Posted: February 13th, 2008 | No Comments »
With the availability of video of Adam Greenfield’s talk at Lift Asia last Fall, I could complete some of the notes I took from his Picnic07′s “The City Is Here For You to Use“. Adam adds the urbanist expertise to his repertoire from a strong influence of 50-60s Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander or Bernard Rurdofsky. In contradiction to post-war urban planners such as NYC’s Robert Moses who were mainly focused on the macro-level aspect of the cities, these thinkers understood the magic of the street (intimate, social, pleasant) and were concerned about nurturing the micro organic beauty of the city. Their generosity is exemplified by Alexander: For centuries, the street provided city dwellers with usable public space right outside their houses. Now, in a number of subtle ways, the modern city has made streets which are for “going through,” not for “staying in. In the past decades, cars, traffic, overplanning, the “repeating module of doom” (succession of franchises) actively made the city unpleasant (reminding me of James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia talk at TED). Even worst, the post 9/11 era sees the increasing amount of, insults to the citizens (e.g. defensible spaces), non-places, anonymous space, junk space (places not worth caring about) or as geographer Stephen Flusty would describe: ‘stealthy spaces – that cannot be found’, slippery spaces – spaces that cannot be reached‘, ‘prickly spaces – that cannot be comfortably occupied’, ‘jittery spaces – that cannot be utilised unobserved’.
However, “nostalgia is for suckers!”. Adam advocates that we now have technological and social possibilities to build upon the inspiration of Jacobs, Alexander or Rurdofsky. The availability of everyware at the level of the body and the city start to disolve in people’s behaviors (to the point of creating new behaviors such as “schizogeography”). Ambient informatics in the form of individual sensors + public sensors + economic data + marketing data become accessible to individuals in a physical context on a way it can be acted upon. This is the very novel way we experience the life in the city. We can start to build new visualizations of the cities and the patterns of their use (no conventional map) and have a city that that response to the behaviors of the users. When designed correctly it make the city more efficient and sustainable and eventually new ways to use the city will emerge. In the downside this new digital layer might create information overload and new types of classes and privileges. In that stage we shall not forget that systems are for cities, but cities for people.
See also Nicolas’ Picnic notes.
Posted: February 13th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Fantastic post by Dan Hill sketching and discussing in “The street as platform” the near-future implications of the digitization of the city with technologies embedded in, propped up against, or moving through the streets, carried by people and vehicles, and installed by private companies and public bodies. “It’s still remarkable to even sketchily consider how much data is already around us, and is near-invisible to traditional urban planning perspectives“.
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.
Inspired by Archigram, who suggested that “When it’s raining on Oxford Street, the buildings are no more important than the rain”, the way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye. For instance, holes in data may become more relevant than the pothole in the pavement.
The narrative describes many aspects of the digital city I have been touching: digital traces, revealing the invisible, seamfulness, and user adoption. Unusually for this type of exercise describing the street of the future, Dan mentions the possibility to better inform the practice of post-occupancy evaluations:
At another building on the street, a new four-storey commercial office block inhabited by five different companies, the building information modelling systems, left running after construction, convey real-time performance data on the building’s heating, plumbing, lighting and electrical systems back to the facilities management database operated by the company responsible for running and servicing the building. It also triggers entries in the database of both the architect and engineering firms who designed and built the office block, and are running post-occupancy evaluations on the building in order to learn from its performance once inhabited.
Relation to my thesis: Quality in the data, citizens appropriation of the technologies in the cities, the temporality of the space and the data defining it:
Her phone’s Google Maps application triangulates her position to within a few hundred metres using the mobile cell that encompasses the street, conveying a quicker route to the café. Unfortunately, none of their systems convey that the café is newly closed for redecoration.
Posted: February 12th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
It has finally arrived! After months of fun labor, Nicolas and I released Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities (pdf). This pamphlet assembles photos and annotations we took here and there along our dérive through the many cities we lived in and visited. Sliding Friction is an attempt to showcase the curious aspects of contemporary urban spaces. Through 15 topics and 4 themes we focus our lenses on the sparkles generated by the many frictions between ideas, practices and infrastructures that populate cities. We hope to provide some raw food for thoughts to consider the city of the future. Do we want to mitigate, or even eliminate these frictions?
Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities (pdf)
Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin
in Walabab editions, Designed by Bread and Butter, Preface by Bruce Sterling, Postface by Julian Bleecker.
Posted: February 12th, 2008 | No Comments »
With my recent affiliation the distributed cluster of researchers that form the Near Future Laboratory think/make-tank (part of the Liftlab group), Julian Bleecker provided me with one of his Flavonoid. A Flavonoid is a little device that’s used to capture physical movements and translate them into digital data.
Literally and practically — it is a device. It records physical movement using a three-axis accelerometer, sum-of-squares calculations. These calculations are time-stamped and churned through a simple algorithm to accumulate the readings over time, and record them at set intervals. The settings are easily modified through a terminal interface that allows you to see the data, adjust recording intervals and thresholds, calibrate the device, set the time and date, and a bunch of other diagnostic and configuration sorts of things.
