The smart city backdrop

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"It should come as no surprise that the design and development of urban informatic systems is currently dominated by people coming from a background in web design. Despite the fact that these are very smart, extremely talented people, they struggle - as we all do - with the received assumptions, latent biases, and hidden agendas that one's background inevitably brings to the new and relatively uncharted territory. So you find urban system designers that can't help but view the city as a website"

Mark Shepard, "Toward the Sentient City", Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, 2011

Why do I blog this? The perusal of this excerpt from Shepard's book about urban informatics, on my way to Marseille for Lift France 2011, immediately echoed with my own feelings. What he expresses here, was actually a footnote but I found it quite important to highlight an interesting phenomenon. This footnote was related to a part of the book intro in which Mark Shepard describes that the underlying logic of "smart cities" can sometimes be limited to functionalist views such as "a searchable city with an easily accessible shopping cart". More specifically, this quote echoes with my feeling when using various mobile services/apps (public transport, restaurant review, location-based signage, augmented reality...).

The design of fearsome interactions

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Theme parks and horror houses are not necessarily the kind of stuff you think about when someone tells you about interaction design... but these artifacts must be carefully thought. And this paper called The Gas Mask: A Probe for Exploring Fearsome Interactions is intriguing for that matter because it describes an interesting design research approach that explore what the authors calls "fearsome interactions".

The papers presents a mask-based interface that is made of breath sensors, WiFi (to wirelessly transmit "breathing data") and a wireless microphone. Two combinations of these are tested as probes in an interactive ride. The field study is quite revealing and the authors highlight "six key dimensions of designing fearsome interactions": cultural, visceral, social, control, performance and engineering. More specifically, I was intrigued by the one they refer to as "control":

"An important aspect of fearsome experiences such as thrill rides or perhaps even watching a horror film is that of giving up control; committing to a scary and unknown experience and not being able to back out, either physically or socially. Our gas mask interface amplifies this because the user cannot disengage from it; the sensor is strapped to their face, emphasising the message that the machine will sense and respond to their every breathing action. (...) Contrary to conventional HCI wisdom which argues that users should be able to gracefully manage their engagement and disengagement with sensing systems, the wider challenge here is to create interfaces that require them to surrender or at least fight for control."

Why do I blog this? First because of my interest towards weird research foci. Second because of the general implications. Although this kind of research looks curious at first, the results discussion is quite important for interaction design/human-computer interaction research. The discussion about control is of particular interest.

NYT piece on the Talk to Me Exhibit at MoMA

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An interesting overview of the "Talk to Me" exhibit at MoMA in the NYT written by Alice Rawthorn. Some excepts I found interesting:

"“We went through so many changes in the definition of design in the 20th century with all the clichés about form following function, and the addition of meaning in the 1960s with post-structuralism, but what is really important right now is communication,” Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, said by telephone. (...) “Because of that designers can’t just think in terms of form, function and meaning when they develop new objects, they have to learn a bit of script writing too.” (...) Though the same same microchips that enable things as small as smart phones to fulfill hundreds of different functions also make them more opaque. In the industrial era when form generally followed function, you could guess how to use an electronic product from its appearance. You can’t do that with a tiny digital device, which is why designers face the new challenge that Ms. Antonelli calls “script writing,” in other words, ensuring that the object can tell us how to use it. (...) “There is still an imbalance between the aesthetic value of some projects and their functional value, and designers need to make much more effort to explain what they are doing,” Ms. Antonelli said. “This field is moving so fast, but we are still dealing with the old clichés and still adding new ones.”"

Why do I blog this? It's interesting to see how the curator puts things into perspective (wrt to interaction design). From an STS standpoint, the notion of "script writing" can be understood in two sense: (1) the code writing aspect that underpins interaction design of course, (2) the very idea that designers/engineers embed a vision of users in the technical objects they create... what Actor-Network Theory describes as script-building (among which certain clichés about users' attitudes, expectations and needs). It's therefore intriguing that Antonelli uses this "script" term.

iPhone headset proxemics

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Although it's hard to see on this picture taken in Marseille last week, it represents the maximum distance between two persons using the same iPhone headset.

