Greenfield and Shepard on Urban computing

Reading "Urban Computing and Its Discontents" by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard was a good move, as I am currently cobbling some notes about locative media and urban implications. This book is part of as a series called "Architecture and Situated Technologies Pamphlet" which addresses the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. I won't go into all the aspects of this pamphlet and will rather focus on the elements I found relevant for my own research and activities. I found it very insightful with regards to (1) the implications/impacts of urban computing on architecture/urban environment, (2) the methodological discussion about how architects, "technologists" and user experience researchers can benefit from each others.

So how Greenfield and Shepard describes the implications of ubicomp/everyware/ambient informatics? I spotted 6 types as these excerpts show:

"

1. These projects [locative media] share a common interest in altering how we locate and orient ourselves within cities, and subsequently navigate through them. (...) it suggests a shift from material/tangible cues (streets, squares, rivers, monuments, transportation hubs) to immaterial/ambient ones through which we form our mental maps. [other cues to be added to what Kevin Lynch described in "The Image of the City"]
2. location-based services (...) operate on the scale of individual patterns of movement. What about information that has the potential to affect larger patterns of movement and activity within the city? (...) dynamic signs that correlated data gathered from throughout the local area, that inferred higher-level fact patterns from this data, and then everted them, made them public in that larger-than-life way
3. expand the reach of signage and advertising in dense urban spaces. (...) What happens when mobile and pervasive technologies are used to subtract this kind of information from the physical world, reducing rather than adding to the visual field of the street? (...) “Every extension is also an amputation.” [McLuhan] (...) So what happens when all that crashes—as it surely will from time to time? (...) What happens when you’ve got a generation of people who are used to following these ambient cues around, and the cues go away?
4. redefines surveillance (...) the ability to correlate disparate datapoints, to draw inferences about probable patterns of behavior, to anticipate emergent phenomena
5. You’ve got privacy issues: do you tell people that you’re gathering information from them? If so—and I hope you do—how do you inform them in a way that lets them make a meaningful choice as to whether or not they want to be in this place?
6. You’ve got issues like deconfliction and precedence to consider: whose orders have priority in this space?

"

Another aspect of interest here is the discussion about where architects and technologists sit. Adam advances that architects are "further along in imagining what cities look and feel like under the condition of ambient informatics than technologists are". To which, Shepard agrees by claiming how architecture is indeed one of the oldest “situated” technologies since buildings have long been designed to adapt to different sites, climates, or cultures over time. However, he thoughtfully criticizes the way mainstream work treat "interactive" architecture by focusing on a limited mode of interaction in which system only responds to input. Referring to Cedric Price, he details how "designing truly responsive systems entails more than the technical manifestation of a one-to-one reaction between input and output (simple goals). Higher-level interactions involve conversations between people and buildings that are capable of mutually learning patterns of activity and adapting to changing intentions (complex goals)".

Mark goes on by explaining how our experience of the city is not only shaped by urban form but by various media and ICT. The challenge is then not to oppose the virtual and the actual as a "strict dichotomy" but rather a continuity or a gradient. This argument is very close to a talk by Christophe Guignard I've attended last summer, in which he compared technologies with the light spectrum.

A last quote I found fundamental concerns the methodology Mark Shepard suggest to move forward:

"it would open new sites of practice to the architectural imagination. By studying the complex set of spatial practices people engage with (and through) computing in urban environments, architects would be better positioned to ascertain which aspects of the built environment are truly relevant today, and which need to be completely reimagined.""

Why do I blog this? currently working on writings and talks about how ubicomp affect the urban environments, this material is close to things I already noted, so it's good to see some resonance. The notion of locative media as cues to be integrated in Kevin Lynch's typology seems now very common as I stumbled into it few times this week.

The whole pamphlet is very valuable and the confrontation (well it's not that much of a confrontation) of Adam and Mark's ideas is very insightful. More importantly, the discussion about technological determinism at the end is a topic that would need to be more investigated as it often lead to dramatic issues, especially in the press with conclusion such as "the end of space" or "X and Y technology will modify the shape of our cities" without any nuance. I'll blog a paper by Antony Townsend about this later on.