Relation to my thesis: Playing with an additional source of digital trace.
Posted: February 12th, 2008 | No Comments »
The objective to metamorphose the LIFT conference from its grassroot and “groups of friends” origins to become a perfectly ran organizations has been widely achieved. While building a professional profit-generating event, the organizers did not forget about the keys to their previous success: openness (no VIP treatments, nor reserved areas), rely on the community (I only heard positive feedbacks from the workshops and the open stages delivered their pleasant surprises), commercial free, and magic formula of mixing the right amount of entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, artists, journalists and activists.
I attended the conference digitally naked with a pen and pieces of papers as instruments to record notes and thoughts and the archived videos to support my memory:
Bruce Sterling launched the conference in the role of a near-future futurist. Predicting the future is about moral boosting. The main reason people prosper is because they are willing to get out of the bed. Showing up is 90% of the job.
His talk focused on how we can deal (i.e. analyze the driving forces and get on with our own life) with a phenomenon we are certain to be confronted in 2008. He exemplified a foresight method (“you cannot predict the future but you can describe it“) with a recent black swan, the wedding of model Carla Bruni with french president Nicolas Sarkozy . An event that defines the character of our time (especially in Europe). An event that, if we do not have the proper analytical tools, we will be overwhelmed, confused and sicken by it. However, If you we understand the driving forces that guide what is going on we will be able to anticipate the developments. “Like an american who learns the rules of soccer, you probably still won’t like it very much, but you will understand why it matters to people, you’ll be able to put into a useful perceptive and get on with you own life.”
Paul Dourish (video) how we can understand what ethnography can teach us (talk in the following up of his implication for design paper). We miss disciplinary power relationships: ethnographers might regularly be asked what implication for design are, whereas it is not possible to ask a computer scientist the impact of his/her work to social theories. The relevance of classical ethnography in the context of mobility, presence and absence. Symbolism of to define mobility different from the technological perspective (location, coordinates) and the ethnographic perspective (dispora, nomad, asylum). There are different ways to represent space that is not about the cartographic representation (aboriginal vs western, history of the place, identify, different account of space). Particularly relevant to my current project with the senseable city lab (reveal the digital traces) and my taxi driver study (the impact of satnav system on mobility and practices)
Genevieve Bell talked about the armed race of digital deception (quoting James Katz), for every device that aims to tell the truth such as GPS there is a service available to deceive (e.g. alabi service). Technology changes faster than people do (culture, practice). How do we act in social practice with the act of lying or withholding information, the notion of white lies and good lies. Lie is about negating the real, but not about negating the truth (Peter Stiegnitz). Playful act through the rules of the world (how we choose to present ourselves, depending on the knowledge of the lookers). With secrets, we keep safe from what we choose to withhold. With lies, we shape our own realities .”Twitter is making an art out of the form of confabulation“. Particularly relevant to my work on people’s disclosure of location information in Flickr and the granularity they use (attaching a coarse-grained location information can be considered as a good lie). It also touches my taxi driver study as Genevieve points out in the very end of the talk: what do we do if technologies also start to lie such as satnav systems giving a bad direction?
Tom Taylor (video) how to use social network to inflect behaviors in the context of sustainable development. He advocated for the use of positive peer/social pressure. The positive approach goes through the engagement of individuals in groups via social softwares and let people expose their behaviors. In the future we will be able to capturing data from different sources (such as Nike+) and expose them where you do not expect it (Measure, visualize and expose in a social graph). As using a Wattson to monitor the electricity consumption in a house. Tom stated that exposing actions can have a massive effect on the way people behave. In the light of the recent works on persuasive computing, this still needs to be proven (specifically how to make that happen). This work reflects well the intention of WikiCity, its feedback loop, and the use of digital traces for social navigation. An aspect to study would be analyse the spiral of: influencing behaviors that influence the data that influence behaviors the influence the data…
I had a pleasant discussion with Rafi Haladjian on creating innovation and services from the technological constraints. In his career he created success from constraints in the network administration for the Minitel (the importance was not about creating a density of traffic, but by spreading of the day so that line would always be used), the Internet (bet on the physicality of server hosting, the unique link that is not virtual and therefore fragile) and the internet of things (play and take advantage of the positive aspect of immature technologies).
Still to come… the foresight session with Scott Smith, Bill Cockayne and Francesco Cara.
We collected very valuable content from picking up the brains of the 70+ participants of our workshop Ubiquitous computing: visions, failures and new interaction rituals. The feedbacks were rather positive: Mark Meagher, Hannes Gassert, Michele Perras, Vincenzo Pallotta, and Tom Hume.