Collaborative usage of music if you want and headset proxemics.

Why do I blog this? Collecting behavior like this leads me to wonder about a new book project about categorizing such habits/practices... Besides, I am fascinated by the use of audio/sound interactions (as "non-optical augmented reality", collaborative practices, etc.).

Design research project about extreme conditions (Moon)

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Stumbled across this curious project this morning: the Moon Life Foundation, an interdisciplinary platform organisation for research and innovation in art and culture to a future life by people on the moon. Their aim is to create a community of practitioners and public about this sound topic.

What I found intriguing about their work is this:

"The extraterrestrial context with its extreme conditions, restrictions and opportunities forces us to abandon familiar points of departure in the design process. The fact that this can lead to innovative and functional tools for our earthly existence has already been proved by the aerospace industry (Velcro, microwave, Internet, laptop, MP3 player and airbag). With the interdisciplinary character of the project (science, technology, art and design) in a futuristic context, Moon Life aims to initiate a new development in design culture. Is it possible to create a future-oriented, innovative impulse for instance in the same way that Constant’s New Babylon did in his time?"

Why do I blog this? Documenting curious design research project as a way to show what kind of material can emerge out of it.

An interview with Saskia Sassen about "Smart cities"

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Preparing the Lift France 11 conference, and given our interest in a session about the future of cities, urban computing and its implications, we ran across this interesting column by Saskia Sassen about "Smart Cities" on a McKinsey digital. We liked it a lot and we invited her to the conference. Few days ago, she kindly proposed to answer few questions I had about her perspective on this topic.

Nicolas: You recently wrote an essay about so-called "Smart Cities" at Mckinseydigital.com, I really liked your point about the need to "urbanize" the technologies deployed in Smart Cities projects. What do you mean by that and what do you think is missing in projects such as New Songdo or Masdar?

Saskia Sassen: This notion of urbanizing technology is one of several along those lines that I have been working out for a while. The starting point was not necessarily cities. It was the notion that in interactive domains the technology delivers its capabilities through ecologies that include non-technological variables --the social and the subjective, the logics/aims of users, for example finance uses the technology with different aims from Amnesty international, etc etc. Again, I make this argument for interactive domains, not, say, data pipelines.

There is another condition present in the interactive domain, separate from the technology itself. At the beginning I studied how the logic of finance (a sector that is deeply embedded in digital networks and digitized spaces) is not the logic of the engineer and computer scientist and software developer who made the digital domain. The effect is that the user (finance) does not necessarily use all the properties that the engineer etc. put into it. I also looked at civil society organizations along the same lines. This helps explain why the outcomes never correspond to what we may have predicted based on the capacities of the technology.

Now I am looking at cities through the same lens. Users bring their own logics to these technologies. In the case of a city with its vast diversities of people and what makes them tick, the outcome can be quite different from what the designers expected. And this matters. This keeps the city alive, and open. When you embed interactive technologies in urban settings, it is important to allow for this mutating as diverse types of users bring their own logics to those technologies. If the technology controls all outcomes in a routinized fashion ((as if it were a data pipeline) there is a high risk that it will become obsolete, or less and less used, or so routinized that it barely is interactive. More like buying a ticket from an automaton: yes you have choices, but you can hardly call this interactive.

The key, difficult, and ever changing question is how do we keep technologies open, responsive to environmental signals and to users choices, including what may seem quirky from the perspective of the engineer. The city is full of signals and quirky uses: given a chance , it would urbanize a whole range of technologies. But this possibility needs to be made – it is not simply a function of interactive technologies as we know them now, and it needs to go beyond the embedded feedback capability. Open Source is more like it.

Nicolas: Do you feel that networked technologies can lead to new forms of urbanity? Said differently, to what extent are the cities of the future shaped by our past urban experiences and infrastructures?

