Wedding digital with traditional
During a crowded reception at Harvard’s Arts @ 29 Garden, Travis K. Bost, M.Des.S. ’12, reached toward a small shelf of books and removed a green volume. Choosing a book happens all the time at a University with more than 70 libraries, 17 million volumes, and miles of shelves. But it was also a larger act: Bost had designed the shelf, which was fitted with a microcontroller and photocells, to show information about the book being removed. When he picked out William Cronon’s “Nature’s Metropolis,” a computer screen flashed related information, including naming books by the same author. Bost’s invention, which is still in the “proof of concept” stage, was on display at openLAB_Summer, an Aug. 9 showcase sponsored by metaLAB (at) Harvard, a Kirkland Street collaborative research laboratory under the umbrella of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Organizers called the dozen offerings on display “summer projects and propositions, experiments...