Powers of Ten – Charles & Ray Eames

We watched Powers of Ten, by Charles and Ray Eames, in class today. It’s a brief video (~ 8 minutes) that visually demonstrates about 40 different views of the same scene, ranging from outer space to the molecular level.

The video begins with a close up of a man and woman on a picnic blanket. In the first half, the view of the scene zooms out by a power of 10 each ten seconds. So the initial scene becomes the central square of the screen, with the surrounding area (equivalent to nine more squares) is of the park on the perimeter of their blanket.

The video continues to fluidly zoom out of the scene until we see a broad cross section of outer space.

We then zoom back down to the picnic, reviewing each cross section in reverse order. At that point, the video begins to zoom into the hand of the man on the blanket, following the same format, until we get to the nucleus of an atom.

The use of a square outline at each 10-second point allows the viewer to position themselves in the continually-changing space, and emphasizes the ‘slices’ that are determined by the time limitation. If each slice were not connected by moving video, the viewer would have lost their sense of being a part of the zooming space, and the effect would have been lost. The video is an extremely effective way of conveying almost incomprehensible concepts like 100,000,000,000,0…

The increases and decreases in levels of detail parallel's Richard Saul Wurman's ideas about the progression from Data to Information to Knowledge to Wisdom. The more precise and limited one's view, the closer the content is to Data. The more broad and inclusive one's view, the closer one approaches to Wisdom.

I've personally always been driven to find the broadest, most inclusive understanding of a topic - both the data and knowledge - before progressing forward. This video really put a 'face with a name' for me, which I'm already finding useful in visualizing my design process.

I've observed on more than one occasion that if I do not arrive at a comprehensive view of a problem before I begin designing, I will mentally limp along right through until the end. I MUST be able to see both the parts and the whole before I begin to manipulate them - aka Use Big Paper!

2/07/2005