Testing Sony Eyepet Augmented Reality

Into testing Eyepet, a game for the PlayStation 3 that is based on Augmented Reality. It basically uses the PlayStation Eye camera to allow you to interact with a virtual pet and objects in the real world. The process is very straight-forward. You have this black plastic placard shown on the picture above with a white square and a paw-print on it that you carefully place on your floor next to your TV set. The PS3 Eye recognizes it (as well as the environment): your surroundings then appear on your TV. You can start fooling around with an egg that soon becomes a gremlin-like pet. The game mechanic is progressive and based on interacting with the virtual animal either by touching (I mean, moving around in front of your TV that see on the screen what you're touching) OR by using virtual objects by holding the card (which has a symbol that is recognized by the system and make the digital item appear on the screen). See for example the following case:

Here I am, trying to activate a heater to warm-up an egg. The point is to push the lever below the pink arrow.

Pushed, now I can warm the egg.

The gesture-based interaction works pretty well, especially when using virtual items. However, what is definitely tough here is that you have to act in front of your TV in a mirror-way: moving an object on the right (on the screen) requires that you move your hand on the left. This reversed-then-flipped mirror image of your room is a bit disorientating for me; i guess it may be difficult for kids as well. In the preliminary gameplays you need to make your pet jump several on a trampoline, so you really need to be accurate when you move it around so that the pet doesn't fell down on your floor. That being said, I found intriguing to have this sort of setting where you make gestures in the physical world and you access some sort of mirror-world on the TV. I do think however that game designers could play more on that trick.

There is also an impressive feature that enables you to draw things on a sketchbook... which are then translated into virtual items in the game. You draw a picture, hold it up in front of the camera and the system will try to copy it (it only works with good lighting conditions).

Why do I blog this? My interest in this sort of things is connected to by my research about interaction design and my interrogations about the role of uselessness in robots/networked objects.

Of course it's a bit frustrating (game mechanics are quite basic, loading times are long) but there are really some interesting interaction ideas in there. I am personally not sure about the virtual pet thing (why does those thing ALWAYS have to look like boring gremlins?) but this is an interesting step in the evolution of virtual/digital interlinkages.

Sidewalk expansion

An interesting depiction of a recent phenomenon: the expansion of sidewalk in occidental cities. In this example, it used to be very tiny and the new version will make it wider.

The design of the urban environment is strongly modified according to recent concerns about global warming (less room for cars, more for bikes and pedestrians) and social trends (encourage physical exercise).

Mushroom meme circulation: physical digital physical

The real-world, a classic mushroom encountered in the mountains in the French Alps.

A digital representation in Super Mario Bros by Nintendo.

Back to the physical world with mario-like mushrooms spotted in San Francisco, next to Union Square.

Why do I blog this? sorting out some pictures of Flickr lead me to wonder about how meme circulate from the physical to the digital and the return to the physical.

Video Games and possibilities

Two quick Unified Resource Locator that caught my eyes yesterday evening during my commute:

• Sometips by Jordan Mechner about game design principles for narrative games. The second hand "List the actions the player actually performs in the game and take a cold hard look at it. Does it sound like fun?" is an interesting filter to prioritize the interactions you want your users to be engaged in. A sort of follow-up to Crawford's list of verbs I mentioned the other day
• Choose Your Own Adventure (thanks Carly for this), a visualization of interactive books

Why do I blog this? both are about games/entertainment but these principles/viz can be applied to other domains. I see them as important interaction design heuristics.

Lift seminar @ lift offices

Last monday, at the Lift seminar at our offices, we organized a set of talks about urban informatics. We discussed the large variety of data that are generated on top of the physical environment and their opportunities in terms of representations, analyses and services. When it comes to digital data, one can talk about "traces" but I will left the term "urban traces" out of the discussion because this discussion can applied to situations that go beyond the city context (suburbs, countryside...). This event was part of the urban informatics workshop series Fabien and have been running.

