The intricate nature of city components

An excerpt from Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities":

"Intricate mingling of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order. (...) Let us first consider that diversity looks ugly. (...) But this belief implies something else. It implies that city diversity of uses is inherently messy in appearance; and it also implies that places stamped with homogeneity of uses looks better. (...) If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is - sameness - it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction."

The picture above has been taken in a familiar area of Geneva. While it does not really depict a "mixture of use" as described by Jane Jacobs, I found it was a good candidate to represent heterogeneity in a city. The two building it shows are different and the junction between them is not seamless.

Why do I blog this? this is space in itself, a sort of heterogeneous continuum with seams (I also mentioned holes a while ago). The quote from Jacobs is interesting because it explains the advantage of diversity: it creates an identity that eventually enable people to find their way in cities (and memorize places).

What does that mean in terms of design and ubiquitous computing? Well, first of all, this situation ought to be taken into account in the design itself: certain systems or artifacts may work differently depending on the space people are located. Second, seams, flaws, holes and stuff can be taken into account, this is called "seamful design". People interested in this might have a look at Chalmers, M. & Galani, A. (2004): Seamful Interweaving: heterogeneity in the theory and design of interactive systems. In: Proceedings of ACM conference on designing interactive systems DIS 2004. ACM, New York, pp 243–252.

Electronic urbanism and open design

Today at the urban sociology department, the "Penser l'espace", Jef Huang (LDM) gave a talk about "Electronic urbanism: future of space and role of authorship". It's very close to his talk at LIFT06. Raw notes below: Even though the title is "electronism urbanism", Jef's work rather focused on smaller dimension such as architecture or virtual worlds but it might lead to electronic urbanism at some point. The premises of his research is a strong belief that the massive proliferation of communication networks and devices will change some of our most basic social activities (work, learn, shop). This shift has economic drivers and there are several dying species coming from the industrial ages. Amazon as an epitome of the shift form the physical to the virtual.

So what will happen in 5-10years? will we still need physical space? Yes, and there are examples of new forms of space which are twofold: one the one hand, mega fulflillment center: huge new building with distribution centers, back-end of Amazon google data center, underground server farms. ON the other end, some are also the front-end, new typologies such as the yahoo! store, the google store, m*zone (samsung chain of physical store: a virtual company creating space so that clients can meet each others), information kiosks

What is interesting is that when these buildings choose their sites, there are new rules: access to highways, topographies, there is a new invisible layer that comes on top of the landscape, for instance, the map of fiber routes in NYC, that affects housing prices (because people want to have accesses). This affects the morphologies of future cities

the phenomenon: learn: classroom - e-learning environment work: office - virtual office shop: physical retail store - virtual shop play: playground - game environment ... But it's an "either-or" phenomenon, there is nothing in between, Jef's work is about studying what can be in-between. To what extent could virtual activities have a physical component? TO what extent can physical architecture/elements (furnitures) act as an interface between emerging virtual worlds and physical realities.

One of the elements about this is open design: the involvement of the user in the design process, that can be trace back form Duchamps (Rotating Glass Plates, 1930) or Oulipo (raymond queneau 100,000,000,000,000 poems combinatorial poetics, 1961). Back to urbanism, a question is then "is open architecture desirable in architecture or urban design?" The problem: "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" (I miss some elements here)

Another question is "what is the role of the designer in an open design piece?" The common misconception is that not, the designer's role is not less important. Only the design is not longer in the final form but the rules of the game have to be designed. What is needed for design of openness: basic rules, algorithm, speed of interaction, consent, transparency of authorship.

The new design paradigm: from designing forms and artifacts to designing rules and parameters for forms and artifacts to emerge.