Family names on door walls

Door entry seen in Brussels:

As the communication system is destroyed, people write their name directly on the wall... and one can see how names are updated over time. It's then possible to read the "history" of the building by looking at who lived there (and make assumptions based on the ethnicity of names). I would be curious to know (and see) who shade the previous names. What does that mean for urban computing?

(I removed the building number on the street, and some other information to avoid finding where this is located).

"TGV hitch-hiking"

This morning in the french news, a story of furious commuters, unhappy with the delay of their trains who stopped a high-speed train (TGV) in France. After few weeks of transport strikes and regular delay, the commuters on this line were so edgy that they warn the station manager that they would stop the TGV. As the article says, it's about "TGV hitch-hiking", a very discreet practice. Why do I blog this? in terms of (sub) computing urban or mobility applications would there be some interesting applications for transport regulation to think about based on this sort of practice?

"Landscape Denatured: Digitizing the Wild" by Eric Kabisch

Had a glance this morning at Eric Kabisch's Masters Thesis called "Landscape Denatured: Digitizing the Wild". He basically describe 4 technologically enabled artworks that explore ways in which digital technologies impact society and culture, focusing particularly on the impacts of information technologies on physical and cultural geography: Datascape, Sonic Panoramas, Unexceptional.net network visualizer and SignalPlay.

What I found interesting is the framework provided for analyzing these works of art:

"To develop a framework for investigation of the processes by which digital technologies, their affordances and their artifacts shape and embed themselves in the world, I will break the process into three stages: the measuring and capturing of natural processes (sensing); the mining, analysis and representation of captured observations and models (narrative); and the introduction of these models into the world through physical or methodological means (propagation).

This framework is useful because it successfully corresponds to many of the individual cyclical and triadic frameworks that inspired the individual artworks composing the body of this thesis work. (...) It parallels notions of geographic information gathering, map production, and map-based decision-making. And it is congruent with Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the functional cycle (or Funktionskreis) whereby an organism’s subjective environment is continuously constructed through its sensing of the environment, processing of the information, and continued engagement and action within the world."

Why do I blog this? It's interesting wrt what I discussed here and what Fabien's reactions. See for instance the parallel between Funktionskreis and wiki city.

Besides, I quite liked this part of the conclusion:

"Our digitization of the world thus far is coarse, leading to gaps and pixelation. As we fill in those gaps through models and assumptions we blur certain details, while artifacts of the process are categorized as anomalies. In geographic information systems, this grey area is referred to as “uncertainty” and is not often reflected in end- user representations such as maps. The wild, ultimately, is that which we cannot record, understand, represent or control"

Digital space behavior close to physical world proxemics

The ACM technews recently reported on a study about an intriguing experiment in Second Life (presented at the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents):

"University College London researchers are using an automated avatar in Second Life to study the psychology of Second Life users. The automated avatar, called SL-bot, has been used to see if Second Life users expect other avatars to give their avatar the same amount of personal space as is normally expected in real life. In one experiment, SL-bot searched for avatars that were alone. When an isolated avatar was found, SL-bot would approach the avatar, greet the avatar by name, wait two seconds, and then move to within the virtual equivalent of 1.2 meters. SL-bot then recorded the other avatar's reaction for 10 seconds and sent the data back to the researchers. Out of the 28 avatars approached in this manner, 12 moved away and 20 also responded with text chat. Another experiment observed pairs of avatars as they interacted and found that users are, on average, six times more likely to shift position when someone comes within 1.2 meters. The findings show that people value their virtual personal space much like people value their real personal space. During an experiment where undergraduate students with scripts interacted with subject avatars, it was found that female avatars protect their personal space less than male avatars, reflecting real world behavior."

