Anecdotes about swiss [edge] urban practices

Following odd performances lately and being interested by issues related to mobility and new spatial practices, I've noted these intriguing anecdotes in Switzerland. First, the Bigger pineapple is a mobile collective who aims at "interrogating new means of transport" (apart from doing this). Their first achievement was to walk from Lausanne to Geneva (around 60 kilometers). Mostly young students, they started at 7:15 in the morning and arrived at 00:40. The purpose was to show the "real distance" between these two cities which seems close at first glance (they are if you take the train it's only 30'). Other swiss peeps also started a similar trip by travelling from Neuchatel to Marseille (600km) using scooters (trottinettes)

The "Bigger Pineapple" are also interested in other transportation systems such as mobile bus stops, in this project. The issue they're interested in is the one of personal mobility: are public transport adapted to our needs? what about creating a personal bus stop? They then built fake bus stop signs that they held in front of buses in Geneva to see if the bus would stop. As reported in the press only one agreed. Their next project want to deal with air flights.

It reminds me another interesting initiative, a bit outdated. Back in 2004, while we were starting the CatchBob location-based gamed project, Fabien and I were contacted by a guy who organize a bike trip in Lausanne called "Balade des chiens écrasés" (crused dogs trip). "Chiens écrasés" refers to newspaper sections where events such as murders or weird urban anecdotes happened. The point of this sort of trip is to revisit these places by biking around the city... with the idea of re-discover the city with a different viewpoint.

Why do I blog this? all these anecdotes IMO form a coherent set of weak signals from the near future which shows edge-but-meaningful urban practices. They question and raise important concerns, especially about mobility, culture and our relationship to space.

Privacy concerns about the capture of electronic traces in urban viz projects

Recent advancements in the field of urban computing and visualization of electronic traces left by people in the physical space are more and more raising privacy issues. After a time where they've been carried out by public bodies, artists and research labs, some private initiatives and private research projects are now taking the lead, which raise the concerns even more than in the recent past. The Guardian tackles that issue in an article about Bluetooth watching yesterday. The Cityware project in Bath is indeed looking at how people move around in cities by using scanning devices in certain locations unknown to the public. Bluetooth signals coming from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras are captured and help to pinpoint people's whereabouts in a now classic way. The main problem of course is that urban dwellers are then tracked without their consent, which leads privacy activists to qualify this kind of project as "yet another example of moronic use of technology".

(Space syntax analysis from the Cityware project showing people using mobile phones (red) and cameras (blue) in an urban location (Bath Abbey))

So what are the elements at stake? Some excerpts from the article:

" The Bath University researchers behind the project claim their scanners do not have access to the identity of the people tracked. Eamonn O'Neill, Cityware's director, said: "The objective is not to track individuals, whether by Bluetooth or any other means. We are interested in the aggregate behaviour of city dwellers as a whole. The notion that any agency would seriously consider Bluetooth scanning as a surveillance technique is ludicrous." But privacy experts disagree, pointing out that Bluetooth signals are assigned code names that can, to varying degrees, indicate a person's identity.

Many people use pseudonyms, nicknames, initials, or abbreviations to identify their Bluetooth signals. Cityware's scanners are also picking up signals that are listed using people's full name, email address and telephone numbers."

Some claims there are solutions to these problems but harmful scenarios can be considered:

"Vassilis Kostakos, a former member of Cityware who now does Bluetooth experiments on buses in Portugal for the University of Madeira, accepted such tracking was a problem. "We are actually trying to fix this," Kostakos said. "If a person's phone is talking to a scanner, then they should be told about it. Any technology can have good and bad consequences. In many ways, I think the role of a scientist is to point out both. I agree this is complex and I agree there are harmful scenarios." (...) Kostakos said he could foresee complex ways in which criminals could exploit the technology, adding: "I recently tried to look at people's travel patterns across the world, and we [saw] how a unique device which showed up in San Francisco turned up in Caracas and then Paris.""

Why do I blog this? the article covers the ambivalence of that topic and how each stakeholders (researchers on one side and privacy activists on the other) have their own concerns and claims. Following the advancement of the field or a certain amount of time, I do agree we have no answers so far. Since lots of the studies so far have focused on "counting" people and measuring flows, it's interesting to note that it's not the first time urban planners are looking at intimate part of city dwellers's lives. For example, the use of trash content analysis is an important method for that matter, which seems to raise less concerns, although it can also be invasive (but less relational since it's easier to connect a Bluetooth ID to an email than linking a trashed Big Kahuna Burger to your social security #).

