Results tagged “scs2010” from confectious

Foursquare

"turning the real world into a game...it's good but a little bit of a disaster"
building a new dodgeball-like thing after dodgeball got closed down -- trying to get people to use it by giving them points
inspirations
- Jane McGonigal
- Nike Plus
- Nick Feltron, personal informatics
...points and scores everywhere
- people and dogs!
- inspired by the collecting of merit badges
mobility as prompted by unlocking and mayorships
using the idioms of foursquare to make political jokes
getting people to do things they wouldn't normally do
track history of movements
"what are you talking about? this is the most interesting dataset in the history of the planet!"
- using it for finding kid playdates, tracking geographic networks of relationships, using data to provide info for games

Q: Tom - how do you incentivize hanging out rather than going places?
"that was the problem with Dodgeball. For too long, it was hipsters drinking beer."
Trying to connect Foursquare to other data sources, such as GoodReads, Amazon, etc

House of Game

formed a "nerd poker" tracking group around video games 4 years ago to meet on Thursday nights online - share scripts and material that might not be recognized...and often very self-serving - now more than 300 people. And not self-serving!

trying to break down the wall between hollywood and games people

bringing people together at E3 -- publishers, software, film/movie business, designers
- filmmakers coming to understand that there are different ways to create characters and tell stories
- game designers coming to understand that other industries are actually interested in how they work
- showcasing indie games like Flower, Misadventures of PB Winterbottom, etc
...and making relationships (got distracted here...lost thread while dealing with emails)

types of play
Mark Owens, Avatar Machine - http://www.marcowens.co.uk/avat.html
Human Pacman, in all its many versions
ParallelKingdom, mobile, location-based MM - http://www.parallelkingdom.com/
MyTown: pervasive, location-based - http://www.booyah.com/
Monopoly City Streets, 2009
Internet Eyes, 2010 - "identify crime and be rewarded" http://interneteyes.co.uk/
Code of Everland -- http://codeofeverand.co.uk/
Project H, math in uganda -- landscape learning through physical plau

local design approach
- place
- people
- issues
with Knight Foundation's community-centric gaming initiative
- Detroit and neighborhood abandonment
-- working with local stakeholders
-- real world street-based social game about DIY hacking and bikes and GPS
-- neighborhood hubs as community centers, of sorts
- Biloxi Mississippi - disaster preparedness for teens
- spectacular public game show sport + large-scale community participation --> community media players work to defeat the enemy Hurricane
- participatory entertainment as community catharsis

ARG on a shoestring - Picture the Impossible

trying to do something "innovative" with a newspaper -- an ARG!
...but with no money and no idea how to do it.
differences between newspaper and university on ownership of technology, content, design
bringing in local charities
...all the coordination work of marketing and getting sponsors and

(making cities)

things usman doesn't believe in

make data public --> public make data
ie, pachube -- you publish your (sensor) data

more data is useful --> more context is useful

freedom from constraints is the end goal --> constraints provide hints

architecture is about organizing --> architecture is about disorganizing

people need simplicity --> we are complexity processors

Digital Built fabric

making the invisible, visible
Barangaroo (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners/Arup, 2009)

responsive architecture
"forcefield," London (Arup)

unfolding resource use
Fitzroy Street, London
"people don't really understand what units are"
"nobody tell us what the benchmarks should be"
the desire for only good news

urban-scale information
low2no
making your mobile phone background black based on extent of carbon use
carbon shadows - buildings with large scale installations that show energy use

responsive architecture
kurilpa bridge, brisband (Cox/Arup)
led-based lighting -- not screen-based to avoid giant screens and repurposing for advertisement

adaptive ambient information
HINTeractions
place-states
place-stats
place-status
place-statements
- reflect back to people how they are interacting with spaces
- adaptive ambient information
- green screens (Chiswick Park)
-- screens showing story about how building is trying to be energy efficient
-- trying to create productive competition to reduce energy

Visible output

"The City" Lewis Mumford (1939)
the move from manual labor to wireless work (well, this is only for some people)
wifi in public space
interactive installations
State Library of Queensland (2008)
tag cloud of term extractions in wifi
- moving the display back into the library space
[This sounds remarkably like suggestions I made to the Electronic Resources and Libraries association conference a year or so ago. Hooray for great minds thinking alike.]

