis for the visualization task. The results of the analysis are elaborated and implemented by means of a software prototype that employs an interactive Dymaxion Map to visualize the information given in our case.

Urban-rural systems in Asia: A research agenda

These brief notes outline a research agenda for hybrid urban-rural regions in Asia. It emerges from work being undertaken by the Urban-Rural Systems team at the ETH Zurich’s Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. All cities have their hinterlands of one kind or another. We are interested in the hinterlands of cities surrounded by tropical, wet-rice agriculture. Such hinterlands are typical of many parts of Asia, and they have very specific ecological, economic and demographic characteristics, which mean they interact with nearby urban centres in distinctive ways. Most notably, wet-rice agriculture supports relatively high population densities with fine-grained plot patterns. When urbanisation processes interact with such areas, the rural does not immediately give way to the urban and instead a hybrid rural-urban typology emerges. Sometimes dubbed desakota landscapes (Indonesian for ‘village’ and ‘city’), they are neither strictly urban nor rural in character, but a mixture of both.

Asian Ethical Urbanism: A Radical Postmodern Perspective and Asian Alterity: With Special Reference to Architecture and Urbanism through the Lens of Cultural Studies

(2010). Asian Ethical Urbanism: A Radical Postmodern Perspective and Asian Alterity: With Special Reference to Architecture and Urbanism through the Lens of Cultural Studies. Journal of Architectural Education: Vol. 63, No. 2, pp. 166-167.