January 2004 Archives

We focus upon frontiers; the peak of interest in a symbol tends to occur at the time of revelation, somewhere midway in the passage from the obscure to the obvious. But there is endurance and renewal, too. Discoveries become available knowledge only when preserved in accessible form; the trenchant and laden symbol does not become worthless when it becomes familiar, but is incorporated in the base for further exploration. And where there is density in the symbol system, familiarity is never complete and final; another look may always disclose significant new subtleties. (260)

So may a white house look white at noon, but red at sunset; and a globe looks round from any angle. Sensory and emotive experiences are related in complex ways to the properties of objects. Also, emotions function cognitively not as separate items but in combination with one another and with other means of knowing. Perception, conception, and feeling intermingle and interact; and an alloy often resists analysis into emotive and nonemotive components. (249)

- Nelson Goodman (sadly, no relation), Languages of Art, 1968.

The Safe Room: NBC Protection Tent " The NBC Protection Tent is an innovative fusion of a hi-tech NBC (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical) filtering system with a low-tech inflatable structure. The tent provides a reusable habitat where people can hang out during an NBC crisis. The tent also doubles in times of peace as a home-office cubical with excellent acoustics.

Kanae passed along this Japanese-American online store from Compact-Impact.

If anyone wants to buy me the SafeRoom, I wouldn't say no. Forget RFIDs and bracelet communicators. Inflatables, man. Inflatables are the future.

full of young people watching TV, if you believe Vodafone.

Oh yeah, and in the future there's a lot of Flash.

It's got the familiar complement of bracelet, pendant, and sunglasses wearables, although Digital Wallpaper, as always, strikes me as a really liveable idea if programmed correctly*. I love the ways our visions of the future never quite see the real changes to come: who could imagine now a world in which female military officers wear miniskirts? We're always crucially wrong on those small details -- and the larger cultural changes that create them.

But one vision of the future seems to remain constant: the idea that somehow computers will magically read our hearts and minds, then respond appropriately. Scott points this out in a great post on an article by Roy Want in Scientific American: "Weiser['s]... bold vision of 'ubiquitous computing': small computers would be embedded in everyday objects all around us and, using wireless connections, would respond to our presence, desires and needs without being actively manipulated." if by "active manipulation", he means "conscious operation of an interface", then that's all good and fine. but i suspect the article's audience will interpret it to mean that ubicomp won't have an interface and will respond to us automagically. using what? telepathy? interactional invisibility does indeed involve active manipulation, in the sense that users will physically and socially manipulate the world to achieve ends aided by computers. but they'll be thinking not about the manipulated tool, but about the action or activity the manipulation effects.

The Scientific American article is headed "Automating Everything," and the Vodafone concepts pick up that ball and run with it. My favorite "automate everything" candidate is the "Emergency service" communicator, which can monitor the emotional state of the user and detect distress or fear. Faced with a threatening situation, the service can trigger an audible alarm or automatically contact the appropriate authorities. There's a lot unstated in this scenario of use, so I'm going to try to give Vodafone the benefit of the doubt. Let's hope the user has to deliberately arm the device before it calls the cops. Let's hope there's some good feedback to the user and some manual overrides. Because otherwise, I'd really hate to see what would happen if I was late for work, ran a block after the bus, yelled for the driver to stop, then finally gave up and started to cry.

This is a challenge that the affective AI people have taken on as well. I can't say as I have much hope for that project either. As Scott says, life is lived in the confounds; it consists both of patterns (which supposedly "the system" will learn and act on) and of exceptions to those patterns. In the future, as in the past, people will continue to misunderstand me, I will continue to misunderstand myself, and we'll all stumble forwards together, often failing -- but sometimes succeeding beyond our wildest hopes. A computer emergency system, like a can of Mace or a .45 in the back pocket, can be a reassuring thought in a dark street after midnight. But as with the gun, just because something sounds reassuring doesn't mean it makes you safer.

*cf last year's sharing personal media ideation. Or thinking about Equator's tablecloth

Chris Hackett from the Madagascar Institute was recently badly hurt in an explosion while building a confetti gun to start off the Idiotarod. You can donate at the Madagascar Inst's site.

