July 2004 Archives

Vanessa Without Borders is the blog of Vanessa, a self-described hipster who has just moved to Sierra Leone to work with an NGO

After 8 years of living the hipster lifestyle in what I've come to think of as the center of the universe, New York City, and working in various media and for various social causes, I have decided to leave the slickness, irony, and most of my accessories behind.

Her website is both a blog of her time there and a clearinghouse for communication between Sierra Leonians and Americans. My favorite section is the Personals, where Vanessa uses the Nerve dating format to quiz both her fellow American and British aid workers and the Sierra Leonians about their lives.

from near near future and elastic space via the very interesting pasta and vinegar, the research blog of Nicolas Nova: "A blog about CSCW, Place and Space Research, Urban Studies and Weird Stuff"

Nicolas, now that I mention it, is using a mobile game as a "testbed to study collaborative processes, namely mutual modeling and division of labor" for his thesis. I find this very interesting, of course, since we're also using a game as a research probe with asphalt-games.

Which reminds me: if you're in New York right now, turn off the computer and get on the streets already.

Everybody likes to rag on the "talking tombstones" that will allow the deceased to leave messages for their loved ones on augmented tombstones with LCD screens.

The snark was palpable:

Sarah said: "going to the graveyard could become just like watching tv! only it would mostly be bad programming...and commercials."

Lev said: "Function and form fit with this one. Graveyards are an incredible vanity in a world that's being paved over."

Josh said: "anyone who thinks those touchscreen tombstones will still be working and elegant in a decade is smoking something."

And Ganesh pointed out that he didn't care, because "I'm gonna be cremated and the ashes thrown in some river."

Which are all good points. But talking to the future -- and conversely, hearing from the past -- is one of those ideas whose time is always coming. FutureMe.org has been around for a while. It sends emails to the future, promising delivery at any date you want in the future. There have been 36320 letters written, so far. I've browsed some of their public entries and find them sad and silly and sweet:

Did you quit smoking like you said you would? Probably not. Set a date and QUIT! You know you have to if you want to have a long life with your beautiful wife, Ewa. SPeaking of...how is she?...Kiss Ewa for me.(written Mon Jan 5, 2004, sent Sat Jun 5, 2004)

I hope mom is still alive. Her death scares me everyday. I can't imagine living in a world without her. Her light is the only thing that keeps me alive anymore.....Well, dinner is ready (lazana) and Conan is coming on in four minutes. I know you hate the monologue, but Conan is Conan, right? Right....Hope thing have gotten better, Your Past. (written Thu Jan 8, 2004, to be delivered Sun Jan 8, 2006)

People remind themselves to quit smoking, and to stay with their lovers, and to just keep on going. And you know, I don't think the problem with messages from the dead would be their banality. Quite the opposite. These messages from the living are poignant enough already.

I just went to see The Five Obstructions, the new Lars von Trier documentary. It's about his relationship with Jorgen Leth, an older Danish director. I loathe von Trier, and unsurprisingly, he comes off as a giant putz. It's hard to imagine why Leth, an amiable and charming man, puts up with him. But that's partially the point: somewhere around the end of the third obstruction movie becomes an unexpectedly inspiring commentary on stubborn ingenuity, the power of constraints, and the complexity of friendship.

Oh, go see it. And then tell me what you think, alright?

from today's NYT article on street art:

We're using the city against itself. Downey, 23.

It's trying to create a visual commons out of the derelict walls of the city. Swoon, 26.

Piling on to Anne's post, I want to add one more fusedspace competition entry to the list (w/thanks to Eric for suggesting it):

Entry 30: Online Chinatown
This proposal aims to enhance public space within Chinatown districts around the world; linking information, events and people using interactive technology

I am not so thrilled with the proposal per se, but I am pleased that it addresses the consequences of global migratory patterns. As anyone who's ever taken the Chinatown bus knows, "Chinatown" is a collective plural. It describes a web of diverse urban areas linked by family ties, bus routes, cultural associations, international phone calls, money orders, gifts. And I hadn't realized until I saw that one project how infrequently I see that web (and the other webs - the Little Saigons, the Koreatowns, etc) explicitly invoked as design rationales on the web.

FYI: That last entry was partially brought to you by the work of Saskia Sassen:

Hypermobility and space/time compression need to be produced, and this requires vast concentrations of very material and not so mobile facilities and infrastructures. And they need to be managed and serviced, and this requires mostly place-bound labor markets for talent and for low-wage workers. The global city is emblematic here, with its vast concentrations of hypermobile dematerialized financial instruments and the enormous concentrations of material and place-bound resources that it takes to have the former circulating around the globe in a second.

I just got a call from a friend in Berlin. She was on a "family heritage" trip to Poland and Germany, which as the child of Israelis was...difficult. So she found a VoIP phone at an Internet cafe and called me to talk. It was cheap; she could afford to tell me about her family’s ancestral town, the drive through Poland to Germany, her need for a good café and a drink.

