Urban
Seen in Guadeloupe last month. Made me think about this quote:
“The world constantly decays. Moisture gets in. Damp hangs around. Ice expands joints. Surfaces wear thin. Particles fall out of suspension. Materials rot. Insects breed. Animals chew. All kinds of wildlife war with all kinds of fabric. Humans make errors. Each process of dilapidation does its special harm and releases new ‘wastes’"
Graham S. and Thrift, N. (2007). Out of order, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 24, No. 3.
Two intriguing examples of defensible space in the Paris metro, or how a certain steel structure prevent people to stand below the tv-screen. Curiously enough, it looks as if someone who stand in there to give you the same information delivered by the screen.
Intriguing sticker found in Paris yesterday. Surely some trendy street-art phenomenon but the observing how it's inserted in the urban fabric is very compelling, as if the city infrastructure was referred to as "this is not a prototype"... as if people needed to be aware that this pipe was real and important.
Would be funny to have this kind of sticker "everyware" (please appreciate the pun here): "this is not a prototype... and you'd better care about this urban computing infrastructure".
Reading books about urban sociology on the bus in Guadeloupe made me think about this quote by Georg Simmel:
"Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one anothe"
Georg Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen Über Die Formen Der Vergesellschaftung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958), 486
Same interface for metro tickets vending machine in GTA 4 (above) and in Paris (below).
Why do I blog this? this is an interesting connection between the digital and the physical: this a digital interface found in the physical environment which found its way in a digital environment. Quite recursive right? What's ironic though is that it's not possible to touch the in-game screen.
See also Dan Hill's perspectives on this issue in 2004. He interestingly compared pictures he did in Santa Monica to photos from GTA's fictional LA (in an earlier version of GTA). Dan highlighted the detailed sense of location in video games such as this one.
Certainly one of the most intriguing urban project I've encountered lately: miel béton (which means "concrete honey" in french): the production of honey on urban roofs in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint Denis. According to new paris bohemian:
"A graphic designer and visual artist by trade, Olivier Darné began his investigation of bees in 2000, when he first placed a single beehive on his house in Saint Denis. Following that experiment with the installation of a dozen hives on the roof of city hall, Olivier was fascinated by the idea of sending bees out into the city as "prospectors" of the urban environment. What, exactly, could bees tell us about our city, about the relationships between wild and urban, between humans and their surroundings, between space and time? What Olivier found was more than gratifying: bees reproduce, in liquid form, the density, changes, and social organization of our city. If you consider that 3000 hectares (or 5000 acres) of city are concentrated into a single pot of honey, the resulting flavors are a gauge of how we urbanites live. (...) By consuming honey produced in and from their own city, urbanites connect themselves intimately to their land, even if it happens to be one that’s filled with concrete, high-rise housing blocks, and if they’re lucky, bees."
Why do I blog this? definitely not related to technology, I found this project amazingly curious as it shows how cities can be curious places for new forms of design. The intersection between nature and the urban environment is surely a relevant topic for design.
Observed this morning, next to the circus in Geneva. Nomads have their vehicles and movable antennas. What's next?
Beaming alien? Wifi and space invaders around? An intriguing combination. Especially this amazing number of barcodes meant to be used by the facility management company in Paris Gare de Lyon.
The minimal b&w sticker is quite well integrated with the seriousness of the barcodes.
Seen in Paris (I spent half of my time in this city lately)
Signage on the sidewalk, dead birds and homeless people living in tents. Or, on other words: designed artifacts for city-dwellers, animal partners which accidently did not manage to live in good terms with (driving) humans, and people left-aside from society.
The urban environment per se, a certainly gloomy winter.
In the last issue of Vodafone's Receiver, there is an article by Anne Galloway about environmental sensing projects. Anne gives a quick summary of some meaningful citizen sensing and community mapping projects such as Proboscis' Snout, Preemptive Media's AIR or Beatriz da Costa's pigeon blog. These different endeavors generally aims at collecting and viewing a wide array of location-based data to reinvigorate environmentally focused civic engagement. They want to do so by (1) engaging people in collecting information about their environments, (2) revealing invisible phenomena such as pollution.