Saskia Sassen: Urbanity is a mutant. And this means it is made and remade along many different concepts/ideas/imaginations across the world. It can happen in sites where we, we of our westernized culture, might not see it. At night in working class neighborhoods of Shanghai bus stops become public spaces –that is urbanity. In some megacities the only spaces that the poor, often homeless have, are what during daytime hours we see as infrastructure: spaces where multiple bus lines intersect or end in. There are many many such examples of practices that destabilize the formal meaning of a space: this, again, takes making, and in that making lies an urbanity. I do think that urbanity is made; it is not only beautifully designed urban settings.

So yes! I think that networked technologies will also, and in fact, already are, leading to new forms of urbanity. The most familiar of these are of course using the tech to communicate about swarming an actual space –a square, a furniture shop—and diverse locational devices. Again, what intrigues me is to think beyond these somewhat “pre-scribed” possibilities: in two ways. One is through the unsettling, making unstable, the prescribed options embedded in the technology’s design. For instance, inserting a given technological capability into a different ecology of elements (in the sense I used this earlier –technical and non-technical elements). This is what hackers do, in a way. In the case of the city, it would mean bringing an urban logic into that ecology –the city as the hacker. .. a benign, positive hacker of a range of technological domains in cities. The other is what I like to refer to as “barefoot engineering” -- this resonates with the so-called “barefoot doctors” in China’s villages during Communism –knowledgeable locals who knew the properties of plants and understood the village. We need urban “barefoot engineers”!

Nicolas: In the aforementioned paper, you use the term "open-source urbanism". It's interesting to see that metaphor coming from digital culture are currently transposed beyond their original realms. How do you think the "open source" concept can be applied to urbanism? What would be the limits and opportunities?

Saskia Sassen: As a technological practice of innovation, Open Source has not been about cities, but about the technology itself. Yet it resonates with what cities have and are at ground-level, where its users are. The park is made not only with the hardware of trees and ponds, but also with the software of people's practices. There are manay examples, and each city has its own. In my city, NY, an example of such people’s software is New York's Riverside Park in the 1980s which went from being a no-go zone, charged with dangers, to being a park for all those who wanted to use it. How did this switch happen? In part because dog-owners started to walk their dogs in large numbers. Having a dog was itself a function of feeling insecure in a city of high murder rates and much mugging. But the city as lived mutating environment allowed people to talk back: get a dog, walk your dog, go in groups, and you recover the territory of the park. Another example is the recent proliferation of urban agriculture; it was not a top-down decision. It resulted from a mix of conditions, primarily the desire of city residents to make, to green, to transform, and the romance with fresh produce. And now the push is for every roof, every empty plot of land to become a site for urban agriculture. Here we see that a thousand individual decisions created an urban possibility and transformation. There are many diverse initiatives that produce these kinds of "third space."

These are ways in which the city can talk back. We can think of the multiple ways in which the city talks back as a type of open-source urbanism: the city as partly made through a myriad of interventions and little changes from the ground up. Each of these multiple small interventions may not look like much, but together they give added meaning to the notion of the incompleteness of cities and that this incompleteness gives cities their long lives, their flexibility, their capacity to mutate. 

And this potential for distributed outcomes is a natural for open source technology. But beyond the technology proper, bringing open source concepts into multiple urban settings/domains strengthens these core features of cities, make them cities of people, strengthen the rights to the city.

In sharp contrast, I think that the model of "intelligent cities" as propounded by technologists, with the telepresence efforts of Cisco Systems a key ingredient, misses this opportunity to urbanize the technologies they mobilize. Secondly, the intelligent city concept if too rigid, becomes a futile effort to eliminate the incompleteness of the city, to get full closure/control. This is a recipe for built-in obsoleteness. Imagine if Rome could not have mutated across the millennia: it would be a dead city now. Third, the planners of intelligent cities, notably Songdo in South Korea actually make these technologies invisible, and hence put them in command rather than in dialogue with users. 
Beyond the imagery of open-source urbanisms, can we strengthen this positive scenario of the city's incompleteness by actually deploying open-source technologies in a variety of urban contexts

Good reference about timelines

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Working on the game controller book lately, I became fascinated by visual representations of time: evolutionary trees, time-series, timelines, etc. A great resource about this is certainly "Cartographies of Time: a history of the timeline" by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton.

