I was thinking about how the research gallery could act as a source and sink for creative work. There could be a flow where people
- gather relevant material from the gallery, onto a workspace such as a desk
- arrange the material to think about it and draw connections
- compose and extend material to create new work
- add the new material back into the gallery.
Gathering
You could grab a pseudo-screen and laser pointer from a stack, and browse the gallery. A lasered item would show up on the pseudo-screen. If you want to work with that project, toss the pseudo-screen on the desk and grab another one.
Alternatively, lasered items could print out a token:
The project could then be seen by placing the token near a piece of paper on the desk. (And/or pseudo-screens could be "iconified" into tokens, and then reused.)
Arranging
The tokens can be sorted into piles, etc, and assigned to pieces of paper to view/interact with the content.
Composing and extending
If programs are made of tokens, perhaps a project can be "view source"d by microrobots or a token table assembling the program. Below, we see the project token (printed out from the gallery), the source code tokens, and the paper showing the running output.
Because the two projects are side-by-side, they can easily be remixed -- parts of one project can be brought over into the other project.
Adding
An arrangement of tokens, with annotations, could be captured as its own project, and added to the gallery or a binder.