A bit more surprising is the article conclusion with this weird assertion: "some scientists using the technology describe a future scenario in which homes and cars adapt services to suit their owners, automatically dimming lights, preparing food and selecting preferred television channels". It's always weird to me to see this kind of engineer nonsense popping up again and again over time. Nonetheless I find it interesting as this sort of automation is a recurring dream that shows the perpetuation of bad ideas in design over time. It's been few months that we're discussing these issues with Fabien or Julian. Concerning the use of electronic traces, I am less interested in how it can help automating processes and depressing stuff like the one described above.

Information remnant

Pen annotations on a concrete wall... or when information put by builders in context stay in place. Beyond the aesthetic rendering through the glass, that picture nicely depicts the presence of certain indications about the building process which remains over time.

"Design in the age of intelligent maps"

(Maps of optic fiber routes in an urban environment taken from Jef Huang's talk at the world congress of architecture)

Meanwhile, on the urban computing front, Adobe Think Tank featured an insightful article by Karzys Varnelis and Leah Meisterlin entitled "The invisible city: Design in the age of intelligent maps". It described how today's maps are not just about spatial relationships but rather about revealing invisible information ("previously hidden in spreadsheets and databases") through new sorts of representation.

As the authors say, maps are now so ubiquitous that they're a key component of network culture: we use map on the web, on mobile, in car GPS, etc. and even on the street.

Concerning the implications:

"...is not just a new representation of the city that emerges out of this data; its a new hybrid city, part physical texture and part data-driven map. (...) For designers, the implications are clear. As maps become richer, more complicated, and less predictable, cartography becomes less a matter of convention and more a matter of invention. Our age of intelligent maps demands intelligent map design (...) Instead of seeing ourselves as part of the city fabric, inhabiting a three-dimensional urban condition, we dwell in a permanent out-of-body experience, displaced from our own locations, seeing ourselves as moving dots or pins on a map. In doing so, we experience ourselves less as individuals and more as data moving along a planetary network, composed of both telematic circuits and the physical pathways of the global city. (...) [and also some critical perspectives:] If ubiquitous mapping systems are a powerful new tool, uncritical reliance on them can easily lead users astray. (...) it is also disappointing—and perhaps indicative of where Google is ultimately going in all this—to observe that layers of content for ubiquitous mapping applications remain so tied to traditional datasets"

(Picture of the book "Paris ville invisible" by Bruno Latour which deals with this issue)

So what can be done? how to design meaningful interactions and using alternative datasets? Varnelis an Meisterlin describe how "interventionist mapping" has started to gain some interest recently, mentionning examples like Stamen's INdigital Wireless E9-1-1 or Justice Mapping Center and Columbia University's Spatial Information Design Lab's series of maps depicting the Million Dollar Blocks. These projects, by showing relationships and patterns can become more than expository: they allow to ask questions, draw conclusions and help to mobilize people politically.

And while maps's role evolve, so does our relationship to the spatial environment

"In the past, maps existed as much to mark out the unknown, to slowly fill in areas blank except perhaps for the legend "here be monsters," as to represent the known territory of the city. Today, however, with polar exploration, mountain climbing, and even space travel, becoming increasingly banal amusements instead of feats of daring exploration, maps are shifting toward a new relationship between the known and the unknown. (...) maps as navigational tools for the physical traversal of space are supplanted by intelligent maps for navigating a contemporary space in which the physical becomes a layer of data in a global informational space (...) Much of this world is invisible and it is the task of the designer to help us understand it."

Why do I blog this? Accumulating material for a near future laboratory pamphlet about urbain comuting. The article reads as an interesting follow-up to Urban Computing and Its discontent by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, since it looks at the same boundary object through another perspective.

Perusing this also made me think about what Dan Hill recently described about his position at Arup (and some examples of what is of interest to him):

"I'm currently exploring a few ideas in particular, such as extrapolating and aggregating Building Information Modelling (BIM) techniques up to the city level - to form a kind of 'City Information Modelling' (CIM). Taken with the feedback from urban informatics, this could then extend the design process out over the true life-cycle of the project, including inhabited and adapted, which would mean a four-dimensional modelling process taking into account the living city, or a '4D Urbanism'. You'll note these concepts are still a bit slippery, to say the least."

Real-time information about electricity production

A basic instance of revealing the invisible through technology (urban computing!?). These simple electronic displays give some information about the production of electricity by solar panels located on this parking lot rooftop. Seen in Lyon, France yesterday, it actually represents the real-time production (percentage), the cumulated production since 2005 and the equivalent of saved greenhouse gas.