Why do I blog this? apart form the ethical discussion about the use of virtual test subjects, this study is interesting in terms of digital space usage. Result are actually very close to what Jeffrey, P., & Mark, G. described in "Constructing Social Spaces in Virtual Environments: A Study of Navigation and Interaction" (In K. Höök, A. Munro, D. Benyon, (Eds.) Personalized and Social Navigation in Information Space, March 16-17, 1998, Stockholm (SICS Technical Report T98:02) 1998) , Stockholm: Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), pp. 24-38). These authors found studied a 3D virtual world and showed that proxemics can be maintained in virtual environments. Even there, a certain social distance is kept between participants’ avatars. They noticed how spatial invasions produced anxiety-arousing behavior (like verbal responses, discomfort and overt signs of stress) with attempts to re-establish a preferred physical distance similar to the distance obverted in the physical world.

Should ants be the next model for urban computing?

Stigmergic Collaboration is a model for the self-organisation of ants, artificial life and swarm intelligence. Wikipedia defines it as "a method of indirect communication in a self-organizing emergent system where its individual parts communicate with one another by modifying their local environment". It emerges from the work of a french biologist who coined the term in conjunction with his research o termites behavior. As described by Mark Elliott:

"Pierre-Paul Grasse first coined the term stigmergy in the 1950s in conjunction with his research on termites. Grasse showed that a particular configuration of a termite’s environment (as in the case of building and maintaining a nest) triggered a response in a termite to modify its environment, with the resulting modification in turn stimulating the response of the original or a second worker to further transform its environment. Thus the regulation and coordination of the building and maintaining of a nest was dependent upon stimulation provided by the nest, as opposed to an inherent knowledge of nest building on the individual termite’s part."

Why do I blog this? Although I won't enter in the big debate about how this model can be translated to human/behavior (ants/termites =! human beings), I think that stigmergic collaboration is a very interesting notion to understand the future of urban computing. Coordination is explained through the use and production of artefacts by the individuals, for example collective nest building, or the production of chemical traces. What is interesting is the notion of "artefact production", humans do not leave and rely so much on chemical traces BUT their activity in the environment leaves traces... especially if you think about mobile phone/bluetooth/wifi interactions.

Cardinal directions stuck on pavement

Seen last week in Paris, near République:

A piece of street art (made out of stickers) that indicates cardinal directions. I know it's not meant to be an urban sign but it's a curious user-generated/DIY city elements. Standing around it for half an hour (I was waiting for a friend there), it was funny to see people avoiding walking on it: the status of the sign was higher than expected.

Podotactile affordances

Two other uses of podotactiles encountered recently, two possible affordances: Cuieng thanks to podotactiles experienced this morning in Paris, France:

These thin podotactiles literally pave the way to a shop when exiting from the subway at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie.

Another affordance of podotactiles is to use to avoid having stickers on certain surface, it's less common and it's exactly the same model as the one used to pedestrians stops on sidewalk edges.

Why do I blog this? From the spatial/design perspective, collecting and analyzing these elements is interesting, especially when you observe people's behavior (rubbing sneakers). It seems that I start having quite a bunch of examples like this, it's interesting IMO to note the different affordances as well characteristics such as shapes (thing, round), length (short and discrete, or continuous).

Street complexity

The complexity of indications on street pavement in Geneva: - Green is to represent tram paths but the information is for pedestrians, cars and bikes since the tram pilot knows obviously that he/she only go straight. - Red is to represent bike paths: useful for cars and pedestrians to know where NOT to go since it's actually the portion of bike lanes near cross-roads - White is to represent road/street boundaries for cars, bikes and trams (stop/do not cross the line) - Yellow on the street is for pedestrians (to cross the road + to show the limits of the bike lanes) - not present on the picture is also the podotactiles on the sidewalk, for pedestrians.

Why do I blog this? I find intriguing how the use of such signs for cueing behavior is more and more complex. See also the subway platform example.