They've been promising for years that someday something might go "horribly, horribly wrong," and now it did, and it's not fun at all.

Nalini recommended that I read a book called Social Landscapes, but she couldn't remember the author's name. As usual, the Internet doesn't disappoint.

Social Landscape Photography Gerald Davey
Social landscape photography expresses a distinctly personal vision, typically within everyday human environments.

Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods in the Sociological Imagination, by Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman
In this collection an international range of experts explain how they have used visual methods in their own research...Contributors explore the following ideas: Self and identity; visualizing domestic space; visualizing urban landscapes; and visualizing social change. Methods covered include photo and video diaries, juxtaposing official and unofficial views, using images as triggers in interview work, working with children through photographs, and combining visual methods with interviews and text based research.

visualdiaries: the social landscape rich-joseph facun
"from rome, virgina, ohio, to new york i have walked and this is what i see," says facun.
the following images are a selection of these observations; a view of urban scenery as seen from a single point.

  
The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape by Joel Kotkin
Like the postindustrial metropolis, the preindustrial city, existing before the era dominated by mass production of goods and services, flourished by capitalizing on functions--such as cross-cultural trades, the arts, and specialized craft-based production--that could not be adequately performed by the far more numerically superior hinterland.

In an attempt to keep track of the ever-growing number of ubiquitous devices and pervasive systems, I wrote up a brief taxonomy of “networked objects” for a class last year. I’m reposting an excerpt now as a blog entry because, well, a couple of people said they found the original paper useful. Most of the projects I see these days fit into a few rough categories: surrogate objects, network displays, remote controls, and community devices. The categories are not mutually exclusive; rather, they describe a range of functions shared by many devices hooked into networks.

I somehow missed, back in November, Time magazine's hoopla over the Frog Design/Motorola iDEN Offspring prototypes for wearable, wireless networked objects that (huzzah!) aren't watches, cellphones, or PDAs. Not that I don't like watches, cellphones, and PDAs. But there's a fine line between, say, enhancing existing objects with appropriate connectivity -- and being afraid to produce anything new.

Addendum: I've been getting a lot of comment spam on this entry, so I'm removing commenting from it until I get the spam filter working for this site. Sorry. Email me if you have anything to talk about and I'll be happy to respond.

- L.

Mr. Shreve said that a customer called to tell him about a boy who injured himself trying to whack a Defender mailbox with a baseball bat from a moving car. "I don't know if his arm was broken or dislocated, but he was in a lot of pain," Mr. Shreve said.

For $795 and in any of seven colors, the Defender gives you peace of mind, knowing that your enormous tax refund, royalty check or new credit card sits securely behind seam-welded steel an eighth of an inch thick. The box itself stands about four feet high on a tapering pedestal that makes the slightest nod to evening wear, and it holds a package of 9 by 9 by 12 inches. The pedestal is hollow so that it can hold many days' worth of mail — in case you are traveling.

from the NY Times

No, for sheer peace of mind, forget a firewall or crypto. Want you really want is steel. I want to discuss here - again - physical presence, and the reassurance power of tangible objects. Their affectiveness. It's easy to snicker at the Defender. I know, because I'm snickering right now. But if activism takes its power from issues that people can control, then the Defender is a whacking great piece of personal activism for (snicker) $795.

I wouldn't spend $795 on a mailbox, even if I had the money. But if money is an index of concern, then I would spend at least that much in Liz-terms to get some reassurance about something that worries me a great deal more: the fuzziness of my electronically-stored data in a world of corporate-owned databases. Servers are so hackable and demographic information is worth too much money.

I know I have a data shadow, but I know that I cannot imagine its extent, or where it is cast. That's the problem - I don't know who wants to know what about me. Mail theft, in contrast, is so wonderfully limited. It is imaginable. It occurs during a moment of human inattention at an end point of an extremely regulated and surveilled system. The solutions have heft and mass. My days are measured in cycles and bitflips, and I believe in them. But I wish data privacy could feel so...real. Solid. It's difficult to feel reassured when the problem is - literally - invisible and the safeguards wouldn't stop a baseball bat.