While visiting a glass dump

... made me thing of Person, M. & Shanks, M. Theatre/Archaeology, London: Routledge (2001):

"The archaeological experience of ruin, decay and site formation processes reveals something vital about social reality, but something which is usually disavowed. Decay and ruin reveal the symmetry of people and things. They dissolve the absolute distinction between people and the object world. This is why we can so cherish the ruined and fragmented past"

Why do I blog this? Visiting this glass dump last week made me think about the intricate relationship between waste, detritus and how we use things.... which often leads to an intriguing typology of places where we drop detritus like the one above. Generally hidden from public view, it sometimes resurface. Beyond my fascination towards garbage, it's intriguing to note the value of trashs described by Person and Shanks's quote.

"A Social Dimension for Digital Architectural Practice" by Chris Speed

Chris Speed's PhD thesis seems very relevant for people interested in architecture and digital technologies, and more specifically the notion of "social navigation":

"Through a literature review of the introduction and development of digital technologies to architectural practice, the thesis identifies the inappropriate persistence of a number of overarching concepts informing architectural practice. In a review of the emergence and growth of ‘human geography’ it elaborates on the concept of the social production of space, which it relates to an analysis of emerging social navigation technologies. In so doing the thesis prepares the way for an integration of socially aware architecture with the opportunities offered by social computing."

As the author describes in his conclusion, the thesis:

"...adressed the research question by analysing how digital architecture had positioned itself without a social agenda through its adoption of a split model for time and space. It went on to discuss the way in which human geography, through an identification of social agency in the production of space, has demonstrated how a combined approach supports many new models for understanding experience. It introduced social navigation as a contemporary form of social computing that offers the methodological techniques for supporting the construction of digital architecture. The author's own art and design practice was reflected upon, as it was through this that a methodology was developed and applied to the large-scale design project, and evaluated through a substantial ethnographic study. "

What's interesting in his work is the different projects he designed to illustrate his theoretical claims. One my favorite is certainly the Random Lift button that I already mentioned here.

(Photo by Chris Speed)

Why do I blog this? I only had a glance to the whole thing because there's a lot of material in there but it looks like an impressive attempts to put together different theoretical bodies and design projects in a very coherent and relevant way to address the relationship between digital and physical space.

Folded map on the bike

A nicely folded map for a careful bike-rider? At first glance, its looks as if the owner folded a map intelligently to find his/her way in the city. But the same map is on every bike around and if you read it you notice that it's a warning about the upcoming removal of the bike. An interesting signal of map usage with bikes anyway. Seen in Zürich, Switzerland this week.

Bottom-up urban practice: tune your city

Just saw that in a the newspaper this morning, there seems to be a guy in town who's attaching those little ashtray in various places because he's fed up of people throwing paper and cigarettes on the ground. A bottom-up urban fux of some sort if you want.

Public telephones and public space culture

URBAN TRACES - TELEPHONE is a project I recently stumbled acrosss, which examines public phones in different countries. Alina Tudor & Răzvan Neagoe sees public phones as a interesting sign of daily urban life that reveal the relationship between certain cultures and public space:

"We start up from the idea that the identity cannot be anything else but the object of a horizontal analysis and can’t be simply defined as an urban artefact. It represents a cultural sign as long as the virulent changes affecting all the social structures register as a natural answer a form of resistance over the all these mutations.

TEL. continues the series of unconventional spaces as part of the Urban Traces project. Following the interactive “Up in the flat there’s a house” and “Courier” projects, this one brings in front a small but… sizeable space, which is ignored. We have chosen the public phone because it is getting sick of daily urban life syndrome. It has become a place for passers by to have rest, a shelter to hide from the rain… it is vandalised and almost none of the phone booths has the door. This project is a warning sign regarding the collective indifference that is representative for big cities."

An example from this project:

This project is also part of a "Bank of images", that is to say a collection of public telephones from different countries and regions of the world:

"The Bank of images project has the intention to collect a series of photographs of public phones searching to offer them a new identity. Images that are representing different telephones and phone booths used accordingly to any other destination besides their primary one, but also the public phones which are placed in different contexts and thus acquiring a double sense in relation to that place are expected."

Why do I blog this? Public telephone (with or without phones) is definitely a urban signal I am always looking at when visiting a city. A topic we covered in Sliding Friction as well. What I find intriguing in that project is the idea of thinking how they can reveal the state of public space cultures in modern societies. Other public services can also be relevant to observe, such as public toilets, benches or traffic lights.

Urban computing (behind the scene)

A recurring topic here, as seen in Zürich yesterday: what it takes to support urban computing: infrastructures and configuration issues.

Map for blind

How to represent a map for blind people. Seen this week in Torino.