(Fixed sensor to measure bike usage in Marseilles)

My introduction to the seminar was about the types data that are available. I presented first the usual kind of data (cadastral, road/railroads/water/electricity/cable/telephone networks infrastructures and usage), talked about the open data initiative. However, our interest was really about "traces" of people's activity in space, for which one can discriminate:

1. Activity-generated data: fixed sensors that can detect bike usage, moving sensors (pedometers, mobile phone, use of Velo'v bikes (unlike Velib bikes, Velo'v seemed to have GPS sensors, is that correct?), automatic location-declaration (on location-based services such as Aka Aki which automatically tells you who is in the vicinity)
2. Volunteer-based data: that is... user-generated content, which can be technology-based (pictures uploaded on sharing platforms such as Flickr, or self-declared positioning as people report their location on Foursquare). It can also be non-technology-based: see for example Respiralyon a french initiative that enable people to report on smells and odors in their own city.

Then Fabien described different projects he carried out, which aims at engaging the audience on the potentials benefits of exploiting the logs of digital activities in our contemporary cities.

(Measuring the pedestrian flows in Barcelona using Bluetooth sensors, a project carried out by Fabien for a spanish client)

To put it shortly, all of these data form a sort of informational membrane that surrounds the spatial environment. We have already dealt here with the possibilities afforded by these data that I described my french book about locative media:

• Visualize the data to describe the urban activity, reveal the invisible, make explicit the implicit (you can see Real Time Rome as a paragon for this use). This first step generally helps bringing new perspective for decision making and policies building or raising awareness and effect the discussion making of individuals or of a crowd.
• Use the data as a model for spatial activities that can enable what i would call "urban stakeholders" to act upon them. A good example for this is to provide urban planners, transportation authorities or traffic engineers with data to refine their models of citizens spatio-temporal behaviors... and eventually help the decision-making process: where to install certain services (or how can we craft certain incentives so that we make specific shops/services to be located in a designated areas). As Fabien mentioned, these data can help to complement existing models (it's not a substitution) drawn out of surveys or qualitative analyses.
• Use the data as a model to build applications on top of them. This is what Citysense aims at: building a tool to help people taking certain spatial decisions based on others' behavior. It shows the overall activity level of the city and hostpots as well as also links to Yelp or Google to show what venues are operating at those places. In addition, combined with other sources of information (such as Yelp), it allows to filter out places in the vicinity.

This part was followed by a presentation by Boris Beaude (EPFL) who is an insightful geographer and a talk by Pascal Wattiaux who discussed the role of technologies in the production of the olympic games. My role as a moderator did not allow me to take notes but Fabien did. Both of them gave some perspective to the "urban informatics" trend by showing a large set of constraints (geographical issues, event-related problems, marketing troubles), critiques (data reductionism) and of course opportunities for the near future.

Thanks Fabien, Boris and Pascal for their participation!

When your walkman asks you to do something...

The use of RJDJ applications such as Trippy and Shake is fascinating. These are basically two "reactive music" applications that use the iPhone's built-in microphone (Trippy) or accelerometer (Shake) to adjust/modify/transform the soundtrack you're listening to:

"RjDj uses the power of the new generation personal music players like iPhone and iPod Touch to create mind blowing hearing sensations. The RjDj app makes a number of downloadable scenes from different artists available. The Trippy app is a compilation of seven scenes bundled which are all using microphone input to manipulate or create music. The Shake app comes bundled with seven scenes which are all about moving, shaking and dancing with your device."

Of course this is not very different than past generative/ambient music but what I find really intriguing is this tune:

What I find important here is that the system explicitly asks you - the user - to go to a certain place to create a certain experience. And it's not just a place, it's a context that you're required to find. Luckily construction workers are everywhere in Geneva, digging up and down the city for a new tram thing, I had plenty of opportunity to play with this application and I liked it a lot.