The layering of infrastructures in urban computing

In Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space , Bell and Dourish addresses the different layering of infrastructures in any urban environments: it's physical (topologies), historical and cultural. On top of that, ubiquitous computing adds new infrastructural layers. This is made apparent by activities such as wandering around to find a Wifi or cell phone signal, or locate Mecca through mobile services. The central argument of this short workshop paper lies in what follows:

"spaces have structure and meaning for us in terms of our relationship to a variety of infrastructures of action and interpretation. (...) 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. Cross-cultural explorations of urban experience can draw attention to these issues. (...) architecture is all about boundaries and transitions and their intersection with human and social practice. (...) We need to think architecturally about the mobile and wireless technologies that we develop and deploy, the human side of infrastructures. (...) new technologies inherently cause people to re-encounter spaces. This isn’t a question of mediation, but rather one of simultaneous layering. (...) 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. (...) there is already a complex interaction between space, infrastructure, culture, and experience. 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 ever be one part of the mix."

Why do I blog this? although very short, this article summarizes the main points about urban computing issues. They do set the trends that they will develop in further papers and it's relevant to see the main highlights here with concrete call for research actions. I am personnaly very intrigued by "the human side of infrastructures" and the hybridation of these spaces.

Bell, G. and Dourish, P. 2004. Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing on the Urban Frontier (Ubicomp 2004, Nottingham, UK.)

Street crochet

Knitting as a the 21st way to hack the city. A phenomenon I documented here (see also Metropolis here and there).

Gentle and sweet. Seen last week-end in Paris near Gare du Nord.

"Data is geology"

Artifacts of the Presence Era is a project form 2003 by Fernanda Viégas, Ethan Perry and Ethan Howe that proposed to visualize accumulated layers of data in an intriguing way. A camera and a microphone captured the myriad of images and sounds produced during an exhibition in the ICA gallery. The system allowed to visualize them "as a growing, organic landscape that serves as a historical record".

"Like its natural counterpart, this process reveals long-term patterns (the rhythm of night and day, periods of great activity or empty silence), while retaining occasionally serendipitous, but often mundane, samples of the passage of life. The project visualized the accumulating layers of data and allowed visitors to navigate the captured images and ambient sounds, peeking back into the history of the gallery. (...) In trying to convey a sense of historical buildup over time, it made sense to 15 look at natural examples of accretion for inspiration. The geological layers in sedimentary rocks and their function as record keepers provided us with such an example”"

Why do I blog this? I am more interested in the metaphor employed here than in the project itself. As Dan Saffer described it in his thesis, DATA IS GEOLOGY. Moving from through the system engage participants in the "excavation" of the traces left by others in the physical space. Being interested in spatial and activity traces and their role in social navigation, I quite like the metaphor. Some food for thoughts regarding chronotopic visualizations.

Analysing the remediation of urban life

In his paper "Beyond the ‘dazzling light’: from dreams of transcendence to the ‘remediation’ of urban life", Stephen Graham interestingly proposes six starting points in analyzing the remediation of urban life, aimed at new media research:

"

1. Stress continuities with discontinuities: new media maintain many intimate connections with old media, technologies, practices and infrastructures and spaces
2. The need for a ‘spatial turn’: urban places as dominant hubs of new media activity: new media research needs to engage much more powerfully with the complex intra-urban and inter-urban geographies that so starkly define the production, consumption and use of its subject artefacts, technologies and practices.
3. Excavating the material bases of new media: needs to excavate the often invisible and hidden material systems that bring the supposedly ‘virtual’ domains and worlds of new media into existence.
4. Centre on contingency: generalizations about new media and cities, and the invocation of deterministic metaphors such as the ubiquitous ‘impact’, is hazardous to say the least (...) a wide range of relations are likely to exist between new media and urban structures, forms, landscapes, experiences and the cultural particularities of different urban spaces and times.
5. Banalization and the ‘production of the ordinary’: new media have stopped being ‘new’ in the sense that they have already ‘produced the ordinary’ (...) This process of banalization is nothing new.
6. Address the growing invisibility of sociotechnical power: be acutely conscious of the growing invisibility of sociotechnical power in contemporary societies.

