March 2009 Archives
-
'Soft infrastructure superpowers': Lift09 presentation
-
"Urban computing generally encompasses the study of people experiencing the city with technologies. Our approach is to benefit from people’s experience of these services, to gain a more thorough understanding of urban environments. In the recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices led to a massive increase in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there. The analysis of the accumulated archives of such spatio-temporal data can derive high-level human behavior such as the estimation of mobility mode. Evidently, urban planers, traffic engineers, tourism authorities could profit from the pervasive deployment of new technologies to increase the understanding of how people and crowds explicitly consume space. "
-
"Velib is a community bicycle rental service in Paris (similar to the Vélo'v service in Lyon and Bicing in Barcelona). The stations deployed in the city offer bikes people can use for their small and medium daily routes within the city. As part our Tracing the Visitor's Eye project, and as follow-up to the work on Bicing in Barcelona, Mathieu Arnold granted us access to the infrastructure status (i.e. number of available bikes for each station) over several weeks. The resulting animation shows the spatio-temporal state of the system and the mobility patterns of its users. One intention behing these visualization is to explore how accumulated data can help people to grasp the availability and quality of the system over space and time (e.g. do not expect to encounter available bikes the different neighborhoods at certain hours). In addition we aim at revealing Paris, the life of its different neighborhoods, specific areas, their topologies and dynamics through its bike system."
-
"Originally commissioned for the exhibition “Wouldn’t it be Nice” at the Somerset House in London in 2008, The MacGuffin Library proposes the foundations for a library of MacGuffins, produced by first authoring a series of film synopsis’ which are used to inform a collection of sixteen objects, addressing themes stemming from a disparate range of interests and inspirations: Re-enactments, unorthodox fantasies, Borges and Carver short stories, forgeries, urban myths, the defining of high and low brow cinema, alternative histories, and the relationship between media and memory. "
-
"San Francisco will, via SFpark pilot projects, evaluate parking-based congestion management. This is expected to improve public transit service, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve neighborhood livability, enhance San Francisco’s economic vitality, and make parking more convenient. Sound parking management is a powerful means to help achieve goals for the transportation system as whole and, therefore, the City’s overall goals for quality of life, sustainability, and economic vitality."
-
Welcome to the website of SFpark — the SFMTA’s new approach to parking management. As of March 2009, no info on sensor-based parking enforcement
-
issue on mechanical animals (from @moleitau)
-
a sample service design blueprint for a panel
-
"Experiments in Biosensing uses methods of synthetic biology to alter the color of yeast cells and bacteria upon exposure to CO and NO2. This enables them to visually function as "un"-natural organic sensors designed to increase public awareness with respect to urban air pollution. These preliminary experiments are the first steps towards the creation of sterile plant sensors changing color in response to CO and NO2 exposure. These plants would be placed in urban neighborhoods visible to anyone walking down the street. Whereas the scientific research ambitions for this project are significant, the primary inspiration comes from a critical interventionist perspective. How might the topic of urban air pollution, which by now has reached main-stream status in many countries be reframed so that knowledge not only results in "well-meaning" but behavioral change?"
-
"This research project examines the changing role of public space in the context of increased information flows. It explores the way data networks affect our notions of community and investigates the potential this holds for the formation of communal space. Rather than viewing the physical as a mere backdrop for the delivery of data, the research project seeks to develop crossovers where physical form and digital information directly inform and shape our urban environment. "
-
"The LANDSPLOITATION Podcast hosts experimental video and audio documenting the social experience of the human landscape, including but not limited to the spaces of the built environment, vernacular architecture, proxemics, human interaction, and political boundaries."
-
Podcasts on history, infrastruture, the built environment, capital, and of course, landscape. Curated by Jo Guldi.
"In the era of modern building, the secrets of landscape are constantly hidden in plain sight."
"Welcome to Pachube, a service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual."
"This theme investigates the impact of pervasive technologies on the spatial environment in urban space, both within and outside buildings. As a theory of society as modified by the spatial environment, we will develop space syntax to respond to novel pervasive modes of communication, transaction and exchange implied by pervasive technologies. This will be achieved in Cityware by means of a continuous process of analysis of empirical data on people's use of and relationship with the urban spatial environment as this is affected by the intervention of pervasive technologies."