Open plan legibility and infoviz

Revisiting the Open Plan: Ceilings and Furniture as Display Surfaces for Building Information is a paper written by my colleague Mark Meagher, Jeffrey Huang and David Gerber for a conference called BuiltViz. The paper argues that one the flaws of the "open plan" in architecture is the lack of legibility, that created an "undifferentiated, homogeneous settings that failed to realize the original intentions of this architectural idea":

"The open plan would be highly disorienting if it were not possible to define boundaries between spaces, to set limits, to indicate zones of circulation, and otherwise to articulate in the plan an anticipated range of activities. For all their clear disadvantages, vertical space-defining elements such as walls clearly provide a sense of orientation and identity, and in their absence it was necessary for the early proponents of the open plan to invent new techniques for spatial definition and differentiation. "

A possible solution to go solve this problem, as suggested in the paper, is to use information visualization techniques. The authors then present two projects: one about an augmented ceiling, and another about interactie shelves.

"Embedded information technology offers an opportunity to support the differentiation and legibility of the open plan by sensing and displaying aspects of the building’s environmental conditions and patterns of use. We introduce two ongoing projects as examples of building interfaces that enhance the transparency of information in the building, using surfaces embedded in the building to reveal invisible attributes of the interior that can be used by inhabitants to better understand their environment."

Why do I blog this? even though the project has not been implemented yet, I found interesting the articulation between architectural theories and human-computer interaction research.

Sticked objects

Sticking objects on street premises seem to be a new trend as one can see with this floppy disk above or the lego blocks hereafter:

After tags (and painted walls in cave), stickers, striped glasses, now it's about sticking objects. The first picture has been taken in Lausanne and the second in Geneva, Switzerland.

Why do I blog this? I find interesting the way objects populates street. Even though these examples are really uncommon, they are intriguing in the sense that they're part of a trend that leans towards reconfiguring physical artifacts in a spatial environment.

Pervasive Computing, space and infrastructures

Dourish, P. and Bell, G. (2007): The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. This paper interestingly explores the implications of computing getting off the desktop to the everyday world and how researchers are forced to "understand something of the spaces into which it moves, and the practical and cultural logics by which those spaces are organized". The authors made the point that space is rarely examined in computer system design, they only quote the examples of a spatial feature "separation" as a way to keep computational objects from each others (files kept in filespaces, the notion of workspace, etc.). Unlike this instrumental model of space, they rather consider spaces as populated and inhabited infrastructures. What this means is that spaces have a meaning to people in terms of the relationships to practical actions and interpretations. For instance, the presence and the activity of others can direct attention or guide movements. They quote diverse examples about this literature I had to explore in my PhD work.

It's very dense and hugely interesting so I will quote only the conclusion which efficiently describes the implications for pervasive computing:

"1) space is organized not just physically but culturally; cultural understandings provide a frame for encountering space as meaningful and coherent, and for relating it to human activities. Technological infrastructures are, inherently, given social and cultural interpretations and meanings; they render the spaces that they occupy ones that can be distinguished and categorized and understood through the same processes of collective categorization and classification that operate in other domains of social activity. Technological infrastructures and services, then, need to be understood as operating in this context.

architecture is all about boundaries and transitions and their intersection with human and social practice. (...) Everyday spaces are not simply spaces for working or meeting, but spaces for waiting, for reading, for loitering, for watching, for loving, for remembering, and more (McCullough, 2003.) The rhetoric of seamlessness is often opposed to the inherently fragmented nature of social and cultural encounters with spaces; we need to be able to understand how pervasive computing might support rather than erase these distinctions.

new technologies inherently cause people to re-encounter spaces. This isn’t a question of mediation, but rather one of simultaneous layering. One fascinating aspect of the move from the systems we built on the wired internet to those that we experience through wireless and mobile networks is that we are creating not a virtual but a thoroughly physical infrastructure, and we need to think about it as one that is interwoven with the existing physical structure of space (Dourish, 2001). The rhetoric of pervasive computing is one that traditionally ignores the ways in which that computing experience must be implemented on top of, and experience in and through, an existing landscape. (...) The spaces into which new technologies are deployed are not stable, not uniform, and not given. Technology can destabilize and transform these interactions, but will only every be one part of the mix."

Why do I blog this? because the paper gives a good overview of how pervasive computing relates to space and place issues (one of the research aspects I am interested in with regards to the user experience of these technologies). What I find relevant is here is the way these conclusions challenge existing developments and current discourse about such technologies.