"

Why do I blog this? my favorite is certainly the 3rd one and I personally think that there is a very interesting vector or research along these lines. Surely something from the near future laboratory.

Spatial evolution in MMOs

Closely related to my earlier post about the evolution of space in multi-user environments, Richard Bartle commented about a paper he wrote on that topic. The author's starting point is that there is less discussion about virtual worlds ARE than WHY people play them, and he claims that VW are places. He basically describes the evolution from text-based MUDs, to 2 1/2D (with isometric or first-person viewpoints) and 3D MMORPGs.

His paper revolves around the display format of virtual worlds, a characteristic Jake Song did not address in his speech at LIFT Seoul:

"Given, then, that virtual worlds should endeavour to approximate reality for their everyday workings, how can this be implemented? The real is at a distinct advantage over the virtual in that it works entirely in parallel. It can ray-trace every photon in the universe simultaneously, whereas even the best of today’s home computers have a hard time rendering a few shadows in real time. Virtual worlds therefore have to cut corners. As it happens, they have developed three ways to do this, which correspond to the three main display formats: (...) Contiguous Locations: Textual worlds represent space as a set of interlinked nodes. Each node represents an atomic location (commonly called a room), which generally conceptualises the smallest meaningful space into which a player’s character can fit. (...) A map for a textual world therefore consists of a network of rooms connected by a set of arrows that correspond to movement commands (...) the arrows on the map need not be bi-directional (...) nodes need not represent rooms of the same size (...) A location can link to itself (...) Tessellated Locations:r ender the world graphically as an array of tiles. The major advantages over a network of nodes in this respect are the constant scale and the implicit connection between the squares. (...) Using an isometric approach, height could now be shown; this meant that hills and mountains no longer had to be suggested by a change in a square’s background texture (...) introduce a degree of nodality back into the system. (...) Access was gained through particular wsquares flagged as being coincident. As an example, if on the main map you walked onto a square containing a staircase leading upwards, that would teleport you to a submap for the floor “above” where you were; (...) Continuous Locations: a location is instead a mere point in a 3D co-ordinate system (...) In a true 3D world, the representation finally goes from contiguous to continuous. Strictly speaking, however, because computers store information using discrete bits, even their “real numbers” are not actually continuous; nevertheless, the level of granularity is so fine that to players it feels continuous."

Why do I blog this? material for a paper about cross-media studies of location-awareness interface in a MUD, 3D space and pervasive gaming. The elements discussed by Bartle are interesting wrt the literature review about the evolution of space.

Bartle, R. (2007). Making Places. In Borries, Friedrich, Walz, Steffen P., Brinkmann, Ulrich, and Matthias Bottger (eds.), Space Time Play. Games, Architecture, and Urbanism. BirkhÔø?user: Basel / Berlin / Boston.

Looks like Braille podotactile

These podotactiles, found on the subway platform in Lyon, France (metro station "Jean Jaurès" direction Charpennes) look quite funny, as if they had been stuck and removed:

As the color shows, they have been removed over time (one can see the mark of previous podotactiles) but what if this could mean something in Braille ;) One step towards more use of proprioception as a sense to navigate the city (an often overlooked one for sure, not by skateboader though)!

Granularity of maps

Toying with Facebook apps this week-end, I ran across the "where I've been" application; the one that allows you to store the countries you have visited. Here's a screenshot of the world map:

What's interesting is the level of granularity the map depicts: as one can see, every nations are represented (well almost, islands such as Mauritius are not) but it's funny to not that North America (USA+Canada) have a finer-grained representation given that states and province are showed.