Which is why I'm sure the Defender - or something priced slightly less - will do very well for itself.

I always like dynamic color schemes, especially those that change in response to physical environmental variables or user behaviors. Douwe Osinga is doing some nice work thinking about group behaviors to affect the appearance of websites, including Automatic Color Scheme:

The website has its colorscheme centrally stored and it all depends on two variables, the hue of the site and the saturation. The hue is the basic color as taken from the rainbow. The saturation is how full this color is, i.e. how far removed from gray...Now, when a visitor lands on any page, he will get a saturation/hue pair similar to the current one. The longer he stays, the more the current one will be modified in the direction of that particular variation.

I also like his Mapped Web visualizations:

Physical distances are easy enough to measure, but how do we go about measuring psychological distances? The Mapped Web does this by taking the chance that given a page contains the name of one country it will also contain the name of another country as a measure for psychological distance. The resulting images show us how close countries are to each other in psychological terms.

Douwe also has downloadable code for everything I looked at, which I think is really commendable.

Privacy and the Urban Imagination
Christena Nippert-Eng and Jay Melican, Illinois Inst of Technology

• “privacy work”: defending and bounding private spaces
  
• privacy as umbrella (Anita Allen)
  
• “Islands of Privacy” research
  
  exercise: emptying wallet and purse and asking people to identify what is private, public, or ambiguous
  
  “economy of strangers” where people must publicize their ID using mediating institutions but want to withhold as much information as possible
  
  development of flexible ID management tools
  
  “public” and “private” defined through perceived consequences of revelation
  
  these definitions are individual and arrived at through scenario-based reasoning
  
  “scenario-ization”: elaborating meaning through hypothesis – “reality-fed imagination”
  
  privacy is “collusive,” requiring “civil inattention” (Goffman, natch)
  
  good community in some ways equals good privacy
  
  what’s new is the extent of privacy fears (fear of loss of control over personal information)
  
  fed by: mobile technology, centralized, hackable databases, and the feeling of being surrounded by unseen, unknown strangers
  

Cafes and crowds

Eric Laurier, Glasgow

• social history of cafes and coffeehouses
  
• one view: the value of a café is in its diversity (Magary)
  
• how do customers evaluate cafes?
  
  at-a-glance analysis
  
  acting/imagining self as a visitor to the city, a stranger
  
• the cosmopolitan café is just one kind of café, with its own problems
  
• each café cannot be everyone’s refuge; it must be different from the stret
  
• Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting
  

Affective Cities

Nigel Thrift

Cities as “storms of affect” (How Emotions Work, Jack Katz)

Plato studied art and affect, Darwin wrote (in 1872) The Expression of Emotions

Yet affect is neglected in academic discussion. Why?

• residual Cartesiansim
  
• cultural division of labor – the arts “do” affect
  
• affect is not easily captured
  

• it is deployed to gain wealth/power
  
• it’s part of how cities are understood – cities must be “expressive” to survive
  

• embodied practices
  
  phenomenology
  
  states that the body moves through
  
  words are representation of emotional state (Katz)
  
  we see our own emotions through the reactions of other people
  
• biological drive
  
  in cultural translations of Freud (vehicles of libido)
  
  driving physical reactions (Tompkins), esp in the face
  
• naturalistic/emergence from interaction
  
  ie, Spinoza
  
• physiological change, writ on the face (Tompkins, Darwin)
  
  face as screen
  

• agencies of choice (mixed activities like electoral activities and protest politics)
  
• mediatization (screen as alternate surface)
  
• small spaces and times (using cinema theory to explain engineering time to produce affect based on anticipation and delay)
  
• design of space (ie, urban lighting consultants and use of music in retail)
  

• skillful comportment
  
  disciplines for openness (Dryerson, Virella)
  
• reparative knowing (ie, psychoanalytic strategies)
  
• tending and neuropolitics (Spinoza, Deleuze)
  
  political ecology: “pruning” bad affect and tending good
  
  William Connolly: Neuropolitics (using layers of attention)
  