There is a lot to draw here, for instance the way they question seamlessness is a recurring topic lately and I find it very important. Lots of people and organizations build things based on this assumption that the world is seamless and then they failed miserably.

Mr. Watson and spatiality

1876: Speaking through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, Bell utters these famous first words, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you". 1915: the replication of the very same venerable lines at AT&T (as described in "Engines of Tomorrow: How the World's Best Companies are Using Their Research Labs to Win the Future" (Robert Buderi)): "Mr Watson, come here, please, I want you!" (uttered in New York) "It would take a week to get there now," came the reply from California

Rem Koolhas on "junkspace"

Some random excerpts of text by Rem Koolhas on "junkspace" that I liked:

"Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is essence, the main thing... product of the encounter between escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain... (...) 13% of all Junkspace's iconography goes back to the Romans, 8% Bauhaus, 7% Disney - neck and neck - 3% Art Nouveau, followed closely by Mayan... (...) Patterns imply repetition or ultimately decipherable rules; Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code... Because it cannot be grasped, Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal to freeze insures instant amnesia. (...) Junkspace sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins, is reborn every Monday morning. (...) Like radioactive waste, Junkspace has an invidious half-life. Aging in Junkspace is nonexistent or catastrophic;"

(Picture taken by myself in Nice, France)

Why do I blog this? beyond my fascination for junkspaces and dirty area, I find Koolhas' description very evocative about the implications of junk. In a sense, it shows how seamlessness is distant.

No better training for the 21st century than being a third-culture kid.

An article in the FT by John Lanchester this week-end dealt with the notion of "third-culture kid": children who accompany their parents when they went to live in countries other than their own and then become hybrid (taking elements of the “home” culture from which their parents came and the culture of the place in which they were being brought up). The authors then use this as a metaphor for other purposes.

"being a European third-culture kid is an excellent training for modern life. As the speed of change increases, it gets harder for people to have a sense of rootedness, even if they are living in the place where they grew up. (...) Can we live like that? Can we live with the degree of change that a fully networked, fully competitive, economically “flat” world demands? I’m not sure. But I am sure that a sense of not quite belonging anywhere is an increasingly pervasive phenomenon (...) At some times and in some places it would have been a life-disadvantage but here, today, I think it’s the reverse. I live in London, a city that is full of people who feel as I once felt: that they never entirely fit in, often aren’t quite sure exactly what people are talking about, have a faint nostalgia for something they know they can never get back, and feel that they live in a place which is deeply familiar and yet slightly estranging. There’s no better training for the 21st century than being a third-culture kid."

Why do I blog this? this is intriguing in terms of describing a feeling people tend to have with social chnanges caused by technology.

Orwellian cameras on a plazza called "George Orwell"

Seen in Barcelona two days ago:

Usage of data generated by tech in urban environments

Trying to expand on what fabien blogged (weblog as a way to elaborate our thoughts), I am digging the internets to find how digital information/traces/logs can be mined and of interest. The massive number of traces generated automatically (cell phone, wifi laptops) or by the user (synchronously or asynchronously with flickr pictures) can be used to perform inferences about spatio-temporal of city inhabitants. Fabien describes 3 main domains of applicability of the processing and visualization of these massively collected personal logs, traces: 1) Provide urban planners, transport authorities and traffic engineers with data to refine their models of citizens spatio-temporal behaviors. 2) Bring new perspective for decision making and policies building. 3) Raise awareness and effect the discussion making of individuals or of a crowd

(Picture: mapping by Fabien of Flickr images taken in San Francisco between March 11 and March 25, 2007)

Why do I blog this? IMO, beyond a representation of the digital layer, there is another level, that would be: how to use the data generated by people (cell phones call/sms, flickr pictures at certain location, lbs patterns, games...) to have a sort-of "infrastructure" that would allow to specific services. For example: is it possible to design a public transport information system relying on these information?