Why do I blog this? observing the interesting interaction design pattern that is at stake here. What is this? First it's a "walkman that asks you to do something", which is clearly intriguing. Second, it's a sort of game mechanic that requires you to change your activity to create an original experience. Sort of "game design" meets "mobile music".

The "find some place" recommendation here is highly interesting. It extends the range of verbs proposed in specific applications (a music player generally only ask you to play/rewind/pause/fast forward or change tune/shuffle). In this case, there is a new possibility that reminds us of Chris Crawford's approach to interaction design: "Interactivity requires verb thinking" proposed in his book entitled "The Art of Interactive Design". "Finding a place" is, above all, a new verb choice for music play.

It makes me wonder about two possibilities: (1) Playing with this trick and finding other verbs that could expand music player?, (2) Thinking about this "find a place" addition as an interesting possibility for location-based applications.

Akrich about scripts

An interesting quote from Akrich, M. (1992). The De-Scription of Technical Objects. In W. Bijker and J. Law (Eds.) Shaping Technology, Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press: 205-224.

Why do I blog this? The paper describes how users' attributes are inscribed into technical objects in a study of third world electrification, and which, as a result, stabilize a sociotechnical network. The notion of script is described, something quite relevant for a current research project.

Evolution charts

Various charts by Raymond Loewy, "Evolution Chart of the Desk Telephone,""Evolution Chart of the Railcar," and "Evolution Chart of Female Dress and the Female Figure." 1934

Why do I blog this? currently working on gamepad evolution for a book project, I am always curious about such charts, especially when made by designers. The emphasis on shape and the different steps makes it interesting to draw some comparisons.

Individual blame

Attributing one's failure to use (or problematic use) of a certain technical object is often refered to in the literature as the "Individual Blame Bias". In his book "Diffusion of Innovation", Rogers gave the following example:

"Posters were captioned: «LEAD PAINT CAN KILL!» Such posters placed the blame on low- income parents for allowing their children to eat paint peeling off the walls of older housing. The posters blamed the parents, not the pain manufacturers or the landlords. In the mid-1990s, federal legislation was enacted to require homeowners to disclose that a residence is lead-free when a housing unit is rented or sold."

Why do I blog this? Always been intrigued by the tendency to hold individual responsible for his/her problems rather than system. It's definitely a recurring topic when you run field studies, it's as if people wanted to take responsibility for causes that are beyond their scope (bad manual, missing information, etc.).

Of course, this issue has some consequences in terms of the diffusion of innovations and Rogers proposed to overcome this bias when studying the diffusion of innovation by refraining from using individuals as the units of analysis for diffusion (it then remove the possibility of blame on particular individuals).

Redundancy

Street participation

Seen in London last week, a classical form of citizen participation in occidental cities. Why do I blog this? It's interestingly ubiquitous (at least in the Camden neighborhood I was in) and situated. I like the way it frames the question in context. However, although the question seems relevant, the vocabulary is highly administrative and not very people-centric.

Playulf09 write-up

Went to Playful last week in London. A one-day event about games and play, this conference struck me as fascinating because the organizers went beyond the classical lists of speakers from the video game industry. People on stage came from various background: web developers, hackers, geeks, bloggers, interaction designers, art directors, etc... It seems that this was done on purpose as the first editions of Playful were a bit closer to the video game industry. As of last year, the organizers seemed to be willing to go beyond this and bring together a more diverse roster. In the introduction, it was said that "playful was about video-game design but we felt that something was missing... it was actually 'everything else' so we opened it to other fields". I couldn't agree more on that since i think the game designers and interaction design are part of the same practice (which does not imply there aren't any singularities and idiosyncrasies). I tried to list the sort of insights I collected below, for each speaker in a very unstructured way (forgive also the broken English of my notes).

Roo Reynolds (slidecast here)talked about films and games, and how films adapted after games generally suck (based on various examples: . His conjecture was that making a film out of a game is harder than the other way around. Especially because films revolve around a plot. The only film that portrays a game correctly might be TRON. Roo also wondered whether it is possible to create a film based on game mechanics.

