One object, four questions

I am building six institutes, each devoted to one subject: Interfaces, Symbolic, Written, Hanzi Design, Canto and Corpus. Between them they hold 73 exhibitions, and 66 are open. Their ground overlaps. The easy way to run six sites on overlapping ground is to let each one write about whatever is interesting, and link generously between them. It is also the way to end up with six versions of the same page.

The Hong Kong MTR shows the problem. It is a colour code, a list of place names, a set of characters on a wall, and a building that people have to find their way through at speed. Every institute has a claim on it.

So there is a rule. Exactly one page may be titled The Hong Kong MTR. Everywhere else, the title names the question, and the MTR appears as the evidence. The test is one sentence: this object is evidence of —. Each institute has to finish it differently. If it cannot, it does not get a page.

For the MTR, the sentence finishes four ways.

• Symbolic takes colour as a network code: what a line’s colour has to carry when the name is in two scripts.
• Canto takes what the station names remember: the villages and shorelines that were there before the stations.
• Hanzi Design takes three characters, 灣, 角 and 涌 (bay, point, stream), as landscape held inside a word.
• Interfaces takes the interchange: whether a passenger can read it in the time between two trains.

Written was the fifth candidate, and it was dropped. Its slice was too thin, and a thin page is worse than no page: it teaches the reader that the institute has nothing to say.

The rule does three things. It keeps each institute to one subject, which is the first clause of the charter. It stops four sites from publishing the same object and pointing at each other, which looks generous and reads as noise. And it gives the reader four pages that do not repeat, each answering one question in full.

It does not settle everything. Numerals are the open case. Written already has a Hall of Numerals, for their forms. Symbolic has a claim on their notation. Where one ends and the other begins is not yet drawn, so Symbolic has not opened a room.

The charter asks the institutes to publish dimensions and leave the verdicts to the reader. This rule is the same idea applied to the institutes themselves. The object belongs to none of them. Only the questions do.