This topic is also addressed in the following paper: Ratti C., Pulselli R. M., Williams S., Frenchman D., 2005,"Mobile Landscapes", Environment and Planning B - Planning and Design. Some excerpts:

"A possible study would be to use this data to infer information about the ‘character’ of a neighborhood where the antenna is placed. At a simplistic level, districts with base stations showing a prevailing use during working hours are likely to have an office/business nature. Neighborhoods with high evening and early morning cell phone traffic are likely to have a stronger residential character. On the other hand, residential neighborhoods with high cell phone use during business hours may reveal emerging live-work situations. (...) our hypothesis is that the patterns of cell phone intensity correlate with the intensity of urban activity; revealing them can help monitor important urban dynamics. Critical points in the use of the urban infrastructure can be highlighted, as well as special events. Finally, a long-standing problem can be addressed: that of estimating flows in and out of the city: patterns of daily commuting, weekday versus weekend activities, holiday movements. Real time applications could also have new uses in emergency relief, based on broadcast alerts that would be different from one region to the other.

As the authors say, this seems to be a "new promising line of urban research: Making sense of the unlimited flow of data from the cell phone infrastructure in the urban context is still unexplored territory". Even though the article focuses on data gathered through cell phones, I think the situation is similar with all the digital information generated by ubicomp systems and social web applications (a la flickr).

Urban tapestry for real

Spotted in Lyon last saturday, this looks like a real tapestry in an urban environment (next step is there?).

Physical space / Virtual space

Büscher, M., P. Mogensen and D. Shapiro (2001). Spaces of Practice. In Jarke, M., Rogers, Y. and Schmidt, K. (eds), Proc. ECSCW 2001: The Seventh European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Bonn, 16-20 September, Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Press, pp. 139-158. Using a case study, the paper interestingly discusses why mimicking physical workspaces in digital environments is naive and inadequate.

"straightforward reproduction is not even the most appropriate ambition for a digital environment. This is in part because the physical environment has constraints that it may not be helpful to reproduce, and in part because the digital environment may be given different and helpful capacities that the physical environment cannot match."

Some example the authors gives relates to - the three-dimensional arrangement and manipulation of material in space is constrained by things such as gravity (" Documents etc. can only be placed on horizontal surfaces, or pinned to surfaces in other planes") and this is not always helpful. - elements from the environments cannot fall conveniently fall at hand - the material available have a both an ephemeral (" easily created and easily changed or destroyed") and persistent character ("things ‘stay where they are put’"). This can have advantages and drawbacks ("The result of this combination of ephemerality and persistence can easily be just a clutter in which materials are neither in a meaningful arrangement nor ‘in their proper place’).

So what the authors proposes is to build upon these problems to create new kinds of digital workspaces that also take advantages of sociality:

" sometimes with a ‘minimal’ form of digital workspace, which users need never move beyond if they do not wish to; sometimes by reintroducing emulated physical properties such as gravity, stickiness, momentum and friction; sometimes through new behaviours for objects such as returning to a default position, or animation; and sometimes through extended properties that can be given to digital spaces, such as parallel universes, folding and tunnelling."

Why do I blog this? working on a presentation about SL, virtual worlds and the importance of spatial metaphors. The paper gives some very relevant elements about this topic; to put it shortly the argument can also be read as "the 3D metaphor is good for certain things, bad for others". People interested in this can listen to the interview of Raph Koster by Adam Reuters (at South by Southwest Interactive festival)

Open space internets

Les internets à ciel ouvert, temporary visibility of infrastructures.

"Infrastructure is both relational and ecological—it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms"

Star, S. Leigh, (1999) The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, Col. 43 No.3, pp 377-. 391. New York: Sage Publications, Inc

A Digital Future Landscape Terrain?

