Jonathan Healey

DESIGN PROBLEM
The Internet is a great paradox for humanity: an unparalleled boon for virtual communication, but often a corrosive bust for physical communities. As access to online resources expands, so too does an isolated digital world existing adjacent to our physical world. Experience within this digital world is constrained by its highly filtered and anonymous nature, thanks in part to predictive algorithms and online avatars.

And yet the potential of instant access to the world’s collective knowledge, opinion, and memory continues to inspire demand for more, not less, “connected experience.”

DESIGN OBJECTIVE
Introduce value to the mechanism of community elections, the ultimate expression of a physical community’s collective competence, through an intervention combining digital and physical resources in a public environment.

The target audience and beneficiaries of this intervention include individual citizens, communities, and institutions alike.

These proposal aims to simultaneously make our experience between digital and physical worlds more connected, more seamless, and more human.
 

George Washington University
Advanced Methods of Visual Representation
Exhibition Design Graduate Program
example work by Emily Lin '17

"The history of the theater is the history of the transfiguration of the human form. It is the history of man as the actor of physical and spiritual events, ranging from naivete to reflection, from naturalness to artifice."

Oskar Schlemmer, “Man and Art Figure”
from, The Theater of the Bauhaus

Forgot your access card? Don't want to install readers at remote locations? This Mobile Pass application lets you unlock commercial doors from your phone.

This product continues to be a market disruptor in the historically slow-moving commercial physical access control industry.

This digital credential offering introduces a new concept to the market: historically seen as a tradeoff, enhancing user convenience can accompany system security. 

Winner of the 2018 Security Industry Association New Product Showcase Award for Access Control Software & Controllers.

This new breed of access control hardware is prepared for the next generation of data analytics, location intelligence, and mobile-first environments its customers are building. Featuring a variety of modern and legacy RF sensors, the device can function as a standalone or networked system.

Historically a technology "hidden" from view, this new device allows for new use cases that would place it among other visible systems, such as internet routers or light sensors. The form responds to this challenge through a subtle curved surface, moulded edges, and two LED communicators.

With Brivo Systems
Role: Design Lead - enclosure, packaging, customer experience

business strategy / user experience / product design

Channel vendors had a problem maintaining their own resources for effectively selling product and supporting customers. This new portal brings together live customer details, resource library, and other critical data in to a single online resource. The design process provoked transformative thinking across the company's many silo-ed business processes, integrating them into a single coordinated platform for the first time.

How will new technologies change the way the average person interacts with physical security systems? How will we manage and protect our identities in these environments?

Moderated final panel of the 2015 Cloud+ Conference, by Security Systems News. Discussion with industry leaders Mayank Uphadiyay, Director of Engineering at Google, and Seth Page, COO of Unikey. 

http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/blog/microsoft-google-cloud
http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/blog/live-cloud

With the Omnimuseum project, "Ubiquitous Museology" charrette, organized by Michael Burns. Teams included designers, architects, curators, anthropologists, students. The Fieldbook team went from problem definition to high-res prototype in less than five hours.

Problem:
How do we activate the everyday experience of an agrarian community in a way way that grows value in the experience, understanding, and productivity of its constituents and visitors?

Proposal focuses on exposing the interactions and performances around the local corn industry.

Actors include:

• Farmers
• field sensors (see "Rachel")
• Mutant Hunters (high school kids hired to cull deviant stalks)
• Visitors (people flying over, driving through, or engaging online from external communities).

Each actor maintains their own Facebook-like social media feed, reporting activity, situation, likes/dislikes, and conversations.

Objective to facilitate the communication and structural relationships within the local community, and create opportunities to learn and share with other communities, researchers, policy makers, and the greater public.

This is about prototyping an artificial intelligence powered visitor management and planning interface for corporate suites in stadiums.

This front desk kiosk app replaces clipboards sign-in sheets with the salesforce.com’s platform and a patented commercial access management API. The digitized sign-in process allows visitors to log in to an office with their social identity, alerts hosts when their guests arrive, supports badge printing and provisions access to physical doors leading to restricted areas or simply the hallway bathroom.

