Science-to-touch is a collection of projects which are aimed at interactive visualization of science. The basic philosophy behind the project is that visualization and interactivity makes science accessible, understandable and fun. Science-to-touch tries to provide high quality content that helps to get in touch with various interesting topics. All projects should be equally creative, informative and accessible.
A particular aim of the science-to-touch project is to create software for touch devices. This software should provide a natural way to interact with the images and imaginations behind scientific concepts.

The first project available in this context is the iOrnament app of Jürgen Richter-Gebert, mathematics professor at the Technical University of Munich. It's a drawing and explanation tool for the 17 crystallographic wallpaper groups. This app provides a highly creative drawing environment for symmetric patterns, as well as lots of interactive background explanations on this topic.

The iOrnament App grew out of a sequence of related programs that were developed over the past 25 years. The oldest ancestor of iOrnament is a program "Ornament" that was written by the author of these pages and presented at the symmetry exhibition in Darmstadt 1986. The program allowed to draw black and white wallpaper pictures at that time on an Atari computer. Inspired by this similar programs were written that ran in various Mathematics exhibitions among them the exhibition ix-quadrat at TU Munich and the German Museum in Munich. The amazing fact about these kind of programs is that everyone starting from a three year old child to an highly intellectual adult can at the same time be creative, have fun with them and learn something about mathematical structures.

http://www.science-to-touch.com/en/iOrnament.html

The V&A has one of the most important collections of engraved ornament in the world. With funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the museum has embarked on a project to catalogue all 24,000 prints, thereby making them available to visitors and scholars online. The collection spans four centuries with designs for everything from jewellery to tomb-stones. Through this blog we will be revealing some of the highlights.

Visit the Blog of Sarah Grant, Curator of Engraved Ornament at the V&A.


http://www.vam.ac.uk/b/blog/engraved-ornament-project