Change in urban environments in the past centuries

In their introduction to the great "Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilites and the Urban Condition" book, Graham and Marvin describes the 5 most important changes cities and urban infrastructures have experienced in the past century:

• "the intensity, power and reach of those connections [water, electrical, heat, car infrastructures];
• the pervasiveness of reliance on urban life based on material and technological networks and the mobilities they support;
• the scale of technologically mediated urban life;
• the duplicating, extending variety and density of networked infrastructures;
• the speed of sophistication of the more powerful and advanced infrastructures."

(Of course the discussion of change here is limited to infrastructures) why do I blog this? because it simply gives the global pictures in which one can think about the present and future situation of cities. Always interesting to keep in mind while working on urban computing and city futures projects.

From Ubiquitous Technologies to Human Context (World Congress of Architecture)

Yesterday in Turin, Italy for the World Congress of Architecture (UIA) where I've been asked by the organizers to put together a session about ubiquitous computing and human needs/desires. It was called “From Ubiquitous Technologies to Human Context" and three great speakers joined me on stage: Adam Greenfield, Jeffrey Huang and Younghee Jung. See the text I wrote for the conference leaflet below. The recent dissemination of information and communication technologies in the everyday environment, also referred to as “Ubiquitous Computing”, is expected to influence the design of our environment. More specifically, tangible examples concern the use of location services to track people’s or goods movement in space, temperature or pollution sensors to collect information about the state of the environment and enable the reconfiguration of building component based on these information. Other examples are not so distant in the future as shown by different examples. For instance RFID chips in the London subway allow people to swipe access card against metro terminal to enter the underground premises. Or, Singapore’s road transit system is based on wireless communication and vehicle identification to provide drivers with different pricing schemes.

In the field of architecture, some envisions the presence of “ambient displays” on walls, ceilings or billboards to represent various flows of information integrated as visualization in the everyday human environment. A tremendous amount of projects in this field also deals with interactive table that aim at supporting collaboration and new affordances for collective usage. Operating at a different level than interactive furnitures, smart home systems are meant to allow voice control, distant access to home features (like starting the heating before being at home) or automating certain functions. At the city scale, location-based services refer to applications that take advantage of the users’ location in space to provide them with dedicated services such as navigation aid, the tracking of individuals or the possibility to attach text or audio messages to specific places. Some applications running on cell phones allow people to assign ratings to places such as restaurants or clubs so that others passers-by can be notified about the quality of the place.

Such services are enabled by wireless communication, the combination of the availability of sensors, identification technologies and the miniaturization of chips in charge of data-processing. As this description reveals, the inclusion of technologies in our environment and objects appears to be highly technical and mostly driven by the development of new technologies. There is indeed a growing gap between what technologies make possible and their relevance to people. In lots of case the scenarios promoted by designers of these services are often transferred from past work in other fields such as business applications or collaborative work. The representation of the user propelled by the early scenarios of ubiquitous computing is often the one of a quest for efficiency and very limited models of people’s desires. Translated into the home domain or the city level, these scenarios are often irrelevant or purely instrumentalist vision of individuals and groups behavior. They for example assume the need to fill “dead moments” when waiting for a bus or the absolute need to “connect” to other people, regardless of the actual context, mood or culture of the users of such systems. In addition, the notion of “automation” is taken for granted, as if every action should be transferred to machines that may anticipate what the users want to do based on previous behavior that was “sensed” and “mined”. Moreover, the notion of “user” itself can be questioned when you have services that operate invisibly in the environment without any specific sign of their presence to remind people that they can be tracked or that sensor collect information about their behavior.

In the context of day about “Hope, Future, Technology”, this session will address the relation between these technological innovations and human needs as well as desires. We would describe how there is a crux need to take people, their culture, desires and context into account in the building of such applications.

I've put my introductory slides here. The whole point of the session was to show why architects should pay attention to ubiquitous computing:

• Designers of such systems are implicitly dealing with architecture in their projects BUT they are not architects so they apply their previous knowledge: generally utilitarian, “design an augmented house like designing MS Word”
• Ubiquitous computing is a complex problem, lots of issues need to be taken into account: human expectations, acceptance of automation...
• Start the dialogue to create this “parallel world”

Thanks Raffaela Lecchi for the invitation, thanks Adam, Jef and Younghee for participating!

Digital Yet Invisible: Making Ambient Informatics More Explicit to People

In Torino today for the Frontiers of Interaction conference where I've just given a talk entitled "Digital Yet Invisible: Making Ambient Informatics More Explicit to People". Slides can be found here. The talk was about the paradoxical relationship between visibility and ubiquitous computing, a topic I already tackled in Paris few months ago:

"To some extent, the “disappearing computing” paradigm that Mark Weiser described has been some taken to the letter that digitality services are invisible. There is a very intriguing and recursive tension here that can be summarized by this dilemma: “how to make visible invisible techniques that aim at making visible the invisible“. And what often happens is that this lead to a situation where people think technology works like magic."