• face (Bill Viola)
  
  gets real audience response
  
  audience constructs an archaeology of affect through the body
  
  points to neglected aspect of cities: as seas of faces
  
  learning how to register affect
  
  embedding affect in space and time
  
  looking at modern affect: visual reference as shortcut (Marcus)
  

Keynote: New Mobilities
John Urry

new mobilities paradigm

vs. sedentarist, nomadic, and placeless theories

rise of travel

• people live and work and play at greater and greater distances
  
• social networks are less coherent, with fewer overlapping multiple affiliations (Watts, Granovetter, etc)
  
• people have more contacts, but more time is spent maintaining them
  
• meetingness: yet physical contact (meeting up) is still seen as necessary and desirable (Boden)
  
• obligatory travel: object obligations (to use/manipulate physical obs), meeting obligations, obligations to certain places of leisure, event obligations, family obligations
  
• new category: “mobility deprivation” for social exclusion/poverty
  
• the rise of the networked family
  
• what is the “good life” in terms of mobility?
  

more automatically on Roko.

Architecture of Subtraction

Karmen Franinovic, Ivrea

architecture as a way to subtract (reduce) unwanted information within public places

play as an “in-between” space outside of productivity (ie, it subtracts itself)

using interviews to get at ways that people (in Ivrea) draw boundaries to protect themselves from info overload (collective/personal, mental/physical)

• subtraction from routine (ie, vacation)
  
• subtraction from people
  
• subtraction from environmental stressors
  

filtering information through physical boundaries and devices – several ideations for relational designs

Smoke City: Virtual Urban Spaces

Tim Portlock, Virtual Montmartre Project, Sorbonne

shows examples of virtual (3D) city tour of Harlem in the ‘20s and his own political/artistic virtual interactive cityscapes

Blog This!: How to Know London

Adam Reed, U of Surrey
quotes Ford Maddox Ford’s 1905 “The Soul of London,” talking about the compulsion to record a city which can never be completely grasped, only seen in fleeting impressions.

[I’m reminded of the “secret knowledge” of LA, which is all about the “back way,” which has fewer stop signs/traffic lights/cars]

for London bloggers the city looms large in entries and in daily life

blogs help bloggers define themselves and London as subjects ‡ impulse to blog immediately, all the time

Listening to the Gateposts…: Reflecting on “The City”

Simon Grimble, Cambridge
thinking about the first view of the city, from one approaching (in Jude the Obscure and Great Expectations) – the city seen from the air and far away, vs the city seen close-up and from street level

Urban governance and bureaucratic representations of the city in Almaty, Kazakhstan

Catherine Alexander, Goldsmiths

parallels between city change, personal change, and the big questions of the future

the city plan as a plan to think with, yet the city plan for Almaty is increasingly out of touch b/c official statistics are not measuring reality

Q: (Jonathan W) highlight forms of movement?
Catherine A: movement into and out of city seen as dangerous, with SARS, immigration, and the global market threatening
Simon G: movement into the city (London) can be ironic/playful
Adam R: movement around London as way to index the city


Q: (Christena N-E) look at artifacts and visual narratives (instead of just texts)?

Keynote: City as Airport

Harvey Molotch, NYU


sociology of product designers

• connecting culture and economy
  
• high art as a “semiotic handle” for design
  
• design as a “technology of enchantment”
  

• security is “submarket” – it is not governed by market forces
  
• security is the product of a “command and control” ethic
  
• there’s no R+D, none of the “useful and approachable” aesthetic of product design
  
• the security gate at the airport becomes the model for the security state in toto
  
• part of the work of “doing security” is showing that security is “being done” [security is performative – but who is the audience? what purpose does bad design serve?]
  
• the “massive idiocies” of airport security: the difficulties created for families with children, the picnic tables used as baggage depositories, the Rubbermaid containers used for change
  
• yet flight attendants are “nice” and “do security” – part of their job is the doing of security work in a non-confrontational and reassuring manner
  
• we all do security, though. we all scan the world around us for threats
  
• Disneyland does security and crowd control well; it may seem like heresy, but why can’t airport security be more like Disneyland?
  