Group activity at the workshop
Posted: February 12th, 2008 | No Comments »
Back from Florence, where I presented to the local officials and the press (comunicato di stampa – video of the President of the Province of Florence introducing the press conference), an in-progress report of the Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project (slides for the 1-hour press conference). Feedbacks have been rather positive. Interestingly, some journalists linked this work to stories that have been in the local news lately. Could the results presented help move the David statue or better understand the impact of the implementation of low-cost (new Ryanair routes to Pisa sold to travelers as if they were flying to Florence). A relevant point raised during the day was that these data could not only help the understanding of tourist movements in Florence, but also compare with the competing cities in a national (competition with Venezia and Pisa) and global levels (how are tourists of Florence different from the other cities?). In that context, future effort will aim at defining the profiles of Flickr users and matching their different behaviors in the top 20 tourist cities.
The perks of this project: 24 hours in Florence.
In the media:
Relation to my thesis: Slightly leaving the pure aademic tracks, it is a peculiar exercise confront research to people that finance it (*sigh* the quest of the relevance…). More than presenting results, the message I intended to communicate was about the seriousness and potentials of people-generated location information and digital traces (partially inspired by Bruno Latour).
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
Martin Dodge has put together a rough and ready web page to summarise research on code/space he conducts in collaboration with Rob Kitchin.
Code/Space research is examining the new spatialities and new modes of (spatial) governance and empowerment enabled by the development and adoption of software through an exploration of the dyadic relationship between software and space; how the production of space is increasingly reliant on code, and code is written to produce space. In so doing, we are developing a set of conceptual tools for identifying and understanding these relationships, illustrating our arguments through rich, contemporary empirical material relating to different spatial spheres and everyday activities (travel, home, work, consumption). The principal concepts we detail are transduction and automated management. Through the concept of transduction we theorise space and spatialities as ontogenetic in nature, as constantly in a state of becoming. Software, through its technicity – its ability to do work in the world – transduces space; enables space to unfold in multifarious ways. We formulate the concept of automated management to think through the various ways that new software systems survey, capture and process information about people and things in automatic ways and make judgements algorithmically without human scrutiny.
Relation to my thesis: The emergence of new forms to experience space through technologies have sparked research in a number of different disciplines, including sociology, computer science, interaction design, urban planning, and in the case of Code/Space, geography. The concept of automated management seem closely related to the WikiCity‘s real time control systems.
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
I am off to the LIFT conference where we will exchange, among many other things, on the visions and failure of ubicomp, on anthropology and technologies (with Genevieve Bell, Pau Dourish, and Younghee Jung), on foresight (with Scott Smith, Bill Cockayne and Francesco Cara), and on the internet of things, robotics, pets and entertainment (Rafi Haladjian and Bruno Bonnell),
Kick-off on Thursday with a 30′ state of the technological world address by Bruce Sterling.
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
This semester I will passively observe two complementary courses on urban computing. At NYU, Adam Greenfield and Kevin Slavin teach Urban Computing focus on the observations and literature on co-evolution of urban architectonic (i.e. the physical city), the metropolitan experience (psychological, emotional and affective dimensions of the city) and ambient informatics.
We will be building the city up from an array of primitives – physical patterns or archetypal situations – asking what set of functions each has served over time, how people have used and understood them over the history of human settlement, and what happens to each of them when computation saturates the urban environment at every scale. We want to consider them both in isolation, and in their interaction; our intent is to privilege neither the virtual nor the actual, being much more interested in how these two conditions inform, interpenetrate and condition one another.
The reading list is available.
On a more applied level, MIT colleagues Carlo Ratti and Assaf Biderman organize an Ambient Informatics workshop that takes the technological aspects of the real-time city as pivot of thoughts. It will It focuses on developing concepts and applications for enhancing our experience of the built environment using real-time information and pervasive computing
Our experience of our cities, homes, and social interactions is changing profoundly as technology becomes distributed throughout the built environment. Seamless integration of real-time information about events, resources, and personal experience within physical spaces opens the door for key applications in urban planning, resource management, emergency response and much more. It can also strengthen our perception of the built environment as a place for social inclusion and collaboration. The workshop will meet once a week and include an organized visit to Scotland and/ or Copenhagen.
Flyer of this semester’s SENSEable City Workshop on Ambient Informatics
Posted: February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
My visit of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, allowed be to exchange with some of the finest researchers active on the edges of CSCW and ubicomp including: Steve Benford (we discussed the potential uses of “trails” to reveal the “wrong” behaviors, replay is often a request of participants of pervasive experiences, but also the challenges to raise the credibility of HCI research in the industry), Martin Flintham (developing and deploying pervasive experiences), Leif Oppermann (uncertainty visualization and tools to develop pervasive experiences), Holger Schnädelbach (evaluation in architecture and hybrid worlds, presentation of cospaces), Stefan Egglestone (feedback look with bio sensors, stress sensing, see telemetry in theme parcs), and Adriano Galati (delay tolerant ad-hoc networks).
In the effort to build more coherence in my research focus, I took the opportunity to present my work and try to highlight and test the key evidences that emerged from my first studies. In the discussion after my talk, Leif Oppermann and Chris Greenhalgh suggested that, in the light of the outcomes of CatchBob! I should have a closer look on how people who atomize the georeferencing of their photos. Do they follow the same practice as in CatchBob! (i.e. become more passive in disclosing the location information, do they “annotate”/communicate less as well?
