High bench in NYC

A quick glance at Fecal Face always lead to odd encounters. This time the crazy story that piqued my interest was the one of a high bench located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NYC. 10 feets in the air on metal stilts, this bench led to some head-scratching. Photos of the sculpture installation on the Lower East Side by Brad Downey and Mike Wrobel (found on the Fecal Face website).

Why do I blog this? Well, I find this sort of urban intervention intriguing, although weird at first. It certainly raises eyebrow but can also lead to some questions about our city environments. It seems that the bench has been removed by the city Department of Transportation and the NYPost asks boringly "is it art or just odd", which is definitely not the right implication to explore here. Fecal Face is clearly more relevant with that topic, proposing "Because Darwin was an elitist" as caption to the picture above.

Clark's laws

In "Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible", Arthur C. Clarke describes these 3 laws that are relevant wrt foresight research:

"

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

(...) As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there."

Why do I blog this? these very basic laws are interesting to understand Clarke's approach to writing science-fiction and what are the underlying traits of his prognostications. Although, it's sci-fi, there is a lot to learn from his novels and these quotes act as valuables rules for foresight research; the implications of each of them would be good to discuss.

GPS bottles and people representation of space

"Message in a Bottle" is an intriguing locative media art project by Layla Curtis:

"Fifty bottles containing messages were released into the sea off the south-east coast of England near Ramsgate Maritime Museum, Kent. The intended destination of the bottles is The Chatham Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The islands, which are 800km east of mainland New Zealand, are the nearest inhabited land to the precise location on the opposite side of the world to Ramsgate Maritime Museum. It is anticipated that the bottles may be found several times before reaching the Chatham Islands. (...) Several of the bottles are being tracked using GPS technology and are programmed to send their longitude and latitude coordinates back to Ramsgate every hour. The information they transmit is used to create a real time drawing of their progress."

People who found a message could report it (and then replace the bottle's contents, reseal the bottle and release it back into the sea to continue its journey to The Chatham Islands).

Why do I blog this? Beyond the poetic/aesthetic aspects of the lost bottles, I find this project interesting as it explores other use of GPS, related to the movement of objects in space.

Furtermore, an interview of Layla Curtis by Peter Hall in the Else/Where mapping book interestingly address some topics that are close to my research interests. Hall highlight the fact that "there's a nice juxtaposition here between the precision of the GPS mapping system and the relative imprecisions of people reporting findings by email". Of course, this is partly caused by the interface Curtis provided to report bottle's findings; as people had to fill a form with "Place bottle found". It can be very relevant to dig more into the naming of these places; I can imagine a sort of typology of mismatch that would be very informative for location-based services designers.

'Mobilis In Mobili'

... is the motto of Captain Nemo in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne. It actually means "Moving in a Moving thing"... showing how change occur through a changing medium, very well in line with one's behavior in a "worldchanging" environment.

"-Ware"

"Urban Computing" is defined by Kingberg, Chalmers and Paulos as "the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies into everyday urban settings and lifestyles".

That picture taken last week in Geneva appears to me as strikingly evocative of "urban computing". The suffix "-ware" added on top of a physical layer indeed reflects how urban computing is not just about digital bits but also raw, messy and dirty material in the city of the near future. That said, it's also interesting as the suffix "-ware" is used in a large variety of forms, sometimes without any reference to its origin (manufactured article of a specified type, made with particular substance).

Playing PONG against a fish

The idea of "new interaction partners" that we develop at the near future laboratory more and more echoes with projects here and there. For instance, Florent Deloison has an intriguing project about playing PONG with a fish (in french). The system is based on mormyrophone, a device designed by biology researcher Christian Graff, able to detect and translate as image and sounds the electric discharges produced by a fish.

This was part of workshop at the Art School in Aix en Provence, France. Other students developed projects about allowing the fish to send e-mails or using the fish as THE interface.

Why do I blog this? reviewing some animal-based interactions that have I seen popping up lately is always refreshing. Although this looks a bit weird and pointless, I believe there is a great deal to explore in this "new interaction partner" vector.

Verne or Wells

As Jules Verne expressed it about H.G. Wells in "Invasion of the Sea":

"We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. . . I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannonball discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to the Mars [sic] in an airship which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. . . But show me this metal. Let him produce it."

