Tuesday, October 04, 2005
A brief overview of the history of the cubes
I am eagerly awaiting to hear that my new hosting arrangements are ready for the Light Cubes web site - as for several months I have not had sufficient space to upload what now amounts to about 25 megabytes of web pages and images - with a good amount more in various stages of development.
It has been almost nine years since I first became aware of the existence of the virtual light and colour cubes. It was in November 1996, a few months after Habitat II, the Second UN Conference on Human Settlements, a short time after Dr. Wally N'Dow had asked me to come up with ideas for a Journey to Istanul + 5 - the five year review of Habitat II - and he had suggested using colours to highlight the roles of the many non-governmental partners whose role would be vital in creating sustainable cities and adequate shelter for all.
Until then, I had made very little use of colours on the web sites I had developed - including what had become the official web site for Habitat II. Much of my attention was on the role of participatory web sites - and more generally of participatory online processes - and the opportunities they could offer to strengthen and expand broad-based opportunities for participation in global - as well as local and national - policy and decision-making processes.
Meanwhile a colleague - Mike Gurstein - with whom I had worked in exploring the uses of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) - had been preparing a conference in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia for which provisions were being made for real time remote participation in the conference using IRC, and I noticed that the conference web site incorporated tables in which the cells had different colours.
This inspired me to play around with variationss of the background colour - using <td background="#rrggbb"> for the various cells - and created a number of pages that I used to explore some spectra created by systematically varying one or other of the r, g and b parameters.
More later.
It has been almost nine years since I first became aware of the existence of the virtual light and colour cubes. It was in November 1996, a few months after Habitat II, the Second UN Conference on Human Settlements, a short time after Dr. Wally N'Dow had asked me to come up with ideas for a Journey to Istanul + 5 - the five year review of Habitat II - and he had suggested using colours to highlight the roles of the many non-governmental partners whose role would be vital in creating sustainable cities and adequate shelter for all.
Until then, I had made very little use of colours on the web sites I had developed - including what had become the official web site for Habitat II. Much of my attention was on the role of participatory web sites - and more generally of participatory online processes - and the opportunities they could offer to strengthen and expand broad-based opportunities for participation in global - as well as local and national - policy and decision-making processes.
Meanwhile a colleague - Mike Gurstein - with whom I had worked in exploring the uses of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) - had been preparing a conference in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia for which provisions were being made for real time remote participation in the conference using IRC, and I noticed that the conference web site incorporated tables in which the cells had different colours.
This inspired me to play around with variationss of the background colour - using <td background="#rrggbb"> for the various cells - and created a number of pages that I used to explore some spectra created by systematically varying one or other of the r, g and b parameters.
More later.