Kareem Ettouney from Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet gave an interesting description of what happens "behind the scenes". He addressed the notion of large-team collaboration in game design. To him, the biggest challenge was the amount of talent to try to create one thing: "Even 4-persons bands have issue so it's more troublesome for game companies... you start being hierarchical, conservative, hold all the strings... as in the old school movie models. Then we started hiring exceptional talents and we remembered what it was like to work at other places, where we did not want to listen to directions". One of his point was that "ownership = responsibility + accountability" as they realized they couldn't do the "old school direction"... so they figure out their new model. Ettouney contrasted the "review approach" (more like a critique about what people did after you asked them to "do the work") and the "input perspective" (sit down and talk about what people bring to the table as solution to problems).

Daniel Soltis from tinker.it then dealt with his interest in hardware hacking and games. I like the way he stated how "we don't make games but we design playful experiences", which is a bit different (especially from the video game industry's viewpoint). What was interesting too was how he showed the opportunities to go beyond the screen and keyboard model. The challenges to do so are quite tough but they could lead to compelling solutions: asynchronous play, geographically-distant play or a changing pool of players (or combination of these variables). Some examples already exist: giant score board, chessboard with giant pieces, Foursquare. However, the mobile phone is perhaps not the best platform... eyes on a small screen... still a device used in one way... and no tactile pleasure of game pieces.

The last bit of the matrix above (drawn from my notes of Soltis' slides) was filled with interrogation marks and he showed few possibilities that I liked a lot:

• The Reverse Geocache Puzzle by Mikal Hart which is a puzzle box that only opens up at specific locations
• Oyster card snowflake: an RFID-enabled snowflake generator which uses the London Oystar card: placedalongside a busy corridor, passers-by are invited to use their Oystercard to discover what kind of snowflake they are.
• iphonehangtime a fun application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that uses the internal accelerometers to measure how long the device is in free fall, from the time it leaves your hand, to the time you catch it again.

Lucy Wurstlin from 4ip presented a set of projects after this nice quote by David Lloyd George: "Play is nature’s training for life. No community can infringe that right without doing deep and enduring harm to the minds and bodies of its citizens". The two projects I liked were audioboo (a sound-sharing website that aims at "becoming the YouTube of the spoken word") and mapumental: an interesting application that help to visualise any neighbourhood in the UK by transit times:

Robin Burkinshaw interviewed by Matt Locke: the discussion was about the Alice and Kev project, an interesting crossmedia approach built in a very grassroots way:

" This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any of the game’s unrealistically easy cash routes. It was inspired by the old ‘poverty challenge’ idea from players of The Sims 2, but it turned out to be a lot more interesting with The Sims 3’s new living neighborhood features.

I have attempted to tell my experiences with the minimum of embellishment. Everything I describe in here is something that happened in the game. What’s more, a surprising amount of the interesting things in this story were generated by just letting go and watching the Sims’ free will and personality traits take over."

The humble approach of Robin combined with the reading was very special and pertinent. And I like how he said "virtual photography is a hobby of mine, i have a whole flickr stream".

James Bridle was introduced as the "most analogue digital person I know" by the conference organizer. In his presentation that you browse over there, he exemplified to what extent "awesomeness is more important than innovation". Starting from a critique of commercial definitions of innovation, he showed what is awesome to him making connections with Douglas Adams or Thomas Pynchon. Two instances particularly echoed with my interests. First, the work of Zak Smith who created an illustration for every single page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel “Gravity’s Rainbow":

And Tom Phillips, an artist who painted over every page of a Victorian novel to create a new narrative:

The presentation was even more curious when Bridle started to discuss Babbage's machine, Naughts and Crosses engine, the absence of Deep Blue for Go and a MatchBox Go engine.