Why do I blog this? both Vernes and Wells were great futurists hidden under their novelist stance. I found that quote interesting and it exemplified the different way they proceeded.

Mechanical TicTacToe

An intriguing Tic-Tac-Toe game played by a robotic system constituted of two mechanical arms, designed by Guillaume Stagnaro:

Burglar vocabulary: location-based tagging

Last week in Brussels, I ran across this signs on the wall of that house:

It quickly reminded me my parents' house on which we found the same marks. At that time, I remember the discussion with local police who told us that burglars use codes to annotate house. It's generally tags like this, with black chalk that express relevant information for them such as the one exemplified below (as shown in France's signs or Belgium's signs).

Simply put, it means that the marks on that belgian house correspond to: one kid, unoccupied house and planned robbery. Although it's weird to imagine only one kid in an unoccupied house, this is what the tag describe.

Why do I blog this? that's an interesting example of location-based annotation. It simply shows an intriguing signal of practices at stake in contemporary cities, a specific form of graffiti that aims at describing places to rob. It's a different form of spatial tagging not that explored by the locative media frenziness (for obvious reasons) that also represents the "transparent society" we're reaching. See here too.

In addition, it's curious from a collaboration POV, how this sort of tagging has been put in place by a group of people. At first glance, one can think burglary is a competitive practice, but it can go beyond that, as shown by the establishment of a common vocabulary.

Protecting one's electricity

Different ways to protect one's source of electricity: Well covered in a french train:

With duct tape at the airport in Brussels:

Why do I blog this? in a time where we have our pockets full of mobile devices that require electricity, it's always an issue to find a power plug. This is even more important when you hang out in Marc Augé's "non-places". Most of time, it's in these areas that owners of the infrastructures are trying to design different ways to prevent you from accessing it. Even when there are still plugs for vacuum cleaners or christmas trees, there are always some possibilities to show you that you're not welcome to steal a bit of volts.

Automation, light and door sensors

Last week I had two interesting encounters with gestural interactions. The first one was in the super-fancy double decker train that goes from Geneva to ZanktGallen/Zurich. In that train, there is a sensor to open up the doors between wagons. People, if they're slow or if they don't know that there's a sensor generally walk in, wait a bit and then come in as the door opens up when the sensor detect the presence of a body. But usually, commuters know that they can wave their hand next to the sensor as I did here (very weirdly with the left hand):

In other trains, the sensor is situated on the floor. Standing next to this door during the whole trip to Zürich was a fantastic opportunity to observe the range of behavior in that kind of situation. I did not count or ran precise analysis but I tried to categorize these behavior in a sort of ludicrous way: - old people clueless about the sensor presence but slow enough to see the door opened when they approach it - people who knows that there's a sensor, so they wait and go through the door - commuters well-versed into swiss train sensors who wave their arm - people in the rush who almost run and bump into the door because the sensor did not have time to detect the body - commuters who know how the sensor works, wave the arm and fail to open it (for some reason... because technology sucks), so step back and try again 1 or 2 times. A variant is when you have people then looking at the sensor, sometimes talking to it. - one person even try to open the door manually but he failed because there is no clear handle (nor affordance) to do so. He the looked at me and sighted.

Quite an interesting list and I am sure there can be other curious use case as I haven't seen kids or people with loads of luggage. The underlying variables here are the following: the location of the sensor, its visibility and affordance to the user as well as the delay between body detection and opening of the door. It was obvious that all of them were problematic.

The second encounter was in Brussels, in an hotel loo, there was a sensor that detect a body presence to switch on/off the light. What happened inevitably is that the light went off and I found myself waving my arms here and there... eventually above my head... because I did not know where was the sensor. What happens? Who tuned the sensor? How did they tune that bloody sensor? Did they run user studies about how people spend time in bathrooms? In any case, what happened is that they created a sort of norm in that building, that tell people how long they must or must not stay there. The whole experience then becomes weird although I can adapt and find funny to wave my arm around.