Although I am not surprised by that, especially when you consider the audience of FB (mostly North America) as well as who designed it, this sort of depiction is interesting. It definitely shows a sort of spectrum that goes from a "precise/fine grained" end (NA) to a "imprecise/unknown" end (with countries not represented as well as no differentiation of big countries). A bit culture centric, this map would be very interesting to discuss with people from local culture. Of course, I know it's not the biggest feature in FB (and the same comments can be done on other web apps) but that's curious noting.

I would have have found curious some sort of user-generated map representations. For example, something such as the fool's world map:

Rob Shields on 'the virtual'

Read "The Virtual" by Rob Shields this week-end. In 230 pages or so, Shields interestingly debunks the notion "virtual" that pervades the discourse about technologies. Although, the book is made of 9 chapters, it's definitely the first three chapters that I found the most interesting. He basically starts by discussing how 'the virtual' became a metaphor that moved from the digital domain to being an organizing idea for companies and government policies, with, as a corollary, unrealistic and exaggerated expectations that technologies will solve social problems. Getting back to earlier instances of 'the virtual' ("If cyberspace is a consensual hallucination in the words of the novelist who coined the term, William Gibson, then cave paintings might well count so"), Shields shows how virtual space has a long history in the form of rituals and in the built form of architectural fantasies such as trompe-l'oeil simulations. Today's definition of the virtual, as well as its interconnection to digital hardware and software can be considered as a new form. Some excerpts of these first chapters that I found important:

"The virtual is often contrasted with the 'real' in commonsensical language by many writers who have not paused to examine the implications of the terms they are using (...) we routinely deploy the word 'virtual' as a place-holder for important forms of reality which are not tangible but are essential and necessary to our survival. (...) the 'virtual' is imagined as a 'space' between participants, a computer-generated common ground which is neither actual in its location or coordinates nor is it merely a conceptual abstraction, for it may be experienced 'as if' lived or given purposes (...) Virtual spaces are indexical, in the sense that they are interstitial moments."

I voluntarily skipped the part about disambiguating the terms 'virtual', 'actual', 'real', leaving that to another post. This is then followed by a description of 'digital virtualities', a summary of the existing systems and their cultural underpinnings (how they are influenced by cyberpunk novels, heterosexual visions of sex, mechanical dinosaurs, euclidean geometry to ease users' adoption

Why do I blog this? the whole book is very insightful but it's certainly these first chapters that I found the most relevant to my research. Being interested in digital space, I tend to avoid employing the term "virtual" because I find it too fuzzy and confusing. Most of the time, 'virtual' is used instead of 'digital' or '3D' and I find it quite limited. Shields' discussion is of considerable important to put things in context about this issue.

The quote that I emphasized in bold above is also very important to me considering how digital space is explicitly referred to as a "common ground" in some research about CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work).

Some differences between physical and digital spaces

In their paper called "Emplacing Experience", the authors compare aspects of space and place in physical and digital gameworlds. They describe different characteristics that show the specificity of digital places:

"Players, through the agency of their avatar, may expend considerable time traveling to the location for a quest. (...) RPG game design has a conspicuous propensity to afford and then discard the notions of place that compel the player in gameplay. (...) players may visit such places only once in gameplay to realize the experience. After performing a quest the place might as well cease to exist, having little further role in gameplay. (...) Although often rendered in attractive detail, the space between the places where the gameplay activities occur is, for all intents and purposes, empty. (...) Computational resources are often diverted from peripheral details of a place or by rendering environmental assets “just-in-time”. (...) Gameworlds and other Virtual Environments (VEs) contain far fewer cues than the physical world and therefore tend to fall into the category of being unfamiliar, particularly when first encountered. (...) a quality of an interaction that allows sense to be made only in a specific spatial, temporal or social context. Such indexicality is used frequently, subtly and without much ado in the physical world. In gameworlds, indexicality is often overt and even clumsy, such as NPCs providing information at set locations. "

Why do I blog this? material needed to write an article about the evolution of mutual location-awareness interfaces over time, in MUDs, 3D games and pervasive gaming. The elements described here are useful to document how the environments (game spaces) are different.

