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...but is it art?
Our company is a spinoff of MAYA Design, and we share office space. MAYA Design is populated with many visual designers; this is primarily applied to user interfaces, but it has side effects. Our office space, for example, is very unusual (mostly in a positive way). A lot of thought has gone into the office space, and it generally works. But it can look funny to the uninitiated.
For example, there's the round conference room. And most of the offices are in the "inner core", not by the windows, but they have large windows in them (so having an office gets you daylight but doesn't deprive others). The library is kind of triangular, with bookcases built to fit the space well. The hallways have a nice graceful flow to them.
There are almost no rectangular rooms. My office, for example, is basically a rhombus. (I think that's the correct term. Two parallel walls, one perpendicular to both of them, and one that is straight but at an angle.)
Today an odd thing appeared in one of our so-far-unused rectangular rooms. (We got new space recently and haven't fully populated it. We aren't going to remodel now, but will later, I'm told.) There is now a large plastic cylinder occupying most of this room and running from floor to ceiling. The walls are translucent, so I can see that there is something in the center of the cylinder, but there are notices saying "fragile" and "don't touch", and what I suspect is a door is currently closed, so I have not investigated.
I assume that this is somehow related to some UI testing someone is doing, or something like that. But I can't help thinking that it's really a psychology experiment and there are hidden cameras and microphones in the room.
For example, there's the round conference room. And most of the offices are in the "inner core", not by the windows, but they have large windows in them (so having an office gets you daylight but doesn't deprive others). The library is kind of triangular, with bookcases built to fit the space well. The hallways have a nice graceful flow to them.
There are almost no rectangular rooms. My office, for example, is basically a rhombus. (I think that's the correct term. Two parallel walls, one perpendicular to both of them, and one that is straight but at an angle.)
Today an odd thing appeared in one of our so-far-unused rectangular rooms. (We got new space recently and haven't fully populated it. We aren't going to remodel now, but will later, I'm told.) There is now a large plastic cylinder occupying most of this room and running from floor to ceiling. The walls are translucent, so I can see that there is something in the center of the cylinder, but there are notices saying "fragile" and "don't touch", and what I suspect is a door is currently closed, so I have not investigated.
I assume that this is somehow related to some UI testing someone is doing, or something like that. But I can't help thinking that it's really a psychology experiment and there are hidden cameras and microphones in the room.
no subject
I found out part of what the cylinder is for. They are in the process of mouting lots of cameras on it. The idea is that a person can jump up in the middle and all the cameras will fire, and from that you can construct a "movie" to rotate the image. I don't know *why* they're doing this, but at least now I have the "what".
For this project they wanted the cheapest (I presume digital) cameras they could find, because they need a lot of them. Apparently the cheapest ones are designed for kids, so we now have several hundred dollars' worth of Barbie cameras. That has to have landed us on a weirdos list somewhere...