• airport as welcoming device (ex: LAX’s neon pillars)
  
• suggestion that airports have security personnel as dedicated “helpers” of passengers, not as guards – “Helping is learning rich”
  
• the example of the busybody, who is helpful but who also performs neighborhood surveillance [as in Jane Jacob’s neighborhood studies]
  

• Q: (Christena N-E) “Security” for whom? Points out the anxiety produced by security measures in families with children, and the workarounds instituted by other travelers
  
• Q: (Genevieve B) (1) The way the experience is gendered, especially in the rules about who can search women. (2) who takes security seriously: big cities vs. little ones.
  
• Q: (John U.) Is this a US-specific question? Schipol and Shanghai are great.
  
• Q: (Adam R.) Airport as liminal space of city: on the geographic margins, but the cause/center of urban catastrophes.
  
• Q: (Giles L.) What is the difference between “security” and “safety” Security is retrospective; safety is proactive.
  
• Q: (Nigel T) Bad design is functional; it enacts dramas that construct anxiety.
  
• Q: (Elizabeth G) The extent to which bad design performs earnestness, sincerity, urgency in gov’t activities (ie, as Americans we think good design is somehow commercial, and bad design non-profit)
  
• Q: (Tim B) The social value of “putting up with it” breeds solidarity
  A: Yes, it can be about “doing your part” – security as solidarity
  
• Q: (Nalini) But I like the Rubbermaid containers! Isn’t this an argument about what “good design” really is?
  
• Q: (Giles L) Well, think about how good at design the Dutch are. Isn’t there a way in which “good design” can be so good it’s restrictive?
  
• Q: (Eric) Getting through security is like getting a gold star in class. Maybe you should get a printed copy of your X-rayed baggage after you get through, to commemorate the parade of your containers past the eyes of the guard.
  
• Q: Police outsource distrust – they do it so we don’t have to.
  
• Q: Security depends upon performing pleasure and performing anxiety at different points in the process – need to have both happen.
  
• Q: (Christena N-E) [An answer to the good design thread] Designers make us feel better, and airports make us feel worse.
  A: It’s the spatial articulation of the good cop/bad cop narrative. It’s the small details that make us feel the anxiety of being strangers there, like not being able to open a door.
  

I've been in the UK for a while, going to a conference and seeing friends, and haven't had much luck with Internet connectivity. What follows (or precedes, given the ordering of this blog) is a belated posting of conference notes and miscellany.

Cheers.

Underdogs and Superheroes is "a research project exploring design interventions for public places" from Play Research. This essay is an articulate explanation of how games and make-belief can help the design process.

Game and performance genres provide techniques for imagining and evolving concepts as well as the means for coordinating a complex activity involving reflection both in action and in context. They provide sets of rules and expectations that structure participation in an activity while supporting imagination and play. Techniques such as enactment, narrative, and improvisation support immersion in characterizations and situations, structured evolution of concepts, and frameworks for inventing new possibilities. Through the application of temporal and physical formats, such as procedures and props, they structure participation and interaction, effectively creating a separate safe space and time for participants to engage in imagination, play, and creative activity.

While I'm at it, I should also cite Faraway, another exercise in games as research, It has a designer in common. Faraway was at the user_mode exhibit at the Tate Modern, which happened before I got this blog and thus was buried somewhere in a list of bookmarks for the past nine months. Frustratingly, I can't find the link to the very good exhibit catalogue that I clearly remember browsing back in May.

Douglas' favorite songs and albums of the year. The usual combination of the obscure sublime and the undeniable crowd. If that can be called usual.

Catching up on some reading, I found via danah a great article from SecurityFocus HOME News on social networks sites and privacy/security (note: the two are not equivalent!):

Of course, sometimes an LJ attack is more subtle. By gaining access to someone's account, as LJ user Jack discovered, an attacker becomes privy to the "private" posts of friends. Ultimately, there is little defense against these social attacks, just as there is no way to stem the tide of gossip in the real world. Matthew Ringel, a longtime LJ user, wrote via email, "If I had a dollar for every time a friend in a social group accidentally 'leaked' some information about an LJ posting to someone who wasn't in the friends filter for it, I'd be typing this on a new laptop. There's no technical solution for gossip."

