December 2004 Archives

Futurefarmers is sponsoring a call for artists, architects, urban planners, gardeners and designers to help them reimagine a former Marine Corps base in Orange County with their Great Park Project. Their intention is to use the project as a research platform for discussing political and social organization of open space in urban areas.

Project ideas are due in February. My favorite sample project: Amy Franceschini's Community Garden Plots on the site of a former airstrip. Franceschini points tocommunal spaces in Copenhagen and Fritz Haeg's Gardenlab exhibit. I was reminded of the community gardens I loved in NYC, many of which have become neighborhood rallying points.

Fiasco/dsg, RIP.

I'm linking to a couple of posters Michele and I have made over the past year for DIS and Ubicomp for preliminary results. Am producing more conclusive conclusions for the beginning of the new year.

I spent the holidays in San Pedro, CA (home to the Minutemen and, briefly, Charles Bukowski). Internet connectivity has been spotty at best. I refuse to pay Starbuck's extortionate prices for Wifi use, and the access point at the local cafe is behind a decorative steel cage. So no luck in the neighborhood.

But fortunately - or so I thought - the city of Long Beach has been providing free wifi throughout the downtown area since 2003. So we drove across the harbor and found...mostly nothing. After some concerted warwalking and -driving through the supposedly covered areas, we had zero signal, and got only weak and fluctuating connections below the main access point.

Here's the thing. Even in 2003, the Bryant Park public hotspot had been up and running for some time. It's still up and running, and works beautifully. There are two access points, one at each end of the park, to guarantee even coverage. There are some discreet placards letting visitors know that there's wifi available, and how it works. That's all.

I sent an email asking for some explanations to the people who installed the Long Beach system. Maybe I came when it was down. But there were no signs publicizing the free wifi. And the only people on laptops were at the Starbucks. But if you're going to run a municipal service, you should at least indicate its existence, if not its status.

Long Beach is a funny small city though - it did poorly for decades and seems to be only barely recovering. I had thought that the free wifi was an excellent attempt at good publicity and just maybe a useful way to bring daytime traffic back to the city center. So this may be just an anomaly. But still, all in all, a disappointing indicator of the fate of free munipal wifi, which will take much more commitment and upkeep than perhaps its boosters expect.

Not to get into too much detail, but the Apple Store in SF has got to do some work on their bathroom interaction. The toilet flushes automatically, but the sink has a funny little lever (that looks a lot like a soap dispenser) that controls water flow. So if you're me, you assume that the bathroom fixtures all work the same way, and you wave your hands helplessly for about 30 seconds under the faucet, waiting for the water to magically gush forth. And then it doesn't, and you realize that you have to actually use your hands, and then you feel kind of silly.

Consistency! All I ask is consistency in the interface.

I've been thinking a lot about shopping recently (obviously).

Shopping is one of the great all-time urban pleasures (that and parades with impressive floats). I like cities, and I like shopping. A lot. As a theater designer, I was a professional shopper, and have kept the habit of always being on the lookout for things that might possibly be useful or pleasing to someone, somewhere. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t really do any good because I never share my finds with anyone.

I have an experiment to propose. I’ve been playing with a Flickr photo pool called windowshop, which I was using to show photos of shop windows. It seems to have some interest. So I just started a new group called magpie to see what happens if the windowshopping is a little more shopping focused and a little more group oriented.

Here’s how I described it on Flickr:

Magpie is a collectively created shopping guide to local stores - wherever you are. It's intended to support small, indepedently-owned businesses that we might not otherwise know about.

Here's how it works:

1) take a photo of something for sale that you think other people might want and post it to the group pool
2) give enough information in the subject field that any viewer can figure out how to find that object again. You can give the full address of the store, or just the name of the store and the city in which it's located. If you want to be nice, add the price and any other comments.
3) tag the photo to help other people in the group search more effectively

AND

4) tag other people's photos as well - the more tags, the easier it will be to find what you're looking for - and help out small, local businesses in the process.

At the moment I’m working on making my own search functions to extend the somewhat limited default set on the Flickr site.

Now that Thanksgiving has officially given way to all-hands-on-deck shopping madness, the NYT has weighed in with a special section, no less, on retail.

