Website: http://www.msa.ac.uk/mac/london/

The controversy

The stadium for the 2012 London Olympic Games is in an advanced state of construction, having begun to acquire its physical appearance in May of 2008. However, while it is certainly set to fulfil its primary role as an athletics venue in summer 2012, the controversy concerning the future post-Games life of the stadium is most assuredly ongoing, thereby changing the idea of how the stadium will be situated with respect to community concerns, sport in the London area, and the future of large-scale sporting events.

We mapped this ongoing controversy surrounding the design and development of the stadium and visualised the controversy in terms of actors, concerns, and intensity. Our mapping is based on a study of how the debate is reflected in the media and aims to recreate as closely as possible the dynamics of the controversy through the looking glass of newspaper articles, architectural journals, and construction magazines. This is augmented by information derived from the actors’ homepages, links and affiliations, roles and responsibilities, and dates of involvement in the debate by reference both to media attention and appointment start and end dates.

Our questions:

• How can we map the changing dynamics of actors’ relationships in an ongoing debate?
• How can we visualise and analyse the versatile course of actions in an ongoing controversy?

Figure 1 – Screenshot of the London Olympics website front page

The Actors

Elucidating the roles of actors in the debate, both human and non-human, are the actor pages linked from the three menus located under the primary menu.

Table 1 - List of principle actors

For the individual human actors, there is further information about their institutional affiliations, appointment dates, and primary concerns. For non-human actors and institutions, different data is recorded such as public or private domain for institutions and a generic “type” for non-human actors. Where applicable, statements are provided through actual quotations to represent an actor’s primary viewpoint or interests in the controversy.

Figure 2 – Actor pages

In addition, on the bottom left corner of every actor’s page, there is a clickable link to related articles connecting to a list of the primary sources, sortable by: Author, Title, Type, Year.

Figure 3 – Bibliography

Multiactorial relationships

A diagram shows the dynamic relationships between the three types of actors, the nature of their connections (design and institutional influences or associations) and the particular actors’ concerns.

Figure 4 – Actor Diagram

A fragment from the diagram:

Figure 5 – Legend for Actor-Diagram

The chronology

The chronology page features the primary moments in the design and construction stages of the stadium through the use of diagrams depicting primary actors, concerns, and their connections to each other. Four stages are selected in the project’s history visualised as nodes and explicated through interactive diagrams featuring text and diagrammatic depictions of the relationships between the primary actors.

Crucial nodes

Figure 6 – Chronology page overview

Junctions

The diagrams used in each stage (when clicking on the blue-coloured node) are derived stylistically from the overall actor-diagram, located on the “Actor-Diagram” page. Every diagram focuses on particular junctions of trajectories of different concerns and actors; the dynamics of the controversy is captured through a number of stories that can be told when untangling every node in the diagram.
Example:

Figure 7 – Individual chronology section

Albena Yaneva
Research and web design: Liam Heaphy
Diagram design: Nick Dunn and Ambrose Gillick

Attachments of PlatformLondonCaseStudy

I	Attachment	Action	Size	Date	Who	Comment	Attribute
jpg	actor-diagram_key.jpg	manage	30.0 K	04 Oct 2009 - 18:56	Liam Heaphy
jpg	actor-diagram_small.jpg	manage	63.3 K	04 Oct 2009 - 18:56	Liam Heaphy		h
jpg	actor_johnson.jpg	manage	94.2 K	04 Oct 2009 - 18:43	Liam Heaphy
png	actordiagram_full.png	manage	1353.9 K	04 Oct 2009 - 18:47	Liam Heaphy
jpg	chronology.jpg	manage	44.2 K	04 Oct 2009 - 18:38	Liam Heaphy
jpg	final_design.jpg	manage	67.5 K	04 Oct 2009 - 18:38	Liam Heaphy
jpg	front_page.jpg	manage	109.1 K	04 Oct 2009 - 18:38	Liam Heaphy
jpg	sources_johnson.jpg	manage	100.9 K	04 Oct 2009 - 18:38	Liam Heaphy
jpg	table.jpg	manage	82.3 K	04 Oct 2009 - 18:38	Liam Heaphy