responsive architecture
masdar city centre (lava/arup)
lighting/solar collection units
city centre acts as dashboard/central processing unit for wider city

mobility
urban sesnsing - smart light fields
bluetooth - tracing where people are in realtime in transit

persuasive public transit - smart wayfinding

EU future internet
www.ict-sensei.org

...and what to do about "ethically dodgy" work

Where Does It Come From? A brief history of computers and the city

so visual that it's hard to summarize. ask Molly for a copy of the presentation. sorry!

thinking of cities not just as social technology but as "intelligent" -- ie, artificial intelligence
Marvin Minsky, JC Licklider, etc

"The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly."
JC Licklider, 1960

3 modes of computing and architecture and city
representing and visualizing
defining the problem to solve
generating symbiotic systems

ivan sutherland and sketchpad, 1962
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA

"Design today has reached the stage where sheer inventiveness can no longer sustain it."
- C. Alexander, 1963

defining design problems as a series of misfits -- as a series of things that you need to design to smooth over
Alexander - systems generating systems

Nicholas Negroponte
"Someday machines wil go to libraries to read and learn and laugh and will drive about cities to experience and to observe the world."

the emergence of cities
social technologies
- the city
- money
- alphabet and writing
- law and government
le corbusier - house as machine for living in
so: agglomeration of houses?
the human cost of cities; ie, infectious diseases
"the city wll be upgraded"

So Anil wrote a blog post about how everything would be better if we just had people interested in social media in the White House, and we did!
"The federal government is the most interesting startup of 2009"
Then he realized he had just made this whole "pollyanna" thing up.
So how to make this enthusiasm true?
He talked to people: What does it look like when people use this stuff in the White House?
Unfortunately, being on social networks meant breaking the law, because the law requires logging all comments left on those streams -- even the 2 star ratings on a podcast.
And the Presidential Records Act is a good thing.
But they didn't have an application to scrape all those YouTube comments...hence the law breakage.
The answer: interns! They take screenshots of social network sites and paste them into MS Word to create archives.
Says Anil, "I have to get into this racket."
So you think it'll take a weekend and some caffeine. But the White House has to put it out to bid, and obey equal opportunity laws, and fair bidding, etc and it took a year and $1 million.
So yes, some problems. First, who reads fedbiz.gov? How do you know the White House wants your help? And how do people agree on a solution, especially when an easy answer is to shut it all down. And they can't make it themselves in the White House -- no programmers -- and they certainly can't host it commercially. Nor can ordinary citizens and corporations give tools as gifts to the government. And also, frankly, it's not a really interesting technical problem, so it's hard to find tech people to build it, and VCs don't want to fund it. And really, it's not worth funding because it's not a growth industry. And do you really want VCs incentivized to make a ton of money off the federal government? And unfortunately, even if you got it to work out, you'd have to do exactly the same thing for every single case in the federal government.
And there are 10,000 webmasters in the federal government.
But these problems are the same kinds of problems that all startups face. And you can think of it as a checklist, instead of a list of insuperable obstacles.
They have old buildings in DC -- all they need is new ideas!
The biggest VCs Anil knows looks like record labels -- and record labels have proven to be a shaky model.
What if we avoided the VC model and went for a philanthropic model?
But no one wants to build this stuff? But that's just a question of sexiness, and sexiness can be acquired.
People want to help each other -- they want to be civic.
"The terms of service problem": apps.gov has solved this. They just provide a block of boilerplate to add to terms of service to allow federal employees to legally use it.
Like all EULAs, you're still screwed. But you're screwed differently.
And indeed, we can find some institutions who will encourage people to build those apps...and the federal government is moving into hosting services in the cloud. You don't have to run it for them and they don't need to run it themselves.
So just give the problem to technologists, and let them solve the problem.
You just need to advertise in the right places, and the White House is good at getting attention.
It's just a leap of faith.

thus, Expert Labs, now a member for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which can place experts as independent advisors into federal government
So the name itself is a hack. People want to talk to experts. By using the word, you make it true. And "labs" gives us access to the scientific community. It sounds like we're thinking hard. It sounds like we're doing research. Much of this is about framing things in language that works.