Thanks Leandro for the invitation! The video is available here.

Visualizing the information distance between cities

(via), City Distance is a neat project by bestirario that aims at measuring informational distance between cities. What this means is simple: it creates a visual representation of the the world comparing real geographical distances with informational distances as defined by Google:

"This tridimensional scheme represents the strength of relations between cities from searches on google. The main idea is to compare the number of pages on internet [sic] where the two cities appear one close to the other, with the number of pages they appear isolated. This position indicates some kind of intensity of relation between the cities. After measuring this “google proximity” we divide it by its geographical distance. By this process we obtain an indicator about the strength of the relation in spite of the real distance, a kind of informational distance between cities."

Which is what the authors of this project calls the "google platonic distance between cities" (See the website for more information about how to compute this).

Why do I blog this? A very curious and insightful representation comes out from this sort of viz. I guess the granularity can be different and reveal finer-grained patterns at smaller levels. Yet another interesting type of urban visualization.

Monocle on cities

The latest issue of Monocle has some interesting article about city life. Of course, there is the Monocle spin that some may not like but there are interesting bits and pieces.

Presence of radio waves, revealed

Making radio waves more explicit through stickers.

Urban safari in modern architecture

Each time I'm around Camargue (South of France, near Montpellier), I try to spend time around La Grande Motte. An intriguing beach resort built in the late 60s, early 70s, the place was formerly a desert of sand dunes and lagoons where giant mole hilles ("mottes" in French) has been designed. The architecture was based on the Inca pyramids models in Mexico, designed with terrace systems along with triangular, round and rectangular features to provide wind and sun shields and sea views.

In France, bashing this sort of architecture is a sort of regular sport, although lots of people go there and enjoy the place. The unity and the coherence of the place is amazingly interesting, and although this city has been created ex nihilo it definitely feels more urban than lots of other beach resorts in the area. Some urban aspects are important: such as the fact that the beach and the building are not separated by a road with cars (but only a promenade for pedestrian and bikes).

Wandering around the city after midnight with a digital camera, food bits and flip flops is a curious experience, especially when the place is not yet crowded with semi-naked humans flocking there for the grandes vacances. The first picture shows a global view taken form the harbor showing the odd ambiance mixing modernist architecture and weird lightings. The other pictures I took give the impression of a retrofuturistic spin that you can also get when you go to University of California Irvine.

Strange angles, fantastic cladding textures are also deeply intriguing in this night atmosphere. Lots of small details, big shapes that you discover and rediscover and stumble across a group of teenagers riding their bikes on curved shapes, old cats trying to get some food and a lost tourist sat on the beach with a laptop.

Lots of people consider this sort of urbanism as a big (and ugly) failure, I don't by that argument and I would be interested in scratching more the surface to understand what works and what doesn't to understand how that modern urbanism project has some good lessons to draw. Surely the low presence of cars would be an interesting topic. Also, I am pretty sure the infrastructure layer of the city may be fantastic to inspect more closely.

Highlights from EURO 2008

Having the Euro soccer cup in Switzerland (and Austria) is interesting as lots of people are cruising around on the streets. Hence, lots of interesting practices or signs of people's practices occurs. Some excerpts from the last few days: Paper notes at a street corner to give friends an update about the new whereabouts (it says "We're at café pessoa, 30 meters ahead in Dassier [street]":

The hospitality of some places however reach certain limits, as "tents are not umbrella" sign attest from the need to buy an umbrella when it rains instead of staying around:

The inherent contradictions of signs in a city not very well-accustomed to helps its tourists (Geneva):

BUT, a fruitful attempt to help soccer-fans takes the form of a pavement map; nicely employed in the picture below. The elegant map-on-the-ground solution is efficient for people who walk and ride bike, as it gives information in context and also allows congregation around the signs to find the stadium:

And, of course, when it comes to computer-based real-time street information, failure and glitches are never very far:

The presence of other cultures, and their intricate relationships with their host country. In this case it's Spain and Switzerland: some only put their spanish flag but most of the flag we see are grouped with both a swiss and spanish flag (you can replace Spain with Portugal, Italy, Turkey and France in the sentence before):

Why do I blog this? what a nice context to observe cultural issues and whatever can be related to human behavior regarding mobility and techniques/technologies/organizational solutions for recurring problems.