The article goes on to point out that such a malicious person is not a "real attacker" because s/he targets individuals personally, not entire classes of users. We can continue the distinction by looking at motivation: because those kinds of attackers act by revealing damaging information, not through hijacking social networks for gain. On the other hand, since the bonds created by social software are only as strong as the trust that their users have in them, the social repercussions of malicious attacks shouldn't be discounted. Even though the attackers don't steal anything immediately "valuable"*, the loss of audience trust is a "real" problem that can fracture communities. It's homicide vs. ground water pollution.

* Although it really does seem like a great way to get detailed demographic info for directed spamming, doesn't it?

I've been slowly working my way through Rules of Play, Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen's massive textbook on game design (they get extra credit, in my book, for trying to cover semiotics in two pages). The MIT Press website says it offers a "unified model" for anyone who wants to talk about games. I'm not sure how I feel about "unified models," in general, but it is true that Rules of Play is...magisterial. And stolid. And very useful reading for anyone who wants to talk seriously about games.

The space of possibility springs forth out of the rules and structures created by the game designer. The space of possibility is the field of play where your players will explore and cavort, compete and cooperate...You can never directly craft the possible space of your game. You can only indirectly construct the space of possibility. Game design is an act of faith - in your rules, in your players, in your game itself. Will your game create meaningful play? You can never know for sure. (67)

Although my actual favorite moment is when they remind game designers that games are best created by playing them, and that designers should start playing some kind of prototype 20% of the way through the development process. Which means that for a 2-week game design assignment, they point out, designers should have some kind of playable prototype by day 2.

From Eric, David Keady's thesis, which looks at...

interesting ways that technology (GPS in particular) can either add
layers of information to the physical space or conversely expose information about the ways we move and interact. One project looks at the ways that group dynamics could be quantified and in what ways can that information be used in an interesting way. Another looks at the way we interact with people and how their aura can be passed on digitally.

Keady's site has a lot of project ideas, some of them familiar, some of them new. It's always nice to an emphasis on visualization and narrative even in project proposals.

My server was the victim of an exploit a few days ago. My hosting company gave me the bad news as soon as they discovered what had happened, but they, um, didn't tell me just how bad it was. I just went to check a few minutes ago and am, um, appalled.

Yes, I mostly kept backups. Mostly. I should have been better about it, I know. I know. But I lived in NYC for 5 years and never got mugged, so I suppose I felt a little invulnerable.

It's not so much that every single HTML page has been overwritten -- I can deal with that. Okay, alright, now they're some badass computer geeks. Great. It's that I've even lost Illustrator files. I mean, they could have just stuck to the HTML files and gotten the point across just fine.

I wish I could report this to the cops or something. I need closure of some sort.

One two three four five six
Roadrunner roadrunner
Going faster miles an hour
Gonna ride by the Stop-n-Shop
With the radio on
I'm in love with the modern world
I'm in touch I'm a modern girl
USA when it's late at night
I got the radio on
I'm like a roadrunner yeah

Okay, so the blog is back on after a harrowing holiday season involving multiple rounds of parties and an extraordinarily gluttonous New Year’s Eve. Yeah, you heard me right. Gluttonous.

I’m back in LA and thinking a lot about cars. Since I don’t have one yet, you can imagine that mostly my thoughts are full of longing. Filled to the brim with longing, actually. But there was also a post in City Comforts late in the year that got me started thinking about ubicomp and cars.

Cars carve up the experience of the city into plastic- and metal-wrapped single serving-size packets. I especially like to drive alone, late at night, and feel more connected to the DJ on the radio than to the people waiting for me at home or the people I left on the onramp. At midnight on the 405, Garth Trinidad, the voice of Chocolate City on KCRW 89.9, seems closer to me than anyone else on the road. He has a name, and he’s inside my car with me. Other drivers are just license plates and car makes.

