Pathways through the objects

As we prepare to present Sync/O at SIGGRAPH this week, we’re thinking about pathways through the site and how we guide people when we present on the work. We most often recommend two approaches:

1. Discovery-based pathway:
By design, there are many ways into the site and therefore many ways into understanding this dance and one great way to approach it is just to beginning clicking on images that interest you and follow your own path of discovery. As you do so, notice that every object includes a PROCESS CATALOG tab (on the left hand side of your screen). The process catalogs are small samplings of the hundreds of design ideas that we made during our research. They show you the visual thinking that goes into this kind of work and include comments from some of the makers. Every object also has key terms and a video of dance, and many include commentary and other features. You can click on the RELATED OBJECTS tab to move horizontally or you can always return home and let the objects slide by until you see something you like. Once you know what you’re looking for, the VIEW ALL OBJECTS link at the bottom of your screen will show you all twenty objects so you can easily get back to something you like.

2. Linear pathway starting with the dance
If you are someone who prefers a more linear pathway through the information then we suggest you begin where we began the project and that is with THE DANCE itself. In this full score interface you can view the dance in full, see our data as a moving score, hear commentary, and link to objects that will give you more visual information on specific aspects of structure in the dance. From THE DANCE we suggest you watch the ALLIGNMENT ANNOTATIONS and CUE ANNOTATIONS and click through some of the movement themes in the MOVEMENT MATERIAL INDEX. You’ll get a good feel for the dance and its systems of organization from those four objects. From there maybe you’ll want to look at some of the more abstract objects such as the DATA FAN or try out the tools, a user favorite is the COUNTERPOINT TOOL.

And finally, for some textual description, the introductory essays–the Dance, the Data, the Objects–explain each of the project’s core elements in more detail (the essays are available as pages here in the blog and under the introduction tab when you’re on the site).

These are a few ideas to start with, let us know if you’d like to hear more about a particular object or perhaps you have a pathway you’d suggest for others to follow. -nzshaw