The book is a comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present:

" From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways--curving, crossing, branching--defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by their geographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain."

There's also this gem at the end of the book, a sort of "Fog of war" representation:

Why do I blog this? Beyond the use of these as models to try different representations of game controller evolutionary trees, I am fascinated by the ways these timelines also add interesting spatial components on top of time-related visualizations.

Exploring gestural interfaces usage to design sensor-based game prototypes

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It's been a while I haven't posted about past and current research projects conducted with partners. Last week, I went to DPPI 2011 (Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces) in Milano, a conference that focused on "How Can Design Research serve Industry?". I'll get back to the conference itself later and only focus here on the paper I presented. Written with Timothée Jobert, a Grenoble-based researcher (CEA-LITUS), our paper was about how user-centered design approaches can be employed in the video-game industry. Our point was to show how users can be taken into account at the beginning of the design process, and not just when a prototype is ready to be thrown in the usability laboratory. The short paper is based on a case study of how players use gestural interfaces such as the Nintendo Wii and the Bodypad. Conducted 2 years ago, the starting point of this field study was the development of a new accelerometer sensors by a company called Movea. We conducted a field study in order to explore user appropriation of such interfaces, define a design space and it led to the development of various game prototypes (by eXperience Team and Widescreen Games).

The paper can be found at the following URL.

Slides from the presentation are available on Slideshare:

[slideshare id=8421676&doc=dppi2011slides-110625085011-phpapp02]

MP3 players or phones as standardized computing component for upcoming products

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Phones and MP3 Players as the Core Component in Future Appliance by Albrecht Schmidt and Dominik Bial (IEEE Pervasive Computing) was a curious morning read. The paper wonders whether mobile devices such as MP3 players or phones can become the standardized computing component for the next decade. Or, in a more industry-oriented vocabulary, will they be OEM products that become parts of other devices?

"As mass-produced mobile devices continue to become cheaper, they could increasingly serve as a component in a product. For the sewing machine for example, we could imagine replacing the color display and custom computer with a programmable touch-screen MP3 player or phone. The casing design and custom software could hide the commodity device so it would be hard to see without dissembling the sewing machine. Using off the-shelf devices as the core computing component could significantly reduce the development effort of the appliance’s computer parts and hence could allow more people to create sophisticated appliances. The skill sets required are programming a standard platform and electromechanical design, but not hardware development. Combined with 3D printing, this approach could broaden the set of people who could produce and distribute complex appliances."

Why do I blog this? Simply because I find this idea intriguing.

New book about recurring technological failures

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A quick egocentric note. My new book about recurring technological failures has been released two weeks ago. It's called "Les flops technologiques: comprendre les échecs pour innover" which obviously means that it's written in French.

Based on the analysis of several cases (the intelligent fridge, the visiophone and e-books), the book describes the notion of recurring technological flops, discusses the very notion of failures and their underlying reasons. It also addresses strategies and design tactics to take them into account. The intro is available on scribd.

For the record, my introductory speech at Lift09 was somehow the starting point for this project. I'll use this material in upcoming conference such as NEXT2011 or media footage.

To keep track of interview/critique, I also opened a french tumble about the book here.

Hopefully the next one about game controller is gonna be in English.

Why do I blog this? Well, I just keep track of recent inscriptions.