Katy Lindemann gave a talk about behavior change through games (which some people refer to as "persuasive gaming"): ChoreWars (allows you to get experience points the more housework you do), Fiat EcoDrive (Nike+ for cars), Glucometers for Nintendo DS, a piano staircase, a weird writing robot at the Houses of Parliament to communicate with representatives.

Russell Davies was perhaps the highlight of the day as his talk revolved around the contrast between "world-building" versus "bubble-building". Based on the model railways metaphor, he described these two approaches: "world-building" corresponds to mimicking reality while "bubble-building" consists in putting the railway in your garden where you cannot try to replicate anything (it allows building a "bubble of suspense"). To him, world building is more difficult and he is more interested in "barely games": collecting, negotiating, pretending and inattention.

Collecting is cool and important in gaming (Pokemon: the actual play is less important than the collecting... and you then invent games with objects you collect. noticin.gs is a good example about this approach. Pretending is even more important and collecting things is great for pretending. You can turn Mario into a pistol or use luxury products (he showed how watch are the ultimate pretending items).

Davies then demonstrated various "pretending" metaphors: Tactile 3D (a 3D interface to navigate your files), 3D mailbox... which do not "work", people simply do not use them because they are not subtle and demand total attention, there's a need to bury pretending details.

[at which point Davies showed fake emails from people pretending to work in huge companies, which I always find hilarious]

So what would a "barely game" feel like, according to him?

1. design for walking around (the time I have to play game)
2. not looking at a scree (worried with AR which is too demanding)
3. uncertain/socially-decided rules
4. useful OR stupid
5. high pretending value

Good candidates for this: iPhone app to record noise samples, Situated audio platform (SAP: use your device to browse geotagged world sounds, wikipedia audio entries, noises of bombs you can throw), personal informatics devices (nike+, nintendo's walk with me) hooked to something more complex, RJDJ for iPhone (music that changes depending on the noise captured by your microphone or the accelerometer), etc.

And then I had to leave to catch my flight :( More write-ups on the playful website, as well as at Roo Reynolds, Suw Charman-Anderson and more.

Why do I blog this? Messy notes to structure a little bit what I gathered from this conference. It was typically the sort of conference from which you come back with plenty of little insights and nuggets that fuel your mind. Besides, a great game-related event with a low number of CGI and not many WoW screenshots that generally bore me. I wish I could have stayed in the afternoon.

How to use a swiss power plug in the UK

It's not possible to insert this in the power plug/socket, if you try there's something that block the insertion. The trick consists in inserting something (like a key... which is super bad if you remember what you're parents/teachers told you not to do) in the ground/earth connection:

Are you ready for the Internet of Things?

Lots of things going on in the Internet of Things world lately. See for example, as pointed out by Marc the other day, Casagras, which stands for Coordination And Support Action for Global RFID-related Activities and Standardisation, has just issued its final report on RFID and the inclusive model for the Internet of Things.

On a different front, we teamed up with Council, tinker.it to set a one-day event about this important topic. It's called "Are you ready for the Internet of Things? and will happen at iMal in Brussels on December 4. This conference will celebrate the launch of Council orchestrated by Rob van Kranenburg.

The program is impressive with a great bunch of pioneers, entrepreneurs, designers, analysts, researchers and developers. The event will feature different activities ranging from keynote speech to workshops and role-playing games:

"0930 : Opening by Rob van Kranenburg and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

0945 0955 : Talk by Nicolas Nova

0955 - 1005 The future of storytelling through scenarios, with Gill Wildman

1005 - 1015 The future of IOT, with GS1

1015 - 1115 : Inspiration

RFID Guardian with Melanie Rieback Pachube and Connected Environments, with Usman Haque Nearness, with Timo Arnall Mime, with Lorna Goulden Noisetube, with Matthias Stevens Privacy Coach with Jaap Henk Hoepman Legal Issues in the Internet of Things, with Nicola Fabiano What I learned from the Violet experience with Rafi Haladjian: The problem with the Internet of Things, are the Things. “Or, how do you get to have open and intelligent artifacts and devices all around the place, without having to manufacture them, transporting them, distributing them (hardly very innovative). How do you creat proliferation, the Internet way, with atoms.”