In the last issue of architectural design, there is a paper by Lorens Holm, Paul Guzzardo entitled "Is There a Digital Future Landscape Terrain?". It's about "lasernet", an interactive installation which aims to be "a model for exploring landscape terrains that establish ‘agora’-like meeting places as a basis for electronic exchange and progression". This part of the paper caught my eye:

"We want to foster participation and criticality. We propose re-mix platforms as the sites for collaborations between farmers, milkmen, managers, constables, contractors, builders, designers, artists, social scientists, even anyone with an interest in the land. We need a social science practice (what we did not have for lasernet) that will survey rural vox popular with the same statistical rigour as we use for soap–sex–war, to incorporate vox in the re-mix platform. We need a future technology that will sensor the environment – imagine crop-dusting the land with microsensors – to monitor environmental shifts in food-chain ecology, in biodiversity, and make visible how these are effected by land use. Without aestheticising them. Make the networks readable so that we can insert our stories into them, and so make them landscape stories. Let the landscape speak, let the landscape become the screen and platform for our stories."

Street TV

"Every fine summer night, television sets can be seen outdoors, used publicly, on the busy old sidewalks of East Harlem. Each machine, its extension cord run along the sidewalks from some score's electric outlet, is the informal headquarters spot of a dozen or so men who divide their attention among the machine, the children they are in charge of, their cans of beer, each others' comments and the greetings of passers-by"

Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities".

Street TV is a phenomenon that always impressed me, the only area where I've seen it were ethnic blocks in France and in LA. Why? because it's about my fascination towards entertainment in cities and how such a device is shared in a public space. It's generally even more fascinating when people have put couches or chairs around the set, creating some sort of temporary chillzone down the street. IMO, it's neither good or bad and the picture above (taken in Geneva yesterday) is definitely not meant to show that people then trash their TV set after watching it on the streets (nor that watching tv there leads to such behavior).

code/space by Rob Kitchin

My notes from a talk I attend at the "Digitality and space" seminar CHOROS lab: "code/space" by Rob Kitchin (National University of Ireland, Maynooth). The presenter started by this quote from Thrift and French: "[M]ore and more ... the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software" (2002, p.309). The point of this talk was to show how, over time, the spaces of everyday life have become increasingly reliant on software (space is being virtualized, in the sense of Manuel Castells). And so much so that many spaces and the life they support would malfunction. For instance, an airport cannot work without "code"/software.

He then described the forms of code embedded in everyday life in 4 ways: - coded objects: non-networked objects that use code to function or permanently store digital data that cannot be accessed without software: "internet of things", "blogjects" as described by Julian Bleecker (automated, automatic, autonomous) - coded infrastructures: networks that link coded objects and infrastructure that is monitored and regulated, either fully or in part, by code: computing networks, communication and entertainment networks, transport and logistics networks, financial networks... - coded processes: the transaction and flow of digital data across coded infrastructure. Important when they access, update and monitor relational databases that hold individual and institutional data... can be accessed at a distance and used to verify, monitor and regulate user access: bank accounts, crime, utility usage, mortgage... - coded assemblages: they are where several different coded infrastructures converge, working together—either in nested systems or in parallel, some using coded processes, others not—and, over time, become integral to one another in producing particular environments, such as office complexes, transport systems, and shopping centers.

Some examples that has been described to exemplify this: - Home: task and routines of everyday home life are augmented, mediated and regulated through computers - Buildings: parts of infrastructures are mediated by software such as lifts and doors... building management systems ("you sometimes need to reboot the lift, if the software fails, the lift fails, it's not longer a physical artifact") - Utility infrastructure (water, electricity...): might appear dumb but are all controlled and managed using software - Road infrastructure: traditional regulatory technologies (conventional signs, traffic lights) are complemented with "smart media" (automatic altering of traffic light sequences, updating of road speed signs, automatic logging of vehicular congestion, variable toll charges, cameras designs to discipline behavior...)... aim to monitor ad regulate the transport system in real-time. See for instance GCM travel - mobile telematics infrastructures: cars and the highway communicate with each other to adapt traffic management. State and emergency vehicles will generate data with respect to other traffic (vehicle speed, location, heading), weather (wiper operation, lights on/off) and transmit this information to a central control... analysis of the generated data is then used to deploy road and maintenance crews and communicated to other drivers: highways message signs, 511. - rail: various rail systems are reliant on code for its day-to-day operation - airport: ticket purchase online (even there), check-in is verified by your code, baggage is route through barcode and tags... the plane itself is a fully software entity... - communication: most communication takes place via coded infrastructures, facilitating time space compression, convergence by allowing instantaneous communication across distrance, reconfigure where people live. - work places - retail and consumption: intertwining of the coded assemblages of financial services, logistics and shop leisure facilities

