June 2004 Archives

New York's High Line is a little known and long-neglected "urban wilderness" - 1.5 miles of elevated rail tracks stretching down the West Side. Built in the 1930s, abandoned by the 1980s, it was threatened in the 1990s by a group of real estate developers hungry for the land underneath. In 1999, the "Friends of the High Line" was formed to save the tracks and turn them into a walkway linking Penn Station to the Hudson River Park. (If you've never walked down that stretch - trust me: it's a great example of vibrant urban life, but it could use some green space.)

In 2002, the city officially decided convert the High Line back to public use, and by 2003 the Friends of the High Line put into motion an open design competition to introduce new ideas for public life and city renewal.

Four teams have been selected to design the final plan for the space; their illustrations will soon be on display at the Center for Architecture in New York, but the online results from the open competition is an inspiring overview of ideas for reclaiming and reusing older city structures.

Also check out: Keller Easterling's alternative "master plan" for the High Line.

If you check the column to the right, you'll see I've added an rss feed that tracks my location. So if you are one of the happy few who both want to know where I am at all times AND use an rss aggregator, today is your lucky day.

Cheers.

Went this weekend to the Art Deco exhibit at the Fine Arts Museum. It was stunning.

I'd never seen footage of Josephine Baker dancing before, and so had never caught the crucial irony: there she was, the "savage" cabaret entertainer, with her bare breasts and her skirt of feathers...with an elegantly styled bob and delicate, well-made high-heeled shoes on her feet. You know, they say that if you really want to place someone socially, you need to check their haircut and their shoes...

More exciting, however, was this swoony 1920s poster from the Japanese designer Satomi Munetsugu. I am a sucker for Deco posters, as is much of the world, but I'd never heard of Satomi's work. This poster is a dramatic departure from the canonical Deco transportation iconography, which usually puts a static image of the means of transportation front and center. Here, the train almost disappears, subsumed into the blur of colors that is all you can see at high speed. The lettering disappears too - even the all-important name of the destination becomes a window through which we see the world fly by. It's as if Satomi just wants us to "focus" (ironic, here) on the act of seeing, rather than what is seen. What matters, he seems to be saying, is not the machinery of speed. Rather, it's the effect that new technologies have on human perception.

The version of MT installed on the NYU server is clearly a relic from more innocent days, when comment spam either didn't exist or wasn't a big enough problem to build in defenses against. Remember those golden days? Since anything that can be spammed, will be, at this point releasing any application without built-in spam guards is a usability no-no akin to not supporting copy and paste.

For the past two days, I've been getting 100+ spam comments/day. Since this blog is hosted on an NYU server, I don't have access to install a spam filter. This has never been a big problem before, but apparently I just hit the spam tipping point and am a prime target. And given the unwieldiness of MT's comment-deleting process, I just can't click fast enough. Which means that, unfortunately, you might be hit with some unpleasant comments. When I'm deleting the comments, I actually have to hold my left hand against the screen to block out the offending text (bringing in Disney characters and explicit sex acts is just unbelievably low, even for a spammer).

Hopefully sometime soon we'll get a filter running here. I am not Joi Ito, and I don't have 5 hours to spend every day on this blog. In fact, with a 2hr commute to Palo Alto, I have considerably less time. So the more time I spend deleting nasty spam, the less time I have to do anything like writing. Which is sad. And sadly, I'm disabling commenting until further notice. Given that people don't actually comment on this blog that often, it's not a major disaster. But it's not the way I wanted to run things. Send me an email if you've got the urge to say hi.

Everytime I wait for my luggage at an airport, I wonder about the ubiquitous Smarte Cartes. What makes them so smart? The carte itself is just a modified dolly - there's nothing smarte about it. The smarts here are actually all contextual - they only exist because the carte rack is in the right place, at the right price. Me, I think the smarte parte is the creators' business plan.

If even these profoundly dumb pieces of metal are a little smart, then what about the "smart furniture" in Mike's new manifesto (complete PDF here) It jibes with much of the ubicomp discussions (cf: context-awareness, augmented artifacts, etc) just using the mindset and vocabulary of design, not scientific research.

Mike thinks smart furniture is "better." Unfortunately, "better" can be a slippery concept. For Mike, "better" means: "reduce(s) complexity." Or it can mean, "more comfortable." Or also: "more powerful and more easy." Or: acting "more elegantly and efficiently." Those statements, now that I think of it, articulate a set of values common to most designers: simplicity, comfort, power, ease. And speaking as one kind of designer, I tend to agree with him.

Of course, speaking as a longtime smart-ass, I want to bring up all sorts of potential discomforts and complications. I always do.

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
- Elizabeth Bishop

This entry (and the one after it) got lost somehow when I was wildly deleting spam. I've got no idea what I did to them, and there's no backup for it. Oh, well. No tragedy. Yet I somehow feel like I should record the disappearance...

