The 25 Participants to Hands on Barcelona's Informational Membrane

On Saturday October 24, Lift lab will run the workshop “Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane” at Citilab in Cornellà (Barcelona) in the last day of Urban Labs. Our first workshops that aimed at discussing the new practices (see Round table on Real-Time Cities at MIT) and the visions and issues (see The Design of the Hybrid City of the Near Future at Lift09) behind the concept of hybrid cities. This time, we will try to go beyond abstract discussions and far-fetched visions. The 25 participants will focus on the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona and try to sketch near-future scenarios with datasets and infrastructures existing in city. The goals will be to understand a contemporary urban software infrastructures and explore the implications (trade-offs, opportunities and concerns) in the data they generate. With Nicolas Nova, we will use these upcoming days to finalize the format of the workshop, but we will make an extra effort to ground it on Barcelona’s specific issues (e.g. mobility, infrastructure, tourism, gentrification, ecology …) and their related datasets.

Once again, we are particularly proud with the mix of talents and pioneers that will join us.

Prior to the workshop, Adam Greenfield will present his takes on networked cities and hopefully also provoke us on the data networked object generate (see Toward urban systems design). Following-up on the same theme, Ben Cerveny will most certainly take some altitude to discuss design research on urban computational systems (see VURB). We could not think a better pair of inspiring speakers to provoke the rest of the participants who for the main part, are pioneers practically involved with the concepts of digital/hybrid/data/networked/sentient cities:

Mario Ballesteros, independent editor, researcher who I met in his role of curator for the Design Hub in Barcelona, is a regular collaborator at Actar Publishers and writes in his own personal research blog, Mañanarama, on the subject of modern architecture in Mexico as a product of failed development.

Joan Batlle, the Head of Innovation and eGovernment International Cooperation Department of the Barcelona City Council, has been leading many projects applying innovative Technology in government processes, including the Intelligent Cities of the Next Generation project.

Anjalika Bose, working currently in Philips Design Probes, as an Ambient Experience Designer, pushing projects in the realm of architectural spaces (see Design Probes).

Cariou Christophe, an independant researcher and founder of Everydatalab who I met at the World Information City conference where he presented an innovative process of mixing quantitative data (anonymous logs of calls, handovers and sms) with user-generated content to map the Fête de la Musique night in Paris.

Jose Luis De Vicente, a cultural researcher and curator. He directs the Visualizar program at Medialab Prado, Madrid.

Domenico Di Siena, architect and researcher, has been reporting his exploration of the relationship between public space and new technologies on Ecosistema urbano and urbanhumano. He is also actively involved in the development of the Meipi collaborative platform.

Juan Freire, PhD in Biology and Professor at the University of Corunna (UDC) where he acted as Dean of the School of Sciences. Now, he is CEO of Fismare, an environmental consulting firm, and fellow of e-Cultura, a firm devoted to cultural management, territorial development and creative processes. I particularly discovered the uniqueness of Juan at Visualizar when he wore his marin biologist hat and drew comparisons between the ocean and urban environment.

Paco González, architect, works and researches at radarq.net, an open study which works and researches on architecture, city and network (see their projects).

Irene Hwang, an architect and editor, co-founder of Constructing Communication. I met Irene in her role of curator for the Design Hub in Barcelona.

Daniel Kaplan, founder and CEO of the Next-Generation Internet Foundation (Fing), a collective and open Research and Development project that focuses on digital innovation and on the interaction between technological progress, business innovation and societal change

Giles Lane, an artist, researcher and teacher, founder and co-director of Proboscis that has widely been inspiring research in locative media and ubiquitous computing since 1994 (mine included), particularly for their capacity to act on the field with citizens and institutions as well as their creative practice that mix fields as diverse as medical research, music, community development, housing and urban regeneration, pervasive computing, mapping and sensor technologies.

Joachim Neumann, researcher at Telefonica Research who has been developing some unique analysis of the Bicing bike-sharing system in Barcelona (see Sensing and Predicting the Pulse of the City through Shared Bicycling)

Thierry Marcou, director of the Villes 2.0 program (e.g. workshops with citizens and local institutions) that led to the development of the Green Watch / Citypulse platform that encourage people’s implication in measuring environmental indices.

Andrés Ortiz, co-founder of Bestiario dedicated to data dynamic representation and to the creation of digital spaces for the collective creation of knowledge. A pioneer in making the complex comprehensible.

José Luis Pajares, designer and research at Univ. Carlos III de Madrid. He has been working on web interfaces web for location and context-aware mobile devices.”Gelo” also organized of the My Map is not your Map workshop.

Yuji Yoshimura, who I am at Barcelona Ecologia, is now an expert in urban mobility and environmental analysis at Center for Innovation in Transport in Barcelona.

Fortunately, we will benefit from the critical thinking of a couple of participants less involved in practical work on informational membranes:

Nurri Kim, artist and archeologist of the moment, who has recently opened Feeder in Helsinki. This exhibition presents a project dedicated to photographing people that I’ve made custom lunches for (including depictions of the meal that I cooked for them and what they would usually have for their lunch) from 2006 to the present.

Rosa Pera, director of Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani. Girona and director of the master degree “Directing and Designing Exhibition Projects” at Elisava School of Design in Barcelona.

Last but not least, I look forward to meet for the first time Albert Cañigueral, Mathieu Favez, Chris Pinchen, and Lillian Shieh!

Why do I blog this: We hope that this workshop offers an alternative venue to the now omnipresent corporate discourses on self-proclaimed “Smart Cities” and government initiatives on “Open Cities“. With its practical approach, anchored on a specific urban context (i.e. Barcelona), this workshop aims at exploring the implications behind these kinds of initiative, understanding what resources are available and their potentials to improve/prejudice near-future cities. Other similar approaches include Dan Hill’s Urban Sensing course and the upcoming Sentient Rotterdam workshop.