Hi, hypernarrative is a blog by Wilbert Baan about Art, Media and Technology with a focus on interactive storytelling. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Google or Netvibes. I'll post a few messages a week. Thanks for visiting!

I love Europort, the industrial part of the Netherlands near Rotterdam. There is a small kitesurfing beach in Oostvoorne and to get there you have to drive through Europort with its chemical plants.

For a long time I didn’t know why I was so attracted to these industrialized areas. I even had a job interview at Shell once (the grey/brown office at 02:03 in the video). I thought I would really like the job, now I don’t think I would have liked the job, I would have liked the view.

The aesthetics of functional design peak in and around a chemical factory. All the tubes, lights, steel structures and storage spaces. Everything is designed with a function, you don’t design things because they look nice, it just happens to look like this because it needs to.

I think the methods of research used in the design of structures could very well be applied when designing interactive applications (read something of OMA/AMO). It is based on designing functionality for people and products. When this is good aesthetics will follow.

The last months I have been working on Volkskrantreizen.nl. This is a new travel community website (and weekly travel section) for the newspaper where I work.

The website is a blog/diary/community made for stories about traveling. Every entry you write is connected to a spot, tips and tags. The countries, spots and tags have overview pages generated from the content within the community. The tips you give are connected to places.

For example if you like sailing you can search for stories and spots about sailing. If you would like to go to Barcelona you can look for tips and stories about Barcelona. You can find other people with similar interests and learn from them or ask questions.

The website uses Google Maps for different purposes. You can start your own travel diary and see all the spots you have written about on your personal Google Map. For video we also use a Google service. You just upload your file and everything is taken care of by Google Video.

Each entry you write is connected to a spot, place, city and country. The map connected to this place will automatically show up on top of your story giving your story an extra dimension.

These drawings from Kunst-Formen der Natur, by Ernst Haeckel are amazing. The drawings are from 1898 and someone uploaded the entire book to Flickr. All because the contents of this book belong to the public domain. Maybe I can’t enjoy the physical book, I can enjoy watching these drawings and also use one to write a little posting about the public domain.

Recently I have read a few novels about the Cold War and as you probably know this war was all about NOT sharing any information or knowledge. Access to-, or sharing information and knowledge are vital to peace. The more we share the less secrets we have, the less we have to guess.

In one of his podcasts, the Dutch history writer Geert Mak (in dutch) refers to the first simple computer that was build in the Second World War and that the inventor could not tell anyone about because of national security (defense strategy). After the war he had to return to his old job and society had to wait until someone else invented a sort of computer, again!

There are no long term benefits in withholding information or knowledge.

Zoom photo

Zoom photo

Back from a great holiday driving through Belgium, France, Andorra and Spain and living out of the trunk.