And this is the language the AAAS uses to describe what they do: "With our eyes upon the democracy of the future, we extend our hand forward."
and thanks to Beth Novak
treating the obstacles as a game

Roads to Nowhere: Government Blockades to Data Streams/Designer Blockades to Data Streams

lots of money has been spent on ICTs in developing world -- governments, corporations
excitement about "informaticization" and the creation of new technology
ie, Frontline SMS -- tool to help people build SMS-based services
today focusing on clash between top-down initiatives and lack of effectiveness of some bottom-up initiatives
the problem: governments throw a ton of money at building internet access...then end up blocking parts of it through filtering
- ie, Iran, Burma,
easier to cut off access during "acute episodes," but what about everyday filtering and blockage
- the cat and mouse game of connectivity between governments and citizens
blocking pornography perhaps means blocking innovation
regular surveys of government websites
struggled with "lack of absolute excitement" over locative services...perhaps ambivalence?
- the lack of data for central Asian cities like Bishkek or Tashkent
- "mute information landscapes" [lovely phrase!] - maps without labels or signage
a design wishlist
- more and easier tools for bottom-up data aggregation initiatives ... it's not a cellphone penetration issue, ie places with 76% cellphone penetration still don't have labelled maps
- a story: a deploying in Bishkek the GPS in the minibus that talks to a server and sends location via SMS so that people can text next bus and route requests -- in a country with no route maps and unpredictable times. but it didn't work! the problem was a power issue: the box was low power, but the towers in Bishkek transmitted at a lower power, so the antenna didn't have enough power to connect to them - so designing specific devices requires specific creativity
- designing UIs -- maybe we need cuteness, like lolcats

history of Burning Man
[This is sort of frustratingly sanitized. You cannot understand the history of BM's relationship with federal authorities without mentioning rave culture, the attendant sex and drugs, and the difference in organizational cultures between BM attendees and government employees, like the sheriff's office. But this is an interesting account of a set of annual negotiations between a corporation (BM) and the state/federal regulatory apparatus. You also won't hear anything about the sometimes frustrating relationship between BMorg and the people who voluntarily provide services.]
[It's also interesting that Heather put "fire" at the end, and said she couldn't fit it in the presentation. But coordinating fire is one of the big issues that BM deals with in terms of managing safety to government standards]
Interesting that the 1999-current day plan occurred because the theme of the year was "the wheel of time"
"we know what we need to do in order to survive" ....ie, keep Burning Man from being shut down by the authorities

Slow Maps...or Can Dinosaurs Learn to Fly?

USGS founded in 1879... to discover where resources were that could be exploited
the 19th century view of maps as scientific instruments in service of extraction
and yet the massive human labor of map-making through manual surveys
public domain maps have spawned the locative data industry today
topographic maps
- anti-pictorial
- they look neutral, but the things they put in and the things they leave out are *not* neutral
- they carry their own meta-data
mapping by aerial photography
- still required manual line drawings! ie, Hans Ullmer, the mountain cartographer and his hand-etching
- tremendous amount of hand labor then = tremendous amount of code labor today
now, the expansion of user domain of cartography in order to gather support from Congress with the National Map viewer
- but the early bias of maps for countryside was a problem after 9/11 - not a lot of data to help estimate the damage
people still need and want maps from the government
trying to get the government to support effective geographies of the city that would incorporate history, tales, and people's lives
organizing a meeting between the neographers and the government geography folks