With BrivoLabs

Watch the Event Summary Video

In collaboration with Corcoran College of Art + Design, Brivo Labs, and Top Coder.

This is a 3 ­day design­a­thon in which technology experts, students, and faculty worked together in teams to investigate the relationship between identity-­based technology, the built environment and visitor experience at museums like the Corcoran Gallery of Art. 

Teams focused on three experiences in the physical environment: the museum entry, retail, and gallery.

Team Entry

How can a Museum open its doors to its 21st Century communities? This team focuses on the spatial­programmatic sequence from the 17th Street sidewalk outside the main Gallery entry, through the security foyer, to the existing ticket-­info desk experience. This includes situational elements such as the building facade & main portal, security check, and initial orientation to the gallery and its contents. Consider, too, proposed identity changes that could make Gallery admission free to the public. 

Team Shop: Museum Retail

How can a shopping environment directly support the museum’s mission of cultural enrichment? This team focuses on the spatial­programmatic situation of the museum’s retail experience. The existing boundaries of this venue should assume the footprint of the existing Museum Store. The museum shop might often be considered the most direct, and sometimes only, interaction an audience has with the cultural assets of the institution. How can social technology further develop this relationship? 

Team Exhibit: Gallery 31 ­ Corcoran Legacy & Diaspora

This team focuses on the spatial­-programmatic situation of the museum’s Gallery 31. Gallery 31 is isolated from the main galleria and primary audience circulation area, and features the potential for its own direct access from the street. It typically features self­contained exhibits in rapid rotation, ranging from traveling international shows to student presentations. Consider, too, the current proposal for the Corcoran collection, and the notion of a Corcoran Legacy Gallery that engages its future diaspora state. 

The case of the 19th century drawing machines illustrates that advances in design knowledge and instrumental knowledge are often complementary, even symbiotic: one enables the understanding and expansion of the other.

— Andrew J. Witt, “A Machine Epistemology in Architecture” 

Students translated an historical ornament to a vector pattern, then to a physical assemblage. Use of a retail-scale electronic cutting tool required exacting precision; students examined the craft of their drawings through a quasi-bas-relief model, introducing material dimensionality to the analysis. Defining the compositional layers to construct a 3-dimensional expression of the drawing necessitated numerous revisions to students’ initial interpretations. 

Corcoran College of Art & Design
with Sydney M. Luken

Presented at IDEC National Conference, 2014

Shodekeh - in collaboration with a nationally renowned beatboxer and a contemporary dancer, Corcoran students re-presented the traditional museum experience to an audience of both willing and unsuspecting visitors. The main tactic co-opted the “guided tour” experience and injected a sequence of improvised performance art as live interpretation of objects throughout the galleries. The interpretative performance created new contexts for the collection, choreographed for the casual viewer a new physical experience of the museum, and even produced new cultural artifacts complementary to the collection. These byproducts included the videos of the performances themselves, as well as a “dynamic drawing” that was created live as a reflection upon the preceding experience engaging each of the objects.

As seen in Apartment Therapy (main house and carriage house) and Urban Turf.

This thesis pursued simultaneous research paths. Presented here are two interweaving courses.

EXPLORATION OF A SPECULATIVE METHODOLOGY

Reviving the etymology of “pattern” as the co-joining of autonomous pieces to create form and volume in dress-making, a conceptual study of pattern and seams sought to reveal non-architectonic structural relationships and to develop an implicit methodology that engages these structures in the design of living culture.

An initial investigation studying the morphology of joined surfaces produced a collection of versioned models describing 378 unique complex surface conditions. These models provided a hypothetical data set that lead to the discovery of a hybrid haptic, visual, and graphic analysis of the forms’ internal structures.

The research presents a method of analysis that could address complex spatial conditions through non-linear formal strategies of pattern identification and system-based seam tactics.