1115 - 1230 Workshops (with input, questions and views by Gérald Santucci (Head of Unit, Networked Enterprise and Radio Frequency Identification, INFSO D4)

WS 1: Accelerating the roadmap to an Internet of Things @ Home, Philips Design WS 2: IoT in education: creating an MBA WS 3: Interactive Role Playing workshop, Summ()n WS 4: Homesense, Tinker.it WS 5: HC Systems and Self-care, IDC Limerick WS 6: Tools for mediation in IOT 1230 - 1400 Lunch

1400 - 1430 Inspiration

Gaming, with Karim Amrani Urban Eyes, with Marcus Kirsch Awareness Technology, with Alan Munro TownToolKit, with Christian Nold A distributed physical network of humans through the city unveilling invisible and always mobile connections, with Natacha Roussel Social Implications of IoT, with Jim Kosem 1430 - 1630 Workshops continuation

1630 - 1730 Workshop leaders present the results. Short Q & A. 1730 - 1930 Dinner

2000-2200 Public evening program. Opening by Yves Bernard. With lectures, keynotes, interviews, short presentations of workshop results by workshopleaders. Speakers include Liam Bannon, Karim Amrani, Karmen Franinovic, Slava Kozlov on "New mindsets and personal/psychological skills we need to develop for the IoT", Jo Caudron..."

Feel free to register here.

Paul Valéry on "the conquest of ubiquity"

(The famous "Gaz à tous les étages" sign)

Spent some time re-reading this fantastic piece by Paul Valéry called La conquête de l'Ubiquité ("The Conquest of Ubiquity"). Written in 1928, this short text has been quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art In the Mechanical Age of Reproduction.

Three excerpts that struck me as fascinating (considering that it has been written in 1928):

"At first, no doubt, only the reproduction and transmission of works of art will be affected. It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. We shall only have to summon them and there they will be…They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. (...) Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. (...) Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality""

Why do I blog this? in this fascinating short essay, Valéry forecasted in a very acute way the evolution of art and media delivery. Furthermore, he addressed the notion of dematerialized contents and linked it to the "network" meme: although he does not mention this term, the comparison with utilities (gas, electricity and water) is strikingly interesting. Besides, the last bit about "a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality" seems to be a premonitory basis for the discourse about Virtual Reality in the 1990s and Augmented Reality nowadays.

Infrastructure issues for Vélib

The NYT has an interesting article about the infrastructure problem with regards to the Velib in Paris. Some excerpts I found relevant below (I've taken the picture above once in Paris, a nice Velib utterly destroyed in a cardboard box):

"With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche. (...) “We miscalculated the damage and the theft,” said Albert Asséraf, director of strategy, research and marketing at JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company that is a major financer and organizer of the project. “But we had no reference point in the world for this kind of initiative.” (...) At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of the initial stock (...) JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine. (...) “For a regular user like me, it generates a lot of frustration,” she said. “It’s a reflection of the violence of our society and it’s outrageous: the Vélib’ is a public good but there is no civic feeling related to it."

Why do I blog this? such an interesting example of how a technical objects rely on its socio-economical milieu to evolve. The figures here are tough but that illustrates the difficult life of innovations. I wonder about other cities where JC Decaux implemented this scheme.

"you are here"

One of the most curious "you are here" sign, which simply that "you are here", next to the map. Seen at the Telecom Conference in Geneva few weeks ago.

Ben Cerveny at Urban Labs

My (messy) notes from Ben Cerveny's talk at Urban Labs which was organized by Citilab (Cornella, near Barcelona)

The talk was entitled "The city as a platform: computational systems for urban society" and the basic take-away was the proposition to see the city as an Operating System.