Hello Tokyo
area/code

New York as a canvas and who gets to paint it
stories, not facts [!]
cities and arbitrage
- how cities listen, and what they listen for
- Netherlands, 1920 - preparing for air attacks
-- these ear-horn air attack amplifiers was a real artifact!
-- the speed of information had stakes -- high ones
- Baghdad, 1990 - b/c the technology of radar was made obsolete by the F1-17 -- the "stealth bomber"
-- replaced by the F22
- how stealth works: you make a big object look like a lot of little objects -- and in order to detect all those little objects, you have to increase the granularity of radar so that the sky becomes effectively illegible through overwhelming amounts of information
- but stealth only confuses radar -- it doesn't hide electrical signals: "to make something visible, learn how to look"
- financial services: 20% of GDP created by [financial] services and 35% of all wages in NYC
black box trading -- algorithmic "algo" trading and high-frequency trading
- moving mack trucks through the market while not letting anyone know you're doing it, like "financial camouflage"
-- so you take a huge thing and break it up into a million little things and move them through the market
-- so using an algorithm to break them up and move them fast -- and another set of algorithms is trying to find them, an engage in arbitrage around the identified trades
-- so trading has nothing to do with humans anymore -- algorithms battling algorithms to make and detect massive trades
--- 70% of all trades on the market are algorithmic
- speed is the competitive advantage of the information, amplified by the size of the market [this is the geography of server placement and Stephen Graham]
-- ie, this is how the Rothschild family made their fortune, in part -- through a private network of carrier pigeons
-- submarine telecommunications cables -- this is what speed looks like now -- and 60 Hudson St., the carrier hotel -- this building represents the computational center of the marketplace, where all the telcos meet without going out onto the internet (used to be the Western Union building). It's on Hudson St, because that's where the people are, so the infrastructure is there. And the information used to be a product of human exchange.
-- the NYSE used to be in a coffeehouse near where the ships were docking and newspapers were circulating
-- jewelry merchants <-- --> financial services
-- inventing the idea of commercial paper
--> city as platform
- the financial services "delaminate" over time: the city exists to produce paper, and the paper gets more and more diffuse over time
- once upon a time, that market was still about humans near each other, trying to figure out what was going on -- even if trading in paper
- now, the marketplace is a whirr of algorithms talking to each other "duking it out"
- so server distance to computational centers is now New York's advantage in the marketplace, and its measured in milliseconds
- hence weird spikes in commercial real estate
- this is the image of the city: network topology -- more meaningful in financial terms than whatever the people who live there happen to think
- as far as HFT traders are concerned, the city is a motherboard, and they're looking for the most efficient circuitry to transmit info to the bus (ie, the carrier hotel) -- and if you're not participating, you're just "loitering on the motherboard"
- "that is the use of the city at this moment."

but maybe there's good news!
- example of the scam in The Sting -- that time and speed are weapons
- what if the traders just built their own network? they could just lift up into the air and leave behind all their ties to the "viscera and the garbage...they could pass right through us, like a gas, like we're not even affected by them." "we will reach the singularity through financial instruments. they will leave the earth and leave us be."
"using time as a tool and not a weapon"

[ooh. the ethnographic of financial trade algorithm makers would be awesome]
[the fetishization of access to past through representations of archaic artifacts and archaic modes of representation -- what does Molly think?]

Bing Maps: New York as Canvas

translation from lab to large teams making a giant product
what does it take to make many many people create something interesting that allows for creativity inside and outside?
so: microsoft's success was based on enabling an ecosystem of developers
team size: when things get large, they slow down -- ie, communication dominates doing --> heat death
mapping online
- first oriented to search and directions -- but that's just one application
-- all the interesting ideas end up below the cutline, and you never get to them
image-based rendering for ground level imagery (which is much more information-intensive, changes more frequently, has more interesting applications)
- blurring difference between map and virtual reality
showing Bing -- trying to pick image sources -- aerial photos, synthetically generated 3D images, street side images -- dynamically based on what kinds of information make sense based on scale
-- handling transitions between image tiles and image sources
-- impressive "swooping down" transition from aerial to street side
- debate about building models vs "capturing a city" -- this is image-based rendering, so based on photos stretched over 3D geometry used for semantics and transitions. "In a standstill, you are looking at real imagery."
- fusion of two different sorts of capture -- topdown, structured, corporate and unstructured, from users -- so structured capture is where you really have to worry about privacy
-- structured capture is important in urban areas as a "trellis" for applications
-- so faces and licensed plates are blurred in structured capture images "believe me, I've had many discussions with lawyers about this"
integrating photosynth with the map
- photosynth as user-generated virtual environment
- trying to fuse the user-generated photosynth with the map and making the "transitions as cinematic as possible"
enabling map apps - such as hyperlocal blogs

Q: What skills do you need to make a map layer?
Q: What about mobile phones?
Q: Natalie - conversation about symmetric access to information about you
A: Think about how Amazon handles things -- by seeing the inputs to the record and letting people remove things from it "let me see what the surveillance camera thought of my butt" [when trying jeans on] -- but this all requires engineering commitments.

