SpacePlace

[Space and Place] Street Talk: happening event

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Street Talk: An Urban Computing Happening, Friday 16 July 2004 in Berkeley. The programme is great with lots of interesting speaker (Anne Galloway, Howard Rheingold, Antony Townsend...).

Street Talk is a one day event to be held at Intel Research Berkeley focused on understand how the rapidly emerging fabric of mobile and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes

[Space and Place] My elephant path from home to work

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Here is my elephant paths from home to work (the circled area) plus from work to cafeteria (the dead-ends). As defined by people on this website:

"Elephant path is a name for a path that is formed in space by people making their own paths and shortcuts; it is an unofficial route. Elephant path is an anarchist way of moving in a city, a town or a village. It is an overlaying system of going from a place to a place in a space regardless of the city/town plan. Still, it is connected to the streets and the architectural forms."

Of course, since I am a lazy bastard I did not use our coolest WiFi triangulation algorithm to follow my paths on the campus. I drew it by hand.

[LocativeMedia] Asphalt Game: a locative media used as a research probe

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Asphalt Games is a locative media game used as a methodological experiment in producing a rich environment for community engagement and social research.

As part of the game, players generate documentation and commentary that traces their paths through the game - and the city. Different views of these traces create a prismatic portrait of urban places as mediated through technology use and social relationships. (...) the game is an effort to help address these questions while raising new ones: - Implications of mixing on and off-line communities in an increasingly connected world. - Identifying opportunities for revitalizing public space. - Investigating issues of identity in relation to place. - Exploring player commitment to location-based play. - Capturing the richness and riskiness of the physical world in game design. - Reworking notions of conventional mapping to include social dynamics.

This is one of the cool picture displayed during a game:

[Space and Place] Ship Control Board

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This picture depicts the control board of an Alstom vessel. It provides ships with Dynamic Positioning, which is quite expensive especially if you want to add positioning capabilities to your windsurf. But the design is interesting.

It is also funny to notice that those colors are the same as the tramway in Lyon... designed by Alstom! Yellow and blue seems to be trendy there. Well, I am finding strange patterns today.

[Space and Place] Find cues across the city

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Steven Johnson describes an interesting new games in Slate:

small groups of people clustering together to read text off of cell-phone screens, then embarking on some kind of oddball group activity—retrieving a suitcase that's been hidden atop a tree, persuading strangers to try on insane outfits—and then huddling together again to peer at their cell phones. This strange behavior is part of something called the Go Game, the creation of a company called Wink Back, Inc. (The next public game is scheduled for Feb. 22.) The game's creators scatter clues and tools across the city, and then wirelessly transmit a series of challenges to the teams as they prowl the streets. One challenge might ask the team to locate a package lurking underneath "a piece of federal property"—which turns out to be a mailbox—and report back the cross streets once the package has been discovered. Another might send players off looking for a specific date inscribed on a "vaguely homoerotic statue." Other challenges look like street theater: Find a goodwill store and dress up in costumes that "represent opposites." Once each challenge has been completed, the game's puppetmasters beam down a new one. It's urban Survivor with cell phones.

This is meant for team building!

Since our launch in March 2002, we've made superheros out of companies like Oracle, UPS and Toyota.

[LocativeMedia] Slashdot about spatial annotation

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It is funny to see that after an hour of throwing up bad uses of locative media, I stumbled across a slashdot post about spatial annotation comments. The news was about Urban Tapestries. Of course, the ./ geeks were very creative in expressing their thoughts:

- first virtual note you will see:"call jenny for a good time: 555-0634" - I urinated on that corner last night, use other side of street. - Lonely? looking for sex? inquire within. - Missing dog...50 pound reward. - Owner not home from 8:30AM to 6:30PM, please rob. - Smash my windows! - I'm watching you, pervert!

Lots of privacy concerns anyway, which is right.

[LocativeMedia] Locative Media Misuses: strange statements about them

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Let's have a brainstorm about locative media misuses... Location-Based Services to track student who moves school furnitures, used as instrument of terror, to locate specific area to defoliate... Well, it's scary. Locative media could be so powerful that we (with fab and mirweis tried to sketch strange statements about them. Here are misuses of a locative media called XXXX: - XXXX used to find fat boys to spank them with wet t-shirts - 3-months old kitten found alive with XXXX - elderly missuse XXXX as flashlight - XXXX destroyed by french actor gerard depardieu - XXXX users return devices screming "it is an instument of Satan" - scandal: XXXX used by greeks to cheat during the EURO2004 competition - XXXX is the final solution for men who loose their hair - XXXX underused by minorities - God found with XXXX, Jesus still running - a locative media bug provoked an earthquake in taiwan - A 50 years old woman experimented problems using XXXX in a safe-sex social-gaming way - 2 persons found dead with XXXX - KKK meeting coordinated with XXX - XXXX used to locate skid marks in switzerland - hot news : XXXX is expected to have a penis enlarging capability

[Space and Place] Spatial Organization in Video game companies

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A paper about communication and office organization in video game companies. Very informative.

If you only have one person per office, it's easy for them to concentrate, but not likely that they will communicate. If you have too many people per office, a lot of communication will happen, but no actual work. Tom DeMarco talks about the importance of "flow" in Peopleware (...) Here's our rule of thumb on Team Spidey, the group working on Spider-Man: programmers are two to an office, artists are two-three, designers are three-four. Producers get cubicles in the hallways. Some exceptions are made for expediency. Small offices for the coders (since only two share), big offices for the designers (since there are probably four of them). (...) When you move everybody around, it means people come in contact with new people. You can make a graph of who communicates with whom on your project--every person is a node, and you draw links between the ones who communicate. When you reorganize, this graph will tend to change. New links will form between the nodes, and the old links may weaken but won't go away completely. The amount of communication on the team will go up. (...) There's another kind of lead, frequently without title, who leads simply by being a "hub" or "go-to guy"--the person everybody asks for help. On your office floorplan, it's good to drop these leads right in the middle of things, surrounded by the people who will need their help. Also, this way, they can keep abreast of important decisions that people are making on the fly.(...)Peter Akemann, our founder and CTO, does: have the prestigious corner office, and set up a workstation in the hallway right in the middle of everything, and spend most of your time there, in the trenches.

[Space and Place] Toward a puke annotation tool?

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The Village Voice describes the "top 10 places to puke your guts out in new york city".

2. Housing Works Used Book Café, 126 Crosby Street: Lots of people come in off the street to this dim and roomy used bookstore's two ground- level, easy-to-locate, single-stall bathrooms. Nobody notices or cares. Plus, the nonprofit is associated with a free needle exchange, so people are shooting up in there (cleanly!) anyway. Good books and records to boot (no pun intended). Less than one block from the F train.

The next step would definetly be some location-based tagging system that will provide: - a rating system - narratives like postmortem (analysis of your "work"), best practices, big troubles - solutions