The proposed framework was tested against a proposed architectural agenda that sought to merge historic patterns of human activity and site condition with speculative patterns of event, process, and technology innovation.

DESIGN TACTICS FOR
THE QUALITATIVE EXPERIENCES OF PLACE

With an agenda of preserving the continuity of living culture through a strategy of re-making, an architectural intervention proposed to introduce contemporary industrial facilities to an historic factory complex in a picturesque New England town.

Situated along the Farmington River since 1826, the original Collins Company axe factory developed around its innovative manipulation of water resources into metal-forging power. World demand for their revolutionary edged tools brought road and rail through the campus, while the town of Collinsville grew intimately connected to the integrity of the business and the “legitimus” of its products.

The proposed Connecticut Global Fuel Cell Center sought to re-purpose the existing campus, vacated by the Collins Company in 1966, with an industrial social-production model. This public-private venture relies on the participation of citizens in the research and production of new power-supply commodities.

The design strategy culminated with the re-orientation of water flowage and operational paths from their linear Fordist system to an innovative system of return-cycles and cross-paths characteristic of contemporary network systems. Extant traces of built environment and historic processes contributed to the identification of existing frameworks which were re-framed or transformed with new programmatic conditions, site remediation, and contemporary technologies.

Montage is typically defined as a drawing that is made of an assemblage of different forms in a composition. In architecture, an idea is also communicated through a method of assemblage. Animation can also be considered as a type of temporal montage, in that within montage are co-present layers of line and surface, but in a temporal montage, the connections the lines make and the characteristics of a surface can change over time. The form of animation becomes a polymorphism, a combination of ideas and/or operands that create at least two or more related results that may or may not be immediately recognized as related (Eisenstein). 

In architecture we value multiplicitous phenomenon as symptomatic of valuable and interesting complexities. Presented here are two works that endeavor to uncover such potentials through a process involving digital modeling and digital animation. By compositionally translating both the media of animation and the media of static image, they seek to discover a path through traditional architectural conventions towards the craft of place-making.

While a rich mise-en-scene can produce a profound experience of cinematic space, ultimately the sequence of cinema is restrained to the linear progression of a single frame, often charged with potent temporal-spatial conditions that are not explicitly framed. The translation experiment presented here leverages the unique processing capabilities of a variety of digital modes to explore those latent experiential qualities and re-present them as a physical spatial device. 

Digital Conceptions has provided an opportunity to build upon a study originating from Arch670 Advanced Digital Applications, in which an original film clip was studied through a series of speculative analyses.  This study re-presents the original work’s animated compositions as a series of three-dimensional forms. An examination of these volumes as unrolled surfaces leads to a manual exploration of a new three-dimensional assemblage of the original sequence. New questions arose as the sequence was physically constructed, addressing the connection between each of the discrete surfaces and the potential of their new configuration.

This latest iteration returns to the analysis of the discrete elements. Using parametric modeling and digital fabrication methods, the goal is to re-identify the discrete sequence of the film while simultaneously re-presenting a new multi-dimensional formal organization. This time, the end-product is tasked with the program of occupying a constrained space and the necessity of an inherent structural logic. 

The concept for this public home of over 10,000 archived textiles focuses on a structural and conceptual "scaffold" to support the complex service of the institution's mission. The collection's extreme sensitivity to light combined with the need to reduce the facility’s ecological footprint on the sensitive watershed site, suggested in the design a subterranean exhibition space.

This strategy produced a parallactic massing, and thereby framing a variety of outdoor space for programmed and unprogrammed activity. The above ground facility grows out of its concrete foundation with a concrete-reinforced steel system of similarly-sized component’s rigidly connected to narrow spanning and cantilevered members. A self-supporting curtain-wall system extends its integral sun baffles beyond the facility’s glazed envelope to create the monumental presence of the two-sided wall in the landscape, and forms a woven metallic alley at the museum’s eastward entry.

A diaphanous wall running down the central lightwell greets visitors and guides guests as they move between levels. This wall bends to become ceiling in the exhibition area below.