information sharing and innovation in cities
kleiber's law: relationship between mass and metabolism: life slows down when it gets bigger
so organisms tend to have the same number of heartbeats over the course of their lives
do cities work the same way?
predictable relationship between "population" and "creativity" - as cities get bigger, they get increasingly creative
- where creativity is operationalized as number of patents, startups, etc
- so cities *make* people more creative
so: the new book is about innovation environments - why some spaces seem so good at making creativity and innovation possible
- cities, rain forests, online spaces
Brian Eno: scenius (genius in enclosed groups)
the forces that drive that innovation aren't "terribly competitive"
dense environments -- hubspaces -- create spaces of information spillover in which good ideas leak over through physical proximity
- ie, the 18th century coffeehouse
great ideas often come from "porting" an old idea to a new domain - which is called exaptation in evolutionary biology
- ie, the innovation of the printing press. Gutenberg had metallurgy, but not a great idea for printing until he saw grape presses used in wine making
the myth of the eureka moment or sudden epiphany
- ideas come usually in much slower processes
- ie, Darwin's autobiography talks about an epiphany while reading Malthus...but the idea is present in his writing for months before he reads Malthus
- "a hunch slowly coming into being"
so you need to create environments where people's hunches are going to be persistent, and can come into contact with other people's hunches
- cities are that environment
architecture makes emergent ideas possible: J. Jacobs "new ideas need old buildings"
- "ideas don't tend to do very well in shiny new office buildings" [something about this repetition of ideas
- the haunting by old ideas
- often cheap spaces that people
- ie, Brooklyn music scene and the reinvention of Williamsburg [oh, I don't really buy this in terms of how W'burg was gentrified and where the music was being made and how important that music is]
so can we drive innovation even faster by affecting the urban fabric?
what kinds of metaphors can we borrow and use from the architecture of real work environments to make metaphorically useful in virtual environments?
"if we were going to be aspirational about what the web should be, maybe it should be a city"
a word of caution: don't romanticize life in cities
- there aren't actually as many interactions with strangers as you think [oh, god no! why would we want more conversations with total strangers. I think this is one of those weird assumptions about how cities are supposed to work -- that you are supposed to have conversations with strangers, that talking with strangers is the way ideas happen. because "scenes" only happen in groups of people who aren't really strangers, or who have a shared pattern of interaction happen
- children or dogs are what create stimulating stranger interactions -- before having a child, he had never had those desired conversations with strangers
- can you reproduce the kids and dogs effect online?

Q: Clay -- what about San Antonio, which is larger than San Francisco?
A: Well, San Francisco includes Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose -- the metro area is pretty big. But it's not just population size but optimal density. [well, what about LA? I feel like this entire thesis is a footnote on Jane Jacobs, and is essentially tailoring the theory to fit...Greenwich Village.]
Q: famous hubs of innovation are Silicon Valley and Rte 128 -- neither is a Jane Jacobs style city. What about organizations and universities? And what about slums? [This does get back to Ananya Roy's point about also not giving into romanticizing slum architecture] Shouldn't we be thinking about different kinds of creativity?
A: innovation in non-market spaces, such as universities (market vs network) -- taking the "open public sector" as an "engine of innovation." So Silicon Valley had big universities, and the Bay Area counterculture legacy
Q: So why are so many city-sited companies killing innovation?
A: 20% time as hunch-cultivating system
Q: Linda S. -- randomness and unpredictability lacking in companies -- how to fertilize?
A: brain cycling between phaselock and chaos states - research on people with slightly longer chaos states -- they are, no surprise, more creative.
[I think I want to push back a bit on the notion of talking that SJ is dealing with -- both in terms of nonverbal interaction AND in terms of the value of talking to strangers. I think there's on the one hand civic health and on the other hand the hothousing of ideas. In any case, the whole thing is, as Adam says, very culturally specific -- both in terms of how creativity is defined and how it is presumed to grow.]
Q: Molly asks about "underground" creativity -- samizdat, illegal immigrants, black market, etc -- and the exclusivity implied in using male-only coffeehouses as an exemplar of how creativity happens (also, creativity through talk, not making)]