Why do I blog this? there are two interesting aspects here: the mix of gestural sensing and automation. All of this is based on the assumption that the best way to interact with technology is to make things more naturals, more physical by removing any transducers between people and artifacts. No buttons, no switches to open doors or switch lights on. In a sense there is still an interface, that is gestural but as it is no self-revealing, people have troubles knowing what to do. And you have, on top of that, the clumsy automation issue: automation indeed create new operational complexities as shown by Wood.

On that topic, see also Fabien's experience as well as Fabio Sergio's story. Clive Grinyer has good thoughts about it too.

"Design matters"

Was in Grenoble yesterday, attending an event called "Design Matters organized by the big nanotechnology operation they have there as well as several other partners. The gig was about design in the context of industrial innovation: "Is it possible to see designs as fundamental processes developed by a multi-partner, multi-disciplinary innovation hub which will allow us to combine the essential elements of research, analysis, conception, creation and production to develop highly valuable technological products?". Speakers ranged from philosopher (Bernard Stiegler), UX specialist (Adam Greenfield), design (the director of a french design school, Federico Casalegno and a designer from Alcatel) and design/branding (SEB). Some of the elements I found interesting are summarized below.

Bernard Stiegler gave an inspiring talk about the evolution of techniques (externalization as described by Lerhoi-Gourhan) that lead to technosciences. He showed how the role of design evolved over time and how we reached a situation in which people/structures who build/design technologies are separated from users, now called "consumers". He pointed how today there's a "desire crisis", a sort of exhaustion of desire in which the individual is disaffected. His claim is the techniques used to create "consumer behavior" amount to the destruction of psychic and collective individuation. According to him, technoscience developments became opaque and distabilize biological, physiological and geographical systems. For the individual, it's a loss of intelligibility in the system as well as a loss of participation. He then advocated for more open and distributed design process in which people can participate. To some extent, Stiegler justifies bottom-up innovation by a psychological impetus necessary for our society to go beyond today's desire exhaustion.

Federico Casalegno presented the eLense project and the Landmark interactive bus stop (in which my colleagues Enrico Costanza and Mirja Leinss participated). Federico showed their design approach at the MIT Mobile Experience Lab, exemplifying today's design methods there.

Attending Adam's "Everyware" talk for the 4 of 5th time is always interesting. Especially to see how things eveolved over time. For example, I was struck by his new slides about "what does it suggest that the same presentation was illustrated last year with prototypes is now exemplified with existing products". His addition of Deleuze work (see Postscript on the Societies of Control) is also strikingly relevant. It was important also to see what Stiegler had to say about Adam's work, as he pointed our the importance of going beyond resistance (which reminds of "nostalgia is for suckers" that Adam threw at LIFT Korea) to participate and invent.

After this very high level discussion, a former designer at Alcatel described the role of a prudct designer according to him. Although what he presented was very conventional to me, it was interesting to see the designers' stance in these big french operations. He claimed how design was blurry, intangible and "difficult to measure" in this context, showing example of meetings in which the person with the vaccum cleaner in the corridor is asked if she preferred "product A" or "product B" or how the CEO needs to get back the products at home and ask his wife about it. I quote that example because I was kind of astonished by the gender assumptions there, as if I had been swamped background in time. I also found curious the sort of design he presented as he never mentioned "critical design" or less mechanistic and utilitarian approach.

Finally, the manager of branding at SEB described the relationship between branding and product design. What was very inspiring there was his description of the failures of some products who wanted to jump in a certain bandwagon (like... designing ironing devices in an "apple-like" way with translucid material), forgotting to match the brand of the product. He also describes some of their process based on "affordance test" of pans, coffee-machine and toasters: how they ask 100 persons (who are presented the product) to use it, how they would hold it, use X and Y functionalities. In a sense, what he described what very close to usability testing in which people begins to explore freely the usage of a physical artifact.

Why do I blog this? although a bit loosely coupled at first, the program was very interesting in the sense that it showed the sort of messiness of approaches and perspectives, especially in the context of France. Good meetings there as well.

No WiFi!

Seen in Grenoble today:

"no wifi"... as if it was important to indicate that this area is not covered? It's not the case here, if you read the lines under that sign. Sometimes, 802.11b cannot be employed... some context prevent people from making it available and sometimes it's even worse: you're required to deactivate your wifi-enabled devices!