Science-Fiction timeline

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Being curious about timelines and graphic visualization of time lately, I quite enjoyed this project called "Wandering through the Future" by Marjolijn Dijkman. It consists of fragments of 70 film productions from all over the world: Apocalyptic landscapes and scenarios leads the spectator through the future from 2008 until 802.701 A.D:

"The project Wandering through the Future reinserted such science fiction films into the public sphere from which they are normally banned. Clips from seventy movies were compiled into a sixty minute video, and screened in a shed modeled on the fortunetellers’ tents found in Sharjah souks. The compilation took viewers on a journey through popular cinema’s reservoir of scenarios for the future, ordered chronologically according to the date in which they are set, from 2008 until 802.701 AD. (...) An accompanying graphic timeline charted how far into the future the various films take us. The timeline made apparent that only very few science fiction films, produced in the optimism of the late 1960s and 70s, project their visions into a very distant future, and imagine a future reality that is desirable. But recent films all present apocalyptic scenarios, set in times that are increasingly near. They envision ecological and biological catastrophes, alien invasions, but most of all technological meltdown. "

Why do I blog this? Timelines and graphical representation of sci-fi flourishes here and there. But this one is intriguing and relevant because it doesn't try to map everything. I like this stance.

Hauntology

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Read at bampfa.berkeley.edu:

In the fifteen years since Derrida first used this term, hauntology, and the related term, hauntological, have been adopted by the British music critic Simon Reynolds to describe a recurring influence in electronic music created primarily by artists in the United Kingdom who use and manipulate samples culled from the past (mostly old wax-cylinder recordings, classical records, library music, or postwar popular music) to invoke either a euphoric or unsettling view of an imagined future. The music has an anachronistic quality hinting at an unrecognizable familiarity that is often dreamlike, blurry, and melancholic—what Reynolds describes as “an uneasy mixture of the ancient and the modern.

Why do I blog this? I ran across several occurrences of this term recently, both in academic paper and music columns. There seems to be something intriguing here that can perhaps be connected to current discussion and work about the circulation of cultural elements (Basile's work), atemporality and the relationship between the past and the future.

Robot fictions: entertainment cultures and engineering research entanglements

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Yesterday in a "secret robot house" in Hatfield, in the suburbs of London, I gave a quick talk about how popular robot fictions influence the design process. The speech was about the propagation of the robot myth in engineering spheres and the influence of certain topics (robot idioms, shapes, behavior and automation)... and how they appear as inevitable tropes in technological research. I tried to uncover what is hidden behind this phenomenon and looked at the complex interactions between entertainment cultures (Science-Fiction mostly) and scientific research. I've uploaded the slides on Slideshare:

[slideshare id=8330333&doc=robot-hatfield2011-110616134210-phpapp01]

Thanks Alex for the invitation!

Domestic complexity: home(s)

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Reading Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell last week-end, I was interested by several things. Among others, as I was about to prepare a speech about robot interactions, the part concerning home and ubiquitous computing was of particular interest. Some excerpts I found important:

"That there are so many words, metaphors, and imaginings for home should serve to remind us that homes exist within a wide range of physical, infrastructure, and legislative contexts and that they are also embedded within highly varied systems of meaning. (...) Materially, homes are hugely varied and the challenges of designing for and into these many homes are immense. First, there are the practical considerations: size, density, scale, and history. (...) Second, homes are the sites of a range of social and cultural practices, dysfunctions, and aspirations, even within a single city. There are a myriad of patterns of occupation, floor plans, household size, and composition. (...) Third, few homes operate in a vacuum or complete isolation; they are part of a larger social, cultural, and sometimes physical institutions. (...) Lastly, and complicating the picture still further, the different kinds of metaphors and symbols of and for home mean that things we wrap around design or that we imagine design might implicate - ideas about security, trust, the future, and even the relationship between public and private - are all flexible. (...) this complexity seems at odds with the current, deceptively simple visions of the digital home. Not only is the home in these visions always singular, but it is nearly always unrealistically large, frequently freestanding, connected to the rest of the world only for the provisioning of services, and newly constructed - without legacy hardware, infrastructure or quirks. It is almost always occupied by a heterosexual nuclear family, which is remarkably accident-and-trouble-free and perfectly happy to perform daily tasks and rituals in series or parallel, entirely without incident. (...) these has been visions of domestic life that celebrated technology and its transformative power at the expense of home as a lived and living practice"

Why do I blog this? Some good material here about the problems of "smart homes" and the complexity of context.

Urban dérive on the (urban) information superhighways

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This video of two Japanese guys using Google Streetview to visit the USA from their living room is quite fascinating.

