Stewart Brand in his shipping container

Working on the digital tabletop got me thinking back to Stewart Brand talking about how he constructed How Buildings Learn:

...the most important tool for organizing projects is lots of horizontal space and immediate-to-hand storage…

To that end he uses a shipping container with steel sheets to pin photos to and "raw plywood work surfaces and shelves. It was heaven".

Reading this I immediately felt the pull of that kind of space, and continue to want to explore what a digital version of it could be.

I think you can feel this approach in How Buildings Learn where there's a lot more attention to how photos are arranged on pages. Not in a "design-y" way but a sort of dense, hand-made way. In that it also benefits from being designed for a certain page-size (no responsive reflows to worry about).

Sources

My copy was lost in a "dog peed on the lowest shelf of the bookshelf" incident, so these quotes are from Austin Kleon's post, which includes a bonus reference to Hockney's art wall.