Bikes plus tagging plus guaranteed national media attention at the Republican National Convention = new forms of mobile street political action. I'm thinking of both magicbike* and the no more prisons sidwalk tagging campaign**. And freeway blogging. And the French project that I can't remember the name of where two suspended robot painters dot matrix graffiti a wall. (You know the one.) It's nice when the street talks. But it's more noticeable when the street is spraypainted with catchy slogans.

Using bikes as automatic traces of urban pathways - so good. I bet Bloomberg's City Hall will not be best pleased by the anti-Bush sidewalk graffiti, however. The best thing about bikes: the police can't cite you if they can't ride you down...

Later: Eric reminds me of the Institute for Applied Autonomy's GraffitiWriter

* Yury of magicbike is somehow associated with this project, so it all makes sense.

**Sorry. Don't have a picture of this one. But everywhere that nomoreprisons activists go, they spray "nomoreprisons.org" on the sidewalk. The "indyvoter.org" people do it too. You can see it all over America, like a neon orange record of rallies, potluck dinners, and how-to-get-arrested workshops.

Jonah has a nice list of tech-based anxieties, to which I am happy to contribute:

The feeling you get right after you put something in the microwave and turn on HIGH power, not knowing what will happen to the food or its container. This reminds me of a bunch of other technology related “feelings” you get - such as not shutting down your machine the “right” way, sharing iTunes but not wanting everyone knowing you listen to Stone Temple Pilots (not that I do)

And how about: the moment in a meeting when you can't remember whether or not you turned off your mobile phone but don't want to be obvious about checking. Or the heart-stopping fear when you drop your laptop? I also like the awkward moment when you let people use your laptop to check their email, and you have to show them where and how to click -- and then get out of the way quickly so you don't accidentally ogle their inboxes.

I'm sure I'll add more on later. Suggestions?

Standing in a small conference room on Microsoft's vast campus earlier this spring, Mr. McBride, 38, explained how the techniques he learned in tracking down prison escapees have come in handy finding spammers. He unfurled a giant piece of paper covered with hundreds of tiny symbols - faces, trucks, computer screens, telephones - connected by a spider's web of multicolored lines.
...
"The real key is trying to figure out how to connect the virtual world" with "someone you can hold responsible for this," Mr. McBride said. Once you have the link, he said, "you can use all the tools of a normal investigation."

What's also interesting is the way this kind of tracking maps social networks across communications media, locations, and business entities. Yet it returns at the end the physical body of the spammer: it's not enough, is it, to have an email address? No, for real legal accountability, you still need a warm body at a mail drop.

From an NYT article on making spammers accountable.

There was a Wired News article today about drivers who want to reprogram their cars that reminded me of my friend Paul’s Prius.

Cars are still a novelty to me, and cars with 9’’ LCDs in them are still more novel (noveller?). But Paul has gotten over the shock of the new, and pointed out all sorts of features in the music interface that’d he be happy to add for himself...if there were some sort of accessible API. Which begs the question, “Well, why not?” Obviously, we might not want Paul reprogramming his brakes on the go. But it’s perfectly reasonable to build in some tools for customizing and extending one’s in-car media player. This is probably illegal, but let’s just entertain the idea for a moment.

“Car chippers” (modern day hotrodders) are hacking their Volkswagens and Corvettes for better performance. But since at this point Americans live in their cars, it seems like a short step towards also tinkering with the entertainment system to get more information about your CDs, to prompt you when your favorite dj is on, etc. This could be a terrible idea - do we really need more people futzing around with their radios at 65mph? But it’s not like the existing Prius screen design and functionality isn’t dangerously futzy already. “Why is there no pause button?” asked Paul. “Why is the volume control on the screen and the track forward-backward buttons on the dashboard?” I couldn’t really give him a good answer.

As the Wired article points out, there’s more at stake than just Paul’s CD collection. Cars are increasingly equipped with the processing power of PCs — but not the debugging capabilities. Instead, car manufacturers are designing cars that can only be troubleshot with the help of expensive scanners — which usually only car dealerships own. So they both take a bite out of the profits of independent mechanics, and force drivers to pay to get enigmatic warning lights diagnosed and turned off. It seems a little counterproductive. Why alienate your two most enthusiastic user populations (mechanics and car chippers) as well as a substantial population of less committed drivers who don’t want to pay $120 to get a minor fix every month or so?

The blurring of boundaries between automobile and PC brings new and troubling significance to the phrase “fatal error.” I’m on the point of buying a car, and anything that ratchets up my bill or my anxiety levels is a deal-breaker. I mean, if you were forced to spend $120 bimonthly to have an official Microsoft or Apple tech fix your computer, wouldn’t you consider that a major, major software problem? And if your computer didn’t tell you what the problem actually was but instead just flashed its LEDs enigmatically, wouldn’t that also be a major, major problem? So why is this somehow okay in a KIA?

Which leads me, inevitably, to the incipient dyspepsia that is the by-women, for-women Volvo concept car (hereafter ironically referred to as “FWBW”) Unlike cars with unhelpful and expensive warning lights, FWBW was apparently designed to completely frustrate any action the driver might take to maintain the car herself.