Things That I Learned, by little Lizzie Goodman, age 28

1. the continuing importance of “old-fashioned” physical installations as guarantors of continuity and trustworthiness:
   

   Melissa Payner-Gregor, chief executive of Bluefly.com, agrees that old-fashioned stores have their advantages.... "The consumer feels that if there's a flagship store it lends credibility to the whole thing," she said.

   
   


2. The high correlation between the introduction of digital technologies into an interaction and the probability that reporters will characterize said interaction as “seamless.”
   


3. Malls apparently are finally turning into full-time communities:
   

   Department stores have been replaced by multiplex movie theaters and Cheesecake Factories, with condominiums clustered on the outskirts.

   
   

Seamlessness, or lack thereof

I’m especially interested in the adjective “seamless.” Significantly, it’s repeated twice in the article – strange for an adjective that’s usually applied to computing, especially tangible and mobile computing.

I spent much of last summer studying the rhetoric of ubiquitous / tangible / mobile / pervasive computing: “seamless” isn’t an innocent word. It usually indicates a kind of optimism about the ability of certain (mobile, pervasive, tangible, etc) technologies to deliver constant, homogeneous experiences and the desirability of doing so. It’s a loaded word, especially in an article about the relationship between e-commerce and physical shopping.

An article that begins and ends with an anecdote about the difficulties of shipping a rug bought from a website doesn’t suggest that the movement from physical to online shopping is seamless in any sense of the word. It suggests that such movement has become prevalent. There’s a difference, and it’s a really annoying difference for all those people trying to buy and sell rugs. As with the article, it’s easier to declare that an experience is to be “seamless” than actually to make it so.

What the article actually suggested to me is something that Matthew Chalmers brought up a while ago, building on some key ideas from Mark Weiser:

Making everything the same is easy; letting everything be itself, with other things, is hard.

The question of "being itself" is harder than it sounds. Shopping is a good example of a larger point: that the transitions between physical and virtual experiences (especially socially complex and emotionally-bound experiences) aren’t ever going to be seamless in the way that the rhetoric promises. These transitions are necessarily noticeable and meaningful because they depend on the way people physically experience the world. Which is to say that Payner-Gregor has a point: the physical world is believable in a way websites aren’t. And that, unlike websites, malls and mall space are swiftly becoming places where we can make homes. No matter what you think of the, um, ubiquity of shopping in American culture right now, the transitions between even seemingly-united states of consumption are meaningful.

In honor of seamless shopping, some more references

Brick-and-Click shopping

Koolhaas’ Guide to Shopping

Prada, Property, Praxis, by Adam Greenfield

Fragments from Benjamin’s Arcades

The evolution of the shopping mall

Malcolm Gladwell on the birth of the mall

Woodward, I., Emmison, M., and Smith, P.  (2000)  'Consumerism, disorientation and postmodern space: a modest test of an immodest theory', in British Journal of Sociology, Vol 51, No 2: 339 – 54 (skip to the last para)

Please Steal Christmas

On the gardens ‘are concentrated or perfected forms of place-making’ tip:

It is surprising the degree to which garden design has *always* accorded with concurrent philosophical trends (empiricism goes hand in hand with the English attempt to replicate the landscape; rationalism accords with certain approaches to the rigorously geometrical garden, etc.)

And surely GPS-based work is in many respects an attempt to construct the Postmodern Garden: which is to say a theoretical experience of the landscape, explicitly designed and guided (or at least mapped). In this case, however, the terrain of the garden is *global*. And fragmentary.

Garden theory was very much in the air in the eighties, when I was studying philosophy; and it was centered, oddly enough, in the English department-- one of the more interesting writers to investigate this field is the British poet James Fenton.

As for the history and theory of perspective - this seems to me a good way to focus the connection between virtually all of the plastic arts and location-specific technology. It´s difficult to think of much in the way of painting, sculpture and architecture that *doesn´t* feed into this new practice - and it´s useful to find the central link.

posted with thanks to Douglas Anthony Cooper

Gordon Peteran, last night at a lecture:

Well, I'd been making furniture for 15 years, and one day I realized that I just didn't really like furniture.

Audience laughs, Gordon pauses.

So I said to myself, I'm going to stop making furniture and start making things that look exactly like furniture.