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.
I'm hardly the poster child for design work around migration, communication, and community. But competitions like the fusedspace one are by their nature definitional - in the entrants' values as well as the judges. As a collective portrait of design priorities, the complete list of fusedspace projects (access it through a pulldown menu at the top of the page) is very telling. There's lots of stuff about play, social navigation, and surveillance (as subject and as visual metaphor), and technological linkages between two separated places.
"Mobility" (as a concept that people design gadgets around, write papers about, and otherwise commodify) so often seems untethered from the influence of culture and history. Social networks - even neighborhoods - abound in the new cities imagined by the developers and designers entering the fusedspace competition. But very few of them appear to define themselves (even partially) through ethnicity, religion, or even the presence of the past in daily life. There's lots of academic exceptions, of course. And you should tell me about the projects I've missed. I'm sure they're around.
But the full list of fusedspace projects (beyond just the nominees) was very telling: I saw only two (out of 300) responses to centuries of global diasporas (Chinese, Indian, Jewish, Afro-Caribbean et cetera) and the links that bind dispersed communities together. Which is odd, because ethnic neighborhoods (and the flows of people and information they inspire) are one of the features that have always made cities cities.
I sometimes suspect, with no proof at all, that all this talk about "social networks" functions as a way to avoid grapping with the messy topic of "families" and what we inherit from them. Talking about race is hard, and talking about religion is hard, and it's even harder to talk as an outsider. Or perhaps it's just a response to the way designers in their 20s and 30s - often students - live their own lives. I recognize myself in a lot of the fusedspace entries. The problem (for me, at least) is that I don't recognize the experience of either of the communities I've recently lived within.
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