(Pigeon Blog maps)
What's more interesting to me is Anne's perspective about that matter:
"What all these exploratory projects have in common is a shared expectation that mobile sensing technologies can be effectively used to effect social or political change. (...) For example, projects in this domain rarely, if ever, question the environmental or political impacts of the technologies they seek to employ for environmental and political activism. (...) While all of the projects discussed above advocate using technologies for socially, politically and environmentally positive ends, they also implicitly support existing consumption practices in the developed world, and hide the role that technological progress has played in creating the very problems they seek to improve. (...) While it may be accurate to point out the ubiquity of mobile phone use, it is also worthwhile to account for how new technological applications stand to impact those who are absent from typical-use scenarios. Furthermore, while promoting public science is undeniably a laudable goal, it is also a rather complex one. Despite the emphasis on local knowledge production in such projects, the data collected still speak the global language of science. By implicitly supporting the notion that scientific data are the appropriate types of evidence a citizen can collect, political action relies on conformity to existing structures of knowledge and power. (...) Finally, this complexity is further compounded by the capacity (or incapacity) of people to make sense of the data collected, not to mention their willingness (or unwillingness) to act as data collectors in the first place."
Why do I blog this? currently writing a book about locative media and working in the field for quite some time now, I am more and more interested in "reality mining" and "people as sensors" (intentionally or while using their own electronic devices). I find quite intriguing that what is sensed is often related to negative phenomena (such as pollution) and it's rare to see other variables. Anne's arguments here are spot on the critiques one can make about this people-as-sensor frenziness. What I appreciate here is that she doesn't "jetter le bébé avec l'eau du bain": a french expression that literally means "not throwing the baby with the bath's water", that is to say that she describes the problems with regards to this approach whilst not dismissing the purpose. Accounting for the problems of reality mining allows to know one's bias:
"I also believe that we need to approach our activities in this area with a clear understanding of their boundaries and biases. Because, in the end, I believe that it will take working through – or around – these limitations in order to effect the most profound and lasting changes."
She then takes Chris Nold's Biomapping project as a project that both take environmental and social concerns into account properly.
Two intriguing examples of prototyping in the urban environment. The two pictures above (taken in Geneva and Lyon) depict another form of trying to represent the upcoming colors of a building. Different colors are presented (stand-alone or with a combination of others) to the people who will take a decision.
The pictures below that I've already shown here is a basic model of how a soon-to be skyscraper would look like in Zürich, Switzerland. An intriguing steel structure that represents the volume which will be occupied soon by a new building.
Different range of representations using shapes and color. Although the color example quite minimally shows the future of the building, the steel structure is impressive.
Why do I blog this? interesting documentation of a certain design process and how certain elements can be prototyped to evaluate people's reaction to a certain change. These elements acts as a sort of prototyping the near future of the urban fabric using shape and color probes. Very important in terms of user acceptation since colors and huge shapes can be problematic for city-dwellers (say, in continental europe).
Tangentially, it also shows that physical and situated artifacts can also be employed to design the city of tomorrow. It doesn't mean however that digital techniques such as 3D modeling or augmented reality cannot be employed.
Obama is ubiquitous in France. Beyond press articles, he is present in street art (Saint Etienne) but more interestingly as a bait or as weird cue to buy things such clothes (Paris) or pizzas (Paris):
Why do I blog this? not very related to the topics at hand here but this sort of pervasiveness is intriguing. Obama is clearly a meme spread in the physical environment. Perhaps it can show how people have certain hopes or want to benefit from the Zeitgeist.
Incomplete buildings are something that fascinate me. The raw backbone of the buildings looks as if it had been never finished or strip naked after a momentarily stopped renovation. To me, the city of the near future definitely looks like this sort of architecture. And this fascination is not just poetic, it's a very recurring encounter in lots of cities due to economic and cultural issues in construction.
For example, the picture above has been taken in Cusco, Peru. It nicely reveals how the floors reached different levels of completeness. The one above is a restaurant where I had lunch in august, whereas the two other stories below have a totally different affordance. Sometimes, it's even more fascinating when you have incomplete skyscrapers, falling into despair. Some are totally abandoned, some only partly... with pockets of emptiness. These structures often lead to interesting new forms of socialization that would surely need some time to be uncovered.
If like me you're into this sort of things, you may be intrigued by a french architecture firm called coloco which works on this concept. Régine pointed me to their Skeleton Observatory. It's actually a summary of their exploration, about why the think this architectural typology is important and may play a role in the near future. It eventually lead them to describe projects about "inhabiting the skeletons", i.e. the re-appropriation of abandoned and incomplete architectures. The skeleton becomes and "invitation à l'usage" (i.e. "an invitation to be used"). They even have their own France-based abandoned building to test their hypotheses.