So, yes. Ubicomp. Or rather, Pervycomp*. And parking. Admittedly, parking is much less romantic than driving around at night listening to the radio, but after doing a quick check around for ubiquitous computing projects on cars I got a long list of projects designed to help people deal with parking. In HCI, everyday irritations trump romance nine times out of ten. (The tenth, of course, makes my day.)

City Comforts cites this article about SmartPark, the Whistler, BC in-car parking meter system

Motorists purchase one of the devices for $90 along with a rechargeable “smart” card. When drivers decide to park in municipally operated pay parking stalls, they activate the unit by swiping their card, which then deducts an amount of money from the total value of the card based on the amount of time used.

The device, known as an ICPM (In-Car Parking Meter), is then displayed on the vehicle’s rear-view mirror or dashboard for the benefit of pay-parking attendants.

This could tremendously improve the management of scarce urban resources. (Of course, you have to wonder how visitors to the city pay for parking.) In future versions, could the city dynamically change the metered rates over the day depending on supply and demand of spaces per block? Would this, perhaps, someday encourage people to carpool on Saturday nights because parking near bars costs the earth and thus reduce the number of drunken idiots on the 405? Just asking.

What does a city without parking meters look like? Is it like a city without pay phones or without bank branches with tellers? A toll road without booths? How would we know when to pay, and how much will it cost? This is the Internet city, where intelligence is shifted to the edges of the network. As much as I like it in theory (I like the Internet, after all) I don’t know about the practice…

These individual parking meters are a good example of how ubiquitous computing can displace civic infrastructure onto individuals. Which is one way to say that this is a more intrusive continuation of the interaction with government services created by printing your own stamps from the Internet. The on-board parking meter is an extension of the presence of state influence within the previously inviolable space of the car interior.

The ICPM is not ubiquitous computing, exactly. It’s pervasive. It invites the state into a previously privately controlled zone. It dematerializes transactions between individuals and cities into transactions between individuals and personal computing equipment. It’s the plastic- and metal-wrapped single-serving size packet of civic governance.

I’m not quite talking here about the GPS-enabled fear of stalkers and nasty rental car companies. That’s scary too, but it’s a different pervasive computing nightmare. I’m talking here about a gradual fading away of visible confirmations that civic life is a compact between individuals and something exterior to themselves. A lot of the benefits of healthy cities are negative – the litter that isn’t on the streets, the time you didn’t get mugged coming home late at night. So it’s important to have some tangible, ritual interaction with the city infrastructure, even if the infrastructure is as ugly and poorly designed as a parking meter.

And now I’m thinking about radio again. Of Garth Trinidad, in fact, and the way I tune into KCRW late at night, when I’m starting the long dive south on the 405. He’s dematerialized too, just a set of waves on a certain frequency. (It’s funny, isn’t it, how some types of radios are so new I don’t think of them yet as radios, and how some types of radios are so old I forget what they really are?) The ICPM isn’t actually a radio, mind you -– the actual hardware seems to be just a smart card reader/writer. But it’s a next step down the path that began when radios were first routinely installed in automobiles. Folktales tell us to be careful of what we invite across the threshold. We invited the radio frequencies in –- traffic reports, morning talk shows, and all. Garth Trinidad is just a voice in my ear, but through his voice he’s real to me. Here’s the question: could city governance get even realer if it turned into a box on your dashboard? Can we design a box that might make it as real as the voice on the radio? And how freaky would that be?

I don’t know if I’m explaining this correctly; I don’t know why this is such a sticking point with me. If anyone has any thoughts, could they please comment?

Radio on I felt in touch with the modern world
Radio on I fell in love with the modern world
Radio on I feel in love, feelin' love I got the
Radio on like the power, got the magic
Radio on got the AM
Radio on got the FM
Radio on 50,000 watts of power
Radio on going faster miles an hour
Radio on and the neon and it's cold outside
Radio on I feel in touch I feel in love I feel in love
Radio on I got the I got the I got the
Radio on I got the I got the I got the I got the
Radio on again
Radio on

* If I call ubiquitous computing “ubicomp,” can I call pervasive computing “pervycomp?” And how many people have made this joke before? I bet it’s ubiquitous. Oh, I just kill myself.