"In this paper we report on ongoing research in which the implications of urban scale pervasive computing (always and everywhere present) are investigated for urban life and urban design in the heritage environment of the city of Bath. We explore a theoretical framework for understanding and designing pervasive systems as an integral part of the urban landscape. We develop a framework based on Hillier?s Space Syntax theories and Kostakos? PSP framework which encompasses the analysis of space and spatial patterns, alongside the consideration of personal, social and public interaction spaces to capture the complex relationship between pervasive systems, urban space in general and the impact of the deployment of pervasive systems on people?s relationships to heritage and to each other. We describe these methodological issues in detail before giving examples from early studies of the types of result we are beginning to find."
"Architectural programming began when architecture began. Structures have always been based on programs: decisions were made; something was designed, built, and occupied. In a way, archaeologists excavate buildings to try to determine their programs."
"What if our buildings could respond to change as easily as we do? What if buildings never became obsolete, but instead could keep up with our own speed of adaptation and change? What if they were Always Building? Could technology reinvent our environments?"If our habitats were programmable, what would we ask of them?
-
"The piece is attached via a network cable to the internet where it monitors news and search results for “paris hilton” and “paris france” and displays an average result in real-time." Via Kicker Studio twitter
-
Park Interactives, 2000
-
"But here's the most important part. In the end, the viewer is likely to leave this film having been sensitized to what is perhaps its strongest invocation (and something I am forever yelling at my design students about): the notion of intention. Sure, you learn about the designers' dreams and desires, their motivations and peculiarities. But at the end of the day, this film is a testament to how damn intentional all of these people are."
-
"Doiron spent nine months weighing and recording each vegetable he pulled from his 1,600-square-foot garden outside Portland, Maine. After counting the final winter leaves of Belgian endive, he found he had saved about $2,150 by growing produce for his family of five instead of buying it.
Adriana Martinez, an accountant who reduced her grocery bill to $40 a week by gardening, said there's peace of mind in knowing where her food comes from. And she said the effort has fostered a sense of community through a neighborhood veggie co-op.
"We're helping to feed each other and what better time than now?" Martinez said."
"Toronto is a city of towers. There are over 1,000 residential apartment towers found all across Toronto. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, concrete apartment towers were the most popular building type. Thousands of units were mixed in with single-family homes, industry, shopping, and vast open spaces.Today, these concrete slab towers are aging and inefficient, while the open spaces that surround them are underused and poorly maintained. Mayor's Tower Renewal will combine green technology with neighborhood revitalization to make stronger, greener communities across the city."
"However the “place of spaces” was not, as some have argued, superseded by the space of flows. Along with the “smoothness” and the placelessness of the shopping mall, the airport and multiplex, new localities were produced both as sites for work and imagination. The urban became the site for new disruptions and ruses by those rendered placeless in the Smooth City. New struggles and solidarities emerged, once again lacking the mythic quality of the old movements, but adapting, innovating and gaining knowledge through the practice of urban life. Within the new constellation of ruin and danger of the contemporary city, strategies of living, as one of the essays in this volume suggest, often tend to be physiognomic, where detective-like strategies of masking and unmasking help negotiate the urban crowd. "
"EnergyIP was designed from the ground up to support all aspects of smart meter network implementation and ongoing operation for the mass market as well as C&I. EnergyIP helps turn utilities into the real-time knowledge-driven enterprises they need to be to handle increasing political, social, and economic demands of a more conscious customer and regulator. EnergyIP captures the complex relationships among assets, premises, customer accounts, users, applications, and services that must be managed in any successful smart meter communications network. Incorporating automated business processes and workflows, EnergyIP maintains these relationships throughout smart meter network implementations and the routine changes in customers, meters, and services."