(More about it in the following paper: Code and the Transduction of Space by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin)

So, what's the difference? about software and everyday spatialities:

In thinking through the work that software does in the world we have found it useful to rethink of the concept of space. So Kitchin stepped back and described the evolution in the space/place research. There has been an evolution: Involves a shift from ontology (what something is) to ontogenesis (how things become). From space to spacing. This is part of a longer process of conceptualising space: implicit then absolute then cognitive then relative (materialist, metaphorical: virtual) and nowawdays performative. Spacing is not ontologically secure, space is always the process of becoming, it is always a process of taking place. Space in these terms is a practice; a doing; and event; a becoming - a material and social reality forever (re)created in the moment. Space gains its form, function and meaning through practices and it ceaselessly emerges.

How does it emerge? through what Kitchin described as "transduction of space" = technicity is the unfolding or evolutive power of technologies to make things happen: agency (Mackenzie, 2003). Software possesses technicity (a cell phone can link people across spaces). Software helps solving problems or even automate the solving of a problem. Space is constantly being bought into being "as an incomplete solution to a relational problem". Where the relational problem is an encounter between people and environment and the solution, to a greater or lesser extent is software. Relational problem include undertaking domestic tasks, traveling between locations, conducting work, practicing consumption.

The 4 objects described at the beginning of the talk (coded objects, infrastructures, processes and assemblages) beckons new spatial formations into existence. Kitchin differentiated two notions: - "Code/space" are spaces dependent on code to function - wherein the materiality of everyday life and its attendant virtual coding are mutually constituted. The relationship between code and space is dyadic (without code, the space would no be transduced as intended: hence "code/space" rather than "code space"). Old non software means of doing things have sometimes disappeared. - Coded space is a transduction hat is mediated by code, but whose relationship is not dyadic. Software mediates the solution to a problem, but it is not the only solution

Code/space are non-deterministic and non-universal. How code/space operates and is experienced is open to rupture: it's an embodied process, through the performances and interactions of the people within the space (between people, and between people and code). It should be seen as a complex system in state of becoming, with emergent properties, it then needs to be analyzed as complex systems with emergent properties. Kitchin is currently exploring this issue in airport.

The regulatory environment of code/space is increasingly that of automated management (in the sense that it is enacted by technologies that are automatic/autonoumous in nature). Rather than an external surveillance system working to self-discipline, capture is an wholly internalized feature of an activity (Example: buying a ticket is the way you're surveyed: it's internal to the system). There is a move from oligopticon to panopticon or surveillance versus capture.

Conclusion: software will increasingly reshape activities and how we perform them + the material functioning. Code makes a difference in part because it alternatively modulates space. We need to develop appropriate tools for conceptualising the relationships between software and space.

Why do I blog this? This way of establishing a new typology of relationships between space and software (technology) is very intriguing. There seems indeed to be a need to address the topic of 1st life/2nd life connections. Some personal remarks: - Good to see that the blogject meme also spread enough so that geographers start to feel this will change the way we inhabit space. - I am not that familiar with geographers work but it seems that there is a good overlap with stuff I am interested in (studying how technology reshape spatial practices). Some work to use in further projects about spatiality! - From a cognitive sciences standpoint, the metaphors used by this field seem to be very well in tune with situated action and ethnomethodological way of describing human action (this is not apparent in my notes, it was rather due to the examples the speaker employed).

Space and coordination of actions

Some elements to be added to my blogpost serie about space and cognitive interactions (which startd here and end there): The term “space” does not only refer to the topological and geometrical constraints of the environment, nor to the elements that constitute a place. Spatial features like distance between people or the repartition of objects in the environment are affordances to structure actions and interactions between partners of a team. They indeed act as visual markers of possible interactions with a person or an artifact, cues to draw inferences or information to rely on to make a decision.