Also, think about the fact that I've seen this sign in France, and there were not french translation at all around it.

Increasing pace of interactions in our cities

In Life in the Real-time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism, Anthony Townsend deals with the implications of new mobile communication on contemporary urbanization. Unlike preceding technologies such as automobiles or telephones, Townser argues that mobile phones may not results in "enormous physical upheavals" (such as suburbian low-rises or CBD skyscrapers). What may happen is rather that mobile communication may rewrite the rules of spatial/temporal communication turning decision-making in everyday life as something more complex and less predictable. This will eventually lead to more decentralization, more interactions... which will "speed the metabolism of urban systems" with more "activity and productivity". Hence a situation where we have a "real-time city in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously". What are the consequences of this situation according to Townsend? Some excerpts:

"Mobile communications technologies reinforce the competitive advantage of central city business districts by making them more efficient, yet at the same time make megalopolitan automobile-based urban sprawl manageable and livable. This dramatically complicates emerging internal conflicts within the field of city planning on issues such as New Urbanism and urban sprawl by undermining the existing technological space-time regimes that have both driven the trends and framed debate.

Second, and far more importantly, massive decentralization of control and coordination of urban activities threatens the very foundations of city planning – a profession based upon the notion that technicians operating from a centralized agency can make the best decisions on resource allocation and management and act upon these decisions on a citywide basis. "

Why do I blog this? Townsend's idea of the "intensification of interactions" as a consequence of mobile communication is interesting, and different form people who keeps advocating for a so-called "end of space/world is flat" motto. While some people are trying to find the material impacts of mobile phones on cities (new building forms, etc.), his insistence on a qualitative influence is interesting.

What is then pertinent in this paper is Townsend's proposal for urbanists to go beyond classical tools ("the widespread bit-by-bit reconstruction of cities is going largely unnoticed by planners accustomed to visualizing cities through aerial photographs"). Classical tools are also problematic because of their centralized perspective approach, which will prevent urbanists to grasp the ever-increasing changes of city metabolism. Therefore, there is a need for new paradigms in urban planning such as more complex models of swarm intelligence (he mentions StarLogo but there might lots of other and more advanced models).

Eyes upon the street

"there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The building on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn they backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind."

Jane Jacobs - ("The Death and Life of Great American Cities")

Human eyeballs, fake eyes or digital camera?

Why do I blog this? I enjoy that quote from Jane Jacobs and I think about it each time I see eyes painted or tagged as graffitis on the Street of contemporary cities. Especially when I see these eyes in places where the number of pedestrians is quite limited (like the one depicted here found in Brussels). It's as if someone had painted these eyes to remind us that you, as a lonesome pedestrian, are not alone and that you're watched. But not watched by what Jacobs describes, rather by distant and unknown eyes (in a Panopticon way). An interesting sign about this is that sometimes these "sprayed" eyes are represented with a Illuminati-like logo (as if there were a conspiracy against *you*):

Bottom-up innovation and velo'v

In this post, I mentioned this bike rental service called velo'v in Lyon (Paris has velib, Brussels has cyclocity, etc.). They're managed by JCDecaux and you can read Re*Move for an analysis of this. What is interesting is to observe the side practices around these bikes. Two examples: Look how here the saddle is rotated, which is a trick used by people to show that the bike does not work well (or a part is broken):

In the second example, a part of the bike has been painted in pink by ACTUP activitists (in paris they covered saddle with pink tissue):

Why do I blog this? going through some pictures I've taken recently, look at emerging patterns, observe what that means for urban computing. In these cases, it's the "bottom-up innovation" aspect that I find intriguing and how the infrastructure that has been put in place by JCDecaux is apprehended, the creativity around it and what this means to rethink these artifacts in the city of the near future.