Browning, D. Stanley, S., Fryer, M. & Bidwell, N.J (2006). Emplacing experience. Joint International Conference on CyberGames & Interactive Entertainment, Perth 2007 Published in ACM Digital library

Adam Greenfield at PicNic 2007

Adam Greenfield's talk at Pic Nic was entitled "The City is Here for You to Use: Urban Form and Experience in the Age of Ambient Informatics. His presentation is basically about the implications of ubiquitous computing on the form and experience of the city. After "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing" Adam is now zooming on a more specific aspect of ubicomp: its influence on the urban environment. Inspired by Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander or Bernard Rurdofsky, he drawn our attention to their "generosity" about the life on the street and the recent changes exemplified by this quote from 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.". Through various examples, Adam showed how "we killed the street" due to cars, traffic, overplanning, the "repeating module of doom" (succession of franchises) leading to what Augé calls "non-places" and Rem Koolhas refers to as "junkspace". The city then becomes "stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery" through defensible space elements such as the following one I spotted in Amsterdam last week:

This situation leads to various forms of "withdrawal syndromes": ipod usage, mobile phone/blackberry digging... and the city is less "a negotiation machine between humans". In sum, "we lost something" and instead of lamenting ("nostalgia is for suckers"), Adam highlights the challenge: to rediscover the city of Jacobs, Rudofsky and Alexander in a way that is organic to our own age. This means that ubiquitous computing can be a candidate for that matter.

He then presented how ubiquitous computing (everyware) is already affecting cities. Information processing, sensors start showing up in new places at different scale. At the body level, he cited the Nike+ipod example, at the urban level, some dynamic signs allow people to be aware of bus schedule or use contact-cards, leading to more agency in infrastructures. This enable new model of interaction and "information processing dissolving in behavior". The upside of this might be that people can get information about cities and their pattern of use, visualized in new ways (Stamen Design's cabspotting, crime and real estate mapping, map of cities with WiFi hotspot)... and that information can be made available locally on demand in a way that people can act upon. Would ubicomp turn cities in more efficient and sustainable places? Possibly this is meant to allow better choices and entirely new behavior might emerge, will we get a participatory urbanism? a "genuine read/write urbanism" as he mentioned?

How will it affect urban forms? Adam showed some instances of how information as output at the building envelope: living glass modified by CO2 or the Blur Building by Diller-Scofidio (from swiss expo02). Ambient information becomes addressable, scriptable and/or query-able objects such as in the Chaos Computer Club Blinkenlights project.

(Picture courtesy of Diller-Scofidio)

One of the downside he presented concerned how this can lead to new inscriptions of class. He showed a DVD rental booth in NYC that allows cash to rent DVD but needs a credit card to access it. Another problem concerns the over-legibility of things: when there is too much explicitness and not enough ambiguity on plausible deniability, when everything is made public, what happens? maybe we do not want all our friends to know where we are, of course there are special case but not all the time.

Visualizing the geometry of relative distance

Wegzeit is a project by Dietmar Offenhuber that I found interesting:

"Wegzeit is a project about Los Angeles and how it is transformed when brought to relative space. Asking someone in L.A. about the distance between two locations usually prompts a response in minutes. It seems paradoxical that people rely on subjective parameters for their spatial decisions in a city with a largely regular, cartesian layout. But especially here, where the influences of physical space are leveled by this regularity, the importance of subjective, relative spaces become visible more strongly. The project consists of six dynamic virtual environments that propose models of how to visualize three-dimensional relative spaces. They deal with certain properties and effects caused by the nature of relative space such as the asymmetry of temporal distances. (...) in this example all the streets are represented by "rubberbands" between their intersections. temporal distance can now be introduced as force or rest length of the rubberband, and thus deforming the whole system. the topology of space is preserved this way, the result is a global, balanced view of the temporal space."

Why do I blog this? I found intriguing this way of representing "temporal distance", the visualization of space/time issues. Curious phenomenon to be reflected to city dwellers.