While you can only read the first two paragraphs of my Scientific American cubesats article on their Web site, another article of mine that came out today, "Thinking Big: Large Media, Creativity, and Collaboration [pdf]," is available in its entirety. Here's the opening:

My subject is the relationship between space and media. I focus on the role space and media play in supporting collaborative work and the opportunities that emerging technologies present to reshape collaborative-intensive endeavors for the space/media relationship.

We normally treat spaces and media as different things, but our interaction with such communicative media as newspapers, paintings, books, and maps has an important embodied, physical dimension to it.

To understand these space and media interactions I examine how large-scale media, such as wall-sized maps and floor-to-ceiling whiteboards, have a role in supporting collaboration. I have considered three examples of paper spaces: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game, emergency tabletop exercises, and expert workshops conducted by futurists. I note that these schematic visualizations invite participation, annotation, and reinterpretation by users as opposed to passive consumption. I also highlight the importance that physically navigating paper spaces supports the communication of what Sandy Pentland calls "honest signals," rapid negotiation, and thus the generation of common knowledge. Finally, I show how in the near-future we will be able to design digital tools that better support collaboration.

Actually, the whole issue is very interesting:

We open our third volume of PJIM articles under the rubric of mapping writ large. Every article deals, in some manner, with knowledge extraction and the power and informativeness of visual context. The first article invokes a mapping exercise that exploits publicly-published content (Twitter, Flickr) that reveals social networks, activity, and trends via the paradigm of topography. This is followed by how gameplay is analyzed through the mapping of player data utilizing meta-interfaces: interfaces that analyze usability respecting multiple categories of play. Our third article considers the mapping of consumer feedback through "qualitative synthesis"; again, getting the big-picture through visually organizing methods. We conclude with content-aspects of scale and media with an in-depth review of how large surfaces, paper or otherwise, provide informational context that small screen devices cannot emulate; the treatise should be required reading for every interface designer.

Incredibly, that last sentence seem to be talking about me. The editors must have been desperately tired when they put this thing to bed!