Certainly, material for a talk concerning "bottom-up innovation and urban computing"

A framework of "place" for LBS design

Morning read in the train this morning was "A Framework of Place as a Tool for Designing Location-Based Applications" by Anna Vallgarda. The paper is about a "framework of place" defined through interviews with architects, that aims at informing the development of location-based applications. The author describes what are the structure and properties of place that are important for architects as potentially influencing the conception of "how human beings perceive their presence in place". The point is that developing applications based on context require the knowledge and meaning of the significant parameters of the place where it should work. That's why she reviews different "location models" (aura model, nexus model, etc). TRying to summarize the framework she describes lead me to:

"To recapitulate, the concept of place refers to the physical order of objects; it is the physical boundaries within which we act. This framework is an account of what such boundaries contain (and their potential attributes).

Atmosphere: Light: northern, southern, artificial or strong/weak or direct/indirect Color: cold/warm or strong/pale or red, yellow, blue Materials: concrete, tree, glass, stone, clay, tile or rough/soft Proportions: human scale or large industry building Shape: circular, square, blurred Vertical position: floor or altitude Temperature: Celsius or Fahrenheit Air/wind: clean air or wind speed Sound: machine, animal, human or high/low

Activities: Entrances: bodily, visual, audible or mediated/direct or easy/difficult Functionality: bathroom, kitchen, playground Resources: power, water, gas, WiFi

Hierarchies: Social: home – community garden – town-hall square (enables social navigation) Proportion: house – apartment building – industrial area (enables physical/social navigation) Indoor/Outdoor; bed room – balcony – plaza (enables physical/social navigation)

Infrastructures: Type Modalities Measures Enables Bodily: foot, car etc. (measure: meters, miles) (enables movement, overview, social interactions) Visual: direct, mediated (measure: clarity) (enables: visual contact, overview, social interactions) Audible: direct, mediated (measure: decibel) (enables: audible contact, social interactions) Material: water, power etc. (measure: liters, voltage) (enables: various activities)"

Why do I blog this? as I am interested in the UX of location-based application, this sort of framework is interesting as it aims at "establishing a more nuanced notion of location", which is often a problem (as location is often limited to a dot on a map without any thoughts about granularity or contextual problems). As the author mentions,it would be good to complement it with environmental psychology, cultural geography, and anthropology.

It's also limited to indoor locations, I may find interesting to repeat this work and complement the model at the city level, with urban planners or transport/infrastructure practitioners for example.

Atom style - Atoomstijl

Perhaps one of the most important building I wanted to see in Brussels this week was the Atomium. Built for the Expo'58 (1958 Brussels World's Fair) and designed by André Waterkeyn, this building is a 103-mettre connection of 9 steel sphere so that the whole forms the shape of a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times:

According to the wikipedia entry, one of the original ideas for Expo '58 was to build an upside-down (and 6 months lasting) version of the Eiffel tower but the architect felt that an atomic structure would be more symbolic of the era.

Why do I blog this? I find this building intriguing as its whole architecture exemplifies progress. The representation of where the future would lay (the atom) is embedded in this architecture. This whole style called "Atoomstijl/style atome" has also inspired other people such Yves Challand who drew comics in this retro movement.

Talk at Google about location-awareness

Been at Google Office in Zürich this afternoon for a Tech Talk about "location awareness and mobile social computing". Google's R&D office in Zürich is actually very well into maps and spatial applications, which is why I wanted to confront my ideas to them. Although this is my usual talk about barriers and problems of location-aware applications, the version is evolving constantly since I started presenting it. See here for the slides. I try to take into account people's comments and the things we discuss are a lot different depending to whom I present it to.

The discussion revolved around notions such as:

"- are there different perception of storing personal data such as location, how do people accept that? know that their location is stored? - are there different cultural or behavioral reactions depending on countries, wrt usage of location-aware devices - people found interesting the fact that the location-aware application which seems the most successful is not really a location-aware system as it is Jaiku. We had a discussion about how I found this platform relevant as it can allow people to disclose the information they want (and to show others how and where they want to look like). - if the mobile phone is a bad platform, what about navigation devices such as TomTm or GPS artifact, can they be a solution to reach a critical mass (interestingly the same point that was brought forward at Cisco the other day). - what about the ecology of interface: is-it only about mobile location-awareness? can we use other outputs? combine them? what does location-awareness mean on a mobile phone in conjunction with a web-interface?"

Thanks Giorgio and Christian for the invitation!

Greenfield and Shepard on Urban computing

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

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

"

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

"

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

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

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

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

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

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