Ben is interested in how to make urban phenomena legible and feed them back into people's experience. Which is why he works with Stamen that he describes as a data viz agency. In other words, representations that make visible these invisible complexities to give people a tool to visualize them.

He recently started Vurb (a pun on "verb" and "urban") as a follow-up to his previous venture, the "Playground Foundation" in Amsterdam. In this previous project, he was interested in how to build an infrastructure in a city to allow a new sort of play... that take advantage of behavior patterns, computational resources, create new meaning of play and may have a transformational effect... turned today into VURB... which is interested in going beyond play.

He reminded us that the city is already shaped by information as shown by a picture of the first newspaper in amsterdam "amsterdamsche courant". BUT what is new: citizens are now information makers and the city is an aggregation of an enormous quantity of data (from plumbing infrastructures to digital photographies and GPS) that reflects the individual expressions of all the residents... and can be perceived now in its entirety.

What does this produce? while 20th century cities were consumables, 21th century cities will be collaboratively produced, no longer to-down but completely emergent... a bit like this evocative picture of the "New Babylon" by Constant Nieuwenhuys:

All of this lead to this idea of an operating systems for the built environment The various layers of the urban stack are differentially accessible to citizen input:

• sensor networks: not so much
• dynamic infrastructural services
• collaborative modeling: everybody is expressing their aspiration for the city, this is captured in a software model that represents a parallel state: the "cloud city", a set of information that is dynamic, active and aggregated... almost the spirit of the city... the idea that all of the human information and the history of the city lives in a dataset that can be used in different circumstances

We can then have a real-time model of urban scale space: it reflects a politics of a situation, a model does not reflect the entire reality. What type of model do we want to represent the city? Ben claims that we don't want one, we want a thousands! like web-services... there are going ways to bring models on space. The other side of the model is who is in the model, who takes advantage of the model: social networks are the inhabitants, which leads to massively multi-participant models... like an offline game.

Ben drew a parallel between urban planning and game design... the "secret school of learning interaction design" (as it teaches to design for users who do not read manuals, teaches how to make people learn new things progressively... or WoW status aggregation is twitter avant la lettre)

Another thing that I found interesting in his talk was this comment about Barcelona:

"I'm interested in looking at barcelona on the Google maps... look at how the barrio gotico is messy and then you see the grid... look at the boundaries... they look as if you could move a slider to accelerate the transition between the messy old city and the grid"

City center

I've always been curious about the location where people (citizens or visitors) place the center of a city. You can define it as an area but also at specific points.

You have different ways to explore this question:

• Asking people what is the point they would refer to as the center of a city. This kind of enquiry is common in environmental psychology and may help to uncover how individuals have specific representations (psychologists would call them mental models). Depending on the sampling (visitors/tourists, job type...) the answer may be different: should it be the CBD? the geometrical center? Should it be the Schelling Point?
• Observing how city centers are represented in technological artifacts such as maps or guidebooks. For example, looking for cities in digital mapping systems such as Google Maps and observe where they put the red dots that correspond to the city. In this case, it will reflects a specific norm chosen by the Googleplex engineers. I'd be curious to know the underlying rationale behind this positioning.
• ...

Why do I blog this? thinking about urban notions and their representations. I find intriguing to define what is a city center and how human beings think about this concept.

A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing

New dispatch: "A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing" by Julian Bleecker and myself has just been released. It's a discussion between the two us from the Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League. This series aims at exploring the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities?

Introduced by the editor as:

"In the last five years, the urban computing field has featured an impressive emphasis on the so-called “real-time, database-enabled city” with its synchronized Internet of Things. In Situated Technologies Pamphlets 5, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova argue to invert this common perspective and speculate on the existence of an “asynchronous city.” Through a discussion of objects that blog, they forecast situated technologies based on weak signals that show the importance of time on human practices. They imagine the emergence of truly social technologies that through thoughtful provocation can invert and disrupt common perspective."

We'd like to thank Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz and Mark Shepard for this great opportunity!