It's not necessarily the numbers that caught my attention (90 hours, 104,619 clicks, lots of energy drinks). Of course, they're quite extreme but what's curious here is the practice itself. Unlike some commenters who fund it useless and pathetic, I find it rather curious and intriguing as a human practice.

This made me think about a recent project by French writer François Bon called "Une traversée de Buffalo" in which he gives an account of how he lost himself in this area of North America using Google Earth (via).

On the same topic, it's clear that the recent release of Liberty City Streetview map by GTA4net is also relevant (via). It basically allows you to "plunge into the boroughs of Liberty City from the safety of your own chair". But again, this is only a partial view. The point is not just use this as a complement of the game... exploring this Street View map is a game in itself (a playful activity let's say).

Why do I blog this? This kind of (extreme) practice can be considered as an intriguing signal for narratives or services that would tell stories in new ways. A sort of dérive is happening here.

Ursula LeGuin on Science-Fiction

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Interesting excerpts from Ursula LeGuin's introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1976)... about the fact that "science-fiction does not predict":

"though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or reader's. Variables are the spice of life. (...) The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. (...) All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life — science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor."

Why do I blog this? Gathering notes for an upcoming talk about robot, scifi and predictions.

About The City and the City by China Miéville

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One of the best novel I've read recently was The City and the City by China Miéville. Quick notes I've taken while reading it: What struck me (as well as lots of other readers of course) as fascinating in this book was the role played by the cityscape in the whole narrative. The action takes place in the distinct cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. However, both of them actually occupy the same physical space. It's the city and the city. Because the citizens chose this separation, Besźel and Ul Quoma are perceived by people as two different cities... which means that inhabitants are taught to "unsee" or "unhear" the persons from the other city:

"They knew I was in Ul Quoma: I could find them and could walk alongside them in the street and we would be inches apart but unable to acknowledge each other. Like the old story. Not that I would ever do such a thing. Having to unsee acquaintances or friends is a rare and notoriously uncomfortable circumstance."

Unseeing, as described above, is supposed to be unconscious. This ability is important because it doesn't mean that people would'nt notice anything (e.g. if you drive in Beszel, you have to be aware of Ul Qoma car presence but you must not see them). This of course means that this ability is taught very early to children and that each cities has its own peculiar design/color/shape/architecture. This "unseeing" process is so deeply grounded in the cities denizens that it almost act as a physical barrier.

The act of ignoring this separation, even by accident, is called "breaching". Illegal passage between the two cities or discussing with an Ul qoman citizen while being in Beszel can be qualified as "breach" (" Someone said graffiti were appearing on walls in Ul Qoma in styles that suggested Besźel artists."). But this is hard to do, as shown by this excerpt:

"An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realized that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away…"

Besides, the fact that the twin cities exist in the same physical space leads to highly curious topological problems... such as the intriguing typology of places:

  • Total areas: locations which are entirely in one of the two cities
  • Alter areas: locations which are entirely in the other city (as a resident of your city, you would have to ignore it).
  • Crosshatched areas: places where inhabitants of both cities walk alongside one another (unseeing each other). Most of the crosshatched areas have different names depending on which city you're in. However, some crosshatched locations (such as Copula Hall) have the same name in both city as this place plays the role of a border between the two towns.
  • Dissensi: "As the two cities had grown together, places, spaces had opened between them, or failed to be claimed, or been those controversial dissensi". This is perhaps the most curious

And this is just part of the remarkable vocabulary that the author employed to create this odd geography. See also "fractured city boards", "Schrödinger's pedestrian", "maybe-grosstopic proximity", not to mention Orciny (I don't want to spoil anything about this).

Why do I blog this? I am currently preparing a workshop (planned to be conducted in Zürich at the end of the week) and I wonder whether I could use this spatial typology in the design brief (to engage students in designing locative media based on this universe). Despite the importance of spatiality in this novel, it's curious to see that the various covers do not try to pick on that. I would have been intrigued to see how the cities could have been represented visually.