Why do I blog this? cataloguing curious signals about new forms of architecture on a pure exploratory angle.
How to cue the passers-by to enter this shoe shop by using a delicate socialnav-like trick. Note how intriguing it is to use this lovely shoe material on the very swiss-designed raw concrete ground. Seen in Luzern, Switzerland yesterday afternoon.
Two maps to navigate in Berlin yesterday and today. The first one, on the right, is the classic lonely-planet-like artifact you give to the hotel, asking them "can you point me where we area?". The second is the lovely and more valuable map handed by a local friend who made some recommendations. Even though most of the context (parks, other streets) is lost, there is more value to me in this second one (and it's also more foldable in my pocket).
Two different sorts of information: where the former is exhaustive and official, the latter is minimal but goes straight to the point: the place where my friend assumed I'd be intrigued. Services opportunity here.
Coincidentally, and because we passed by Berlin in the same week, near future laboratory compadre Julian Bleecker has also a post about maps.
Reading this report on "the impacts of CCTV in the UK, I was struck by some points in the conclusion:
"crime rates appeared to the authors to be a poor measure of the effectiveness of CCTV. The problem about measuring outcomes in terms of overall crime rates was that they disguised some important successes with particular types of offence. Moreover, in some cases (although not many) an increase in crime was an indicator of success, and this needs carefully teasing out. Similarly, mechanisms increasing recorded crime rates can work alongside those that reducecrime, and these can cancel each other out. Recorded crime rates were subject to a great deal of background noise from other factors, such as other crime reduction initiatives in the areas being studied, regional and national crime trends, and changes in methods of crime recording, any of which could mask the small impact that CCTV might have. (...) there was a lack of realism about what could be expected from CCTV. In short, it was oversold – by successive governments – as the answer (indeed the ‘magic bullet’, Ditton and Short, 1999) to crime problems (...) there was a tendency to put up cameras and expect impressive results, ignoring the challenge of making what is quite a complex measure work (replicating the findings of Ditton et al. 1999), and failing to define what exactly the CCTV system was expected to do. (...) the installation of CCTV requires more than the production of a technically competent system; generally, project designers did reasonably well in this regard. However, systems have to be monitored properly or recordings made and stored properly; but the quality of this work varied considerably from one control room to another."
Why do I blog this? was reading this at the airport after having found the reference in a newspaper, I find interesting the arguments given above as they can also apply to lots of other ubiquitous computing projects. The expectations towards such camera-based system may interestingly apply to other sensor-based deployments. There's a lot more to draw on the report, especially regarding the humans who are in control rooms and who have trouble keeping up with the huge amount of data that is collected.
Some other intriguing examples of apparent infrastructures in Cambridge (USA): the different sorts of cable wiring. Different boxes, different providers. Sometimes even boxes are removed, leaving only the wiring.
An interesting pattern I've found here last week during my ventures in contemporary cities: when attribute of a city are transfered in another.
2 examples: the one above shows the famous entrance to the Paris subway system by Hector Guimard. Except that this nice organic and artnouveau artifact is located in Montreal and not in Paris. In this case, it was actually given by RATP (the parisian transport company) to the Montreal metro in 1967, made out pieces of demolished Guimards from Paris metro stations.
The second example is simply this street box that contains electrical and phone wiring on the streets of Geneva: it has basically been wrapped with something that makes it look like a badly-ripped off from the red telephone box designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
Why do I blog this? curiously observing the meme-like transfer of shapes/colors of items from one city to another. Perhaps this is a representation of post-modernity.
Each time I go to north america, I am struck by how infrastructures are more apparent than in continental europe (= home). Pipes, tubes, sprinklers look simply more present to me, perhaps because they're made more visible through colorful signage.
See for example this gas tubes in Montreal:
Or these nice tubes on a wall:
This lovely yellow tube to refuel indoor heating systems is also stunning:
A favorite in MTL is the "siamoises", these dual sprinklers which often comes with this intriguing signs (way up because it needs to be visible when there is snow):
Another favorite is certainly this kind of huge tape in san diego:
Why do I blog this? simply this helps to frame and understand the large technical systems of our urban environments. What I find interesting here in this made-visible process is the fact that it reflects how buildings are "process" with flows coming in and flows coming out.