VoIP to mobile might not be a novelty for lots of people, but for me it was a revelation. The bits went from a microphone in Berlin, through a server, through long cables, through more servers and cables and thence to the cellular network, (somewhere crossing the Atlantic), emerging clear and true from a mobile phone on a San Francisco freeway. I haven't been this excited about a phone call since I first heard a car phone ring in, um, 1992. I think.

There's a point here I'm getting to about the interplay between stability and mobility. Think about all the movement — temporal and spatial and social — that created that one brief conversation:

1) My friend is wandering around Europe (mobility 1: global tourism)

2) And is upset because of historical traumas (mobility 2: memory and time; mobility 3: emigration; and the potential for mobility 4: a one-way train trip in the 1940s to a small Polish town)

3) So she decides to go out on the town to feel better about Berlin (mobility 4: city-based tourism)

4) And calls her friend in America, who at that moment is driving from work to home (mobility 5: daily commute)

Everything and everyone is in motion except the phone at the Internet café. It’s the technological fulcrum around which this story turns. My friend could have used text — email or IM. But it was important, right then, to talk. My vision’s a little blurry from all the plane tickets, family history, close friendships, and street signs whizzing by. But the social effect of cheap and publicly accessible VoIP (like, I guess, cheap and accessible long distance telephone service) still seems miraculous.

I want to hold on to this sense of wonder as long as I can, because pretty soon VoIP will become invisible as technology (as the phone did). Invisibility is (one) ideal, of course. We couldn’t move smoothly through our complicated 21st century days if every minute or so we stopped to savor the pleasure of doors that open automatically, or lights that turn on when we walk by, or hot water pouring from a tap. We need to be in motion, so we have to stop paying attention to all the fulcrums around which our daily routines turn.

It’s nice to be reminded, occasionally. To be mindful of how utterly ridiculous and pleasurable it is to talk to a distant friend, and the infrastructions - simultaneously stable and very fragile - necessary to have made that connection.

I just had (okay -- it was two weeks ago, but it took me a while to recover) an unusually bad encounter with, sadly, the very well-intentioned and usually helpful Bay Area public transit trip planner. Getting from my house in the Mission District to the lab in Palo Alto (26 miles or so away) requires three forms of public transportation: subway to light rail to bus. The online trip planner, as you can imagine, is absolutely essential in coordinating all these transfers. On a good day, the trip takes 1.5 hours. On a bad day, as happened last week, I miss my usual train, take the next one, and then spend 45 minutes waiting at the Palo Alto bus stop to take a ten minute ride from the station to the lab.

Just to clear this up - I spent just as much time getting from Millbrae (in the south of San Francisco) to California Avenue (in south Palo Alto) as I did waiting at that goddamn bus stop. And as I sat there, waiting for the bus, I thought about that web page, and thought about how the little schedule spat out by the trip planner hadn't differentiated between "waiting time" and "travelling time." Nor had it offered any easy way to minimize waiting by adjusting the time or origin of my trip. Oh, I fumed and I fumed. Would it have been so hard to put the "waiting time" in a different color, even?

Then there's the lack of transparency. Over the past few months in SF, the trip planner has given three different sets of directions from the same origin to three nearby destinations. I like to believe that the system is adapting to changing traffic conditions. Or bus delays that I don't know about. However, without any insight into the algorithms behind the schedule I'm given, I'm forced to assume that the system is just trying to be funny.

This type of transportation problem - travel at a fixed time between a fairly specific origin and destination - gets solved neatly and efficiently when I buy plane tickets (including up to 4 separate hops on multiple carriers!), yet stubbornly resists solution at the municipal scale. Yes, of course: there's a lack of money, time, and interest. But I also want to point to another difficulty: the sheer complexity of the metropolitan environment. The global network of airports is a self-contained system, built to process people quickly and/or amuse them while they wait. They minimize the unpredictable. Cities (even ones with shiny new railway terminals) are exactly the opposite and do nothing of the sort. When I think about the giant mixup that is the Bay Area's buses, subways, trolleys, light rail, bicycles, and automobile traffice, I'm almost amazed that trip planners work at all.

Nevertheless, the website (which is not potentially stuck in a traffic jam and thus about to miss its transfer) could use some more color-coding.

I feel like Janis Joplin asking for a Mercedes-Benz, but when I see the lovely furniture from Front I just think, surely there's someone somewhere who needs to make me some amends.

I especially like the table that stumbles at first, then slowly learns to stand on its own. Its knobbly joints make it look like a colt - or what I imagine a colt would look like, as I've only ever seen them in photos.

Front are young. Front are Swedish. And it looks like their stuff actually exists as promised.