"As a participant walks through the city, wireless networks are sensed by the PDA. Each time a new network is encountered, a new vertical bar is drawn. As each new network is encountered, its marker moves along the color spectrum. The first network is always red and on the left hand side, the last one is always purple and on the right side, and networks along the way get new colors as they come within range. The height of each bar represents the combined strength of the wireless networks currently in range."
-
from Shawn, thanks.
-
"Designers find themselves today at the center of an extraordinary wave of cross-pollination. Because of their role as intermediaries between research and production, they often act as the primary interpreters in interdisciplinary teams, called upon not only to conceive objects, but also to devise scenarios and strategies. To cope with this responsibility, designers need to set the foundations for a theory of design and become astute generalists. At that point, they will be in a unique position to become the repositories of contemporary culture’s need for analysis and synthesis, society’s new pragmatic intellectuals. As scientists increasingly embrace this role of the designer, and also recognize in designers like-minded innovative thinking, science will become design’s most precious ally. "
-
"Platform for analyzing large amounts of mobile location data in real-time to drive relevant recommendation, personalization and discovery."
I am fascinated by ideas of a "smart energy grid" - especially one that helps us understand the spatial and temporal aspects of electricity consumption and production across metropolitan regions.
But this GE "ecomagination" ad... The visual language is a little horror movie, no? It's a little Children of the Corn mixed with SkyNet.
-
"Our primary function is to build community," said Kelly Quirke, 50, the organization's executive director. "We're not just running around sticking trees in the ground."
-
Go to "work," then "competitions," then "Farmadelphia."
Sites that use Flash and don't provide direct links are so irritating.
"The pavilions were designed to be a “prosthesis” around which social activities, biological growth, and architectural edifice could grow. The pavilions would begin their life as nodes for activity within the new urban centres. Then, over time, as the surrounding context developed and grew, the pavilions would loose their character as node and instead become voids within the urban fabric. The structures will eventually be deconstructed and recycled."
"Urban forests are trees for people! They are dynamic ecosystems that provide environmental services such as clean air and water. Trees cool cities and save energy; improve air quality; strengthen quality of place and local economies; reduce storm water runoff; improve social connections; complement smart growth; and create walkable communities. Learn more about this critical resource and what the Forest Service is doing to protect it."
KEIKI (baby plants) is a community-oriented program combining aspects of urban gardening and digital technologies to spawn more intimate connections between communities and nature. This project involves electronically monitoring scattered keiki gardens and how well they are cared for by members of their local community. Real-time plant data is tracked with smart sensors and visualized in online and offline public spaces to provide an understanding on how nature and technology can inspire and sustain both small and large-scale community networks.
The title of Matt Jones' Webstock presentation, "The Demon-Haunted City," reminds me irresistibly of my favorite journal article title of all-time: Nigel Thrift's "Cities Without Modernity, Cities With Magic."
Unfortunately, the two have very little to do with each other. I might even argue that they are in complete opposition. C'est la magic vie, I guess. Never the less, I do recommend taking a look at both.
----
Update: Actually, I take that whole point back. They do have something to do with each other. On the one hand, Matt on the one hand is entirely interested in technological novelty and Thrift is really pushing for a look at banal and mundane experiences of flows and mobility. On the other hand, both of them never doubt for a second that cities are coherent, meaningful units of analysis -- not nodes in a space of information flows, not densities in regions of sprawl, but "spatially fixed" (as Thrift writes) centers.
If you will be at the Emerging Technologies Conference, please come!
Designing for Urban Green Space
This talk maps out various directions in technologies for promoting the creation and maintenance for urban green space, including (but not limited to!) sensing, automatic irrigation, social networks, online maps, mobile phones. It discusses the various constraints people who want to work within green spaces have to deal with--inclement weather, lack of power, flaky upkeep, and vulnerability to theft. It also discusses how assumptions about environmentalism, technology, nature, our relationship with living things shape the kinds of technologies people can and do make. In particular, it takes a close look at urban agriculture as a promising site for technology design through a discussion of an empirical study of urban green space volunteership. It concludes by using community gardeners to motivate some new technological directions for urban green space that put the emphasis less on automatic watering and more on deliberate living.