This has led researchers and designers to insist on the importance of taking space into account in CSCW (Spinelli et al., 2005). Coordination of action is indeed shaped by the environment in a various ways: - environmental constraints (such as corridors and doors) leading to ‘channelling’ and harmonisation of activity; - conversely, the complexity of the environment (enclosure, lack of a clear view, physical obstacles and dead-ends) providing impediments to regular and coordinated action (such as moving in a straight line); - familiarity with the environment and its configuration providing cues to coordination (e.g. well-known landmarks); - ability to display aspects the environment through external representations such as maps and routes, providing an essential background to a location-awareness tool (a map for annotation) and aids to group coordination.

A safe maze

Looking on the internets for an image that would represent an environment that would be both playful and secure for kids, I stumbled across this maze by Peter Randall (photo credit: Martyn Barratt):

Why do I blog this? this is tight to my interest in spatial environment and their legibility. This one is outdoor but you have museums that have indoor maze for kids; those need to be safe and allow people to escape quickly (and the walls are sometimes 30cm high).

Walled gardens: new medievalism?

The creation of walled gardens has always been an amazing topic in architecture; and it certainly has important implications. The IHT has a good piece about walls.

"Like their 13th- to 15th-century counterparts, contemporary architects are being enlisted to create not only major civic landmarks but lines of civic defense, with aesthetically pleasing features like elegantly sculpted barriers around public plazas or decorative cladding for bulky protective concrete walls. This vision may seem closer in spirit to Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of angular fortifications or Michelangelo's designs for organically shaped bastions than to a post-Cold War era of high-tech surveillance. (...) To some, compromise may be preferable to surrounding our cities with barbed wire and sandbags. The notion that we can design our way out of these problems should give us pause, however. Our streets may be prettier, but the prettiness is camouflage for the budding reality of a society ruled by fear."

The article then lists some examples ranging from war zones to great cities:

" the Green Zone, the American encampment in Baghdad, where the 3.6-meter, or 12-foot, high concrete slabs that surround Saddam Hussein's former palaces have infused the city within a city with the ethos of the gated suburban enclaves of Southern California. (...) even the most thoughtful solutions, like the gracefully curved steel tubes that defend the plaza of Thom Mayne's Caltrans District 7 headquarters building in Los Angeles or the faceted bronze bollards on Wall Street, suggest the fragile balance today's architects are struggling to reach between assuring the freedom of movement that is vital to a functioning democracy and bolstering security. "

Why do I blog this? this is interesting in terms of understanding the environment in which people act (and then where technologies are deployed). At a higher level, this "new medievalism" as described in the article can also be perceived as a metaphor of existing practices in virtual environments or for accessing data on certain devices.

The picture has been taken in Zürich, it shows how conspicuously walls can be erected to set a boundary between different areas (in this context a residential area versus a derelict industrial zone). You take few wooden decks, cardboard, old doors; fix them with duct tape and then you have a wall.

The importance of sidewalks

Last week, there as bit a quite impressive boom of reader here due to my post about anti-skateboard devices in San Francisco. This definitely echoed with "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (Jane Jacobs) that I was reading this week end. The description of sidewalks and their importance is very well written and thoughtful. Some excerpts I liked:

"There is not is no point in planning for play on sidewalks unless the sidewalks are used for a wide variety of other purposes and by a wide variety of other people too. (...) Roller skating, tricycle and bicycle riding are the next casualties. The narrower the sidewalks, the more sedentary incidental play becomes (...) Sidewalks thirty or thirty five feet wide can accommodate virtually any demand of incidental play put upon them - along with trees ti shade the activities, and sufficient space for pedestrian circulation and adult public sidewalk life and loitering. (...) Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travels and access to buildings, and go unrecognized and unrespected as the uniquely vital and irreplaceable organs of city safety, public life and child rearing that they are.

Why do I blog this? definitely some thoughts for urban computing projects (I'm currently in the process of writing a project about urban gaming).

The picture shows pavements from a sidewalk in Geneva, which seems to have been fixed with duct tape. It also reminds us how the different type of pavements allows or not certain kinds of activities. That one is very skateboard-friendly.