From Bruce Sterling's undoubtedly endlessly linked initial blog entry for his Imaginary Gadgets Project:
You are likely getting useful, provocative insights from people who were never your colleagues in the past. These are people with thought-processes somewhat orthogonal to your own, who nevertheless show up repeatedly on your search engines as you perform your own work. For instance, go look at my 100+ Twitter contacts -- "bruces." How many of those people are "science fiction writers" or even "writers" of any kind? Many of these characters have careers that can't be described in less than a paragraph.I think this situation is a fact-on-the-ground for a densely-networked, digitized society. I also think the pace of this phenomenon is accelerating. I don't believe we will get a choice about it. If it's inevitable, then we should exploit the inevitability.
Now, my larger suspicion here -- let's call it a hypothesis -- is that there is some grand unified theory for speculative cultural activity. In other worlds, "speculative culture" is not a crazy-quilt, it is a nexus. Every creative discipline has methods to shake up its preconceptions and think inventively. I want to catalog, compare and contrast those methods. I surmise that they have some inner unity, a consilience. If there's no such thing, then that's a useful discovery, too.
Since I am a writer, the first deliverable for this project is a book, the book to be called "User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets." Composing a book is my own way to test the waters: to create a work that would be a typical "Speculative Culture" book. The very act of writing books creates culture. So, perhaps we'll do some useful work here.
I'm reading From Counterculture to Cyberculture, and maybe I'm on crack, but this seems so reminiscent of what the Whole Earth Catalog ended up doing for a very different set of groups in the 1960's:
In this way, the Catalog provided a framework within which engineers and hobbyists could link their own desires for both certain forms of information processing and countercultural legitimacy to the shifting capacities of new computing machines. The Catalog offered new ways to imagine the possibilities of computers and also legitimated the use of computers in nontraditional settings such as classrooms and public storefronts by linking those uses to a New Communalist ethos. This was particularly true for people seeking to use time-sharing computers for peer-to-peer public computing. Lee Felsenstein, for example, was a former computer engineer, a participant in the Free Speech Movement, and an antiwar activist. He had written for the underground newspaper the Berkeley Barb, and he would go on to help found the Homebrew Computer Club. Felsenstein remembers the Whole Earth Catalog as a sort of Bible of countercultural technology. At that time, he explains, technology was a "secular religion" in mainstream America; with the Catalog, in contrast, Stewart Brand "set up an alternate temple of the same religion, of the church of technology, telling people in technological society that people needed to learn to use tools." For those who, like Felsenstein, were both trained engineers and participants in the youth movements of the 1960s, this new religion offered a way forward. In Felsenstein's words, the Whole Earth Catalog reminded its readers that "you don't have to leave industrial society, but you don't have to accept it the way it is."
-
"Now, my larger suspicion here -- let's call it a hypothesis -- is that there is some grand unified theory for speculative cultural activity. In other worlds, "speculative culture" is not a crazy-quilt, it is a nexus. Every creative discipline has methods to shake up its preconceptions and think inventively. I want to catalog, compare and contrast those methods. I surmise that they have some inner unity, a consilience. If there's no such thing, then that's a useful discovery, too.
Since I am a writer, the first deliverable for this project is a book, the book to be called "User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets." Composing a book is my own way to test the waters: to create a work that would be a typical "Speculative Culture" book. The very act of writing books creates culture. So, perhaps we'll do some useful work here."
...echoes of the Whole Earth Catalog as discussed in _From Counterculture to Cyberculture_ -- a catalog for speculative future technologist lifestyles?
-
"My research interests are organized around the history and practice of design and the notion of the ‘user’. Through these empirical prisms I explore sociological questions around the following: design as a prospective practice; design controversies, the politics of technology; object-centered practices; user-involvement in design especially participatory and user-centered design; associations between design and social science. Conceptually and methodologically I draw upon science & technology studies (STS), particularly developments in actor-network theory (ANT) and the sociology of expectations. "
-
"One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior."
-
very pretty. infuriatingly unusable for anything but aimless browsing. no back button, no feedback on what will happen when you click on a mysterious squiggle. so frustrating, but nice consistent aesthetics.
