Recently in public spaces Category

Public smog

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London Smog graphic for Public Smog art project

Just went to opening of VAPOR, an exhibit at Southern Exposure on pollution. One of my favorite projects there was Public Smog:

PUBLIC SMOG is a park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale. The park is constructed through financial, legal, or political activities that open it for public use.
Activities to create Public Smog have included purchasing and retiring emission offsets in regulated emissions markets, making them inaccessible to polluting industries.
When Public Smog is built through this process, it exists in the unfixed public airspace above the region where offsets are purchased and withheld from use. The park’s size varies, reflecting the amount of emissions allowances purchased and the length of contract, compounded by seasonal fluctuations in air quality.

One of the things I like about Public Smog is that, like PARK(ing), it invents a new kind of temporary 'public park' through entry into a market.
In Public Smog, the market is emission trading of greenhouse gases; in PARK(ing) it's the rate of payment for parking meters. They are tied to the forces (like polluting activities, or dependence on cars) that they attack. In that sense, they also gently play with the unrealistic idea that parks are spaces of 'nature' (sorry, have to use the scare quotes) - somehow separate from commercial spaces and processes that shape the rest of human settlements.

Another mobile park

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This time from Kevin van Braak.

Where are all the men?

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It's a beautiful late Saturday afternoon in Ann Arbor, MI - home of the massive University of Michigan campus and all-around college town. Mike and I are sitting in a coffee shop near campus. And Mike has just asked a question that's started to interest me, since in the past I've done some observations of people working in cafes: where are all the men?

Most of the people sitting in this cafe are women in groups; most of them appear to be doing homework with laptops, textbooks, and papers, or at least "doing homework." And it's been like this all afternoon. It's not like Michigan has a massive gender imbalance that would explain it. I am consciously trying to resist linking this to the American gender imbalance in grades and college admissions. This is probably just a weird anomaly, but it's kind of weird.

The new boosterism

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CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Metro & Tri-State :: Daley: By 2016, cameras on 'almost every block' (via telecom-cities)


"By the time 2016 [rolls around], we'll have more cameras than Washington, D.C. ... Our technology is more advanced than any other city in the world -- even compared to London -- dealing with our cameras and the sophistication of cameras and retro-fitting all the cameras downtown in new buildings, doing the CTA cameras," Daley said.


"By 2016, I'll make you a bet. We'll have [cameras on] almost every block."

No one does boosterism quite like it.

It was big—and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains, jewels, muscles, wealth, or words. He was, for a spring-enchanted moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith. He thought of the outlying factory suburbs; of the Chaloosa River with its strangely eroded banks; of the orchard-dappled Tonawanda Hills to the North, and all the fat dairy land and big barns and comfortable herds. As he dropped his passenger he cried, "Gosh, I feel pretty good this morning!"

Sinclair Lewis, Babbit, 1922

graffiti blinkies from Twin A (among others)

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Portland has plenty of bizarre wifi nodes, including strip clubs (yes, I've already made that joke about "laptops") and bathhouses (ditto the joke about "hotspots"). I think that BMW's plan to put wifi access points in BMW dealerships is just as dubious (although not as dubious as this laughable publicity stunt) .

Part of the reason these new access points seem so odd to me is that they're being discussed solely in terms of mobile workers with laptops - regardless of the actual way these spaces are being used. The scenarios are technology-centric, not place-centric or even person-centric. Which is obviously kind of dumb, since it's people who use wifi networks, not the other way around. And I still don't understand the use of a laptop in a strip club. Wouldn't it get in the way?

Here's the funny thing, though. By putting in free nodes, the business owners are trusting that someone will find a use for them. And if they maintain the nodes long enough, someone will. It just might not be the expected mobile worker with a laptop. If you envision a future landscape populated with a diverse set of devices - some laptop-sized, some smaller, some larger - the possible uses for these funny wifi nodes look very different. I don't know what these devices might look like (hopefully not much like current PDAs) - but to me the nodes look like the beginnings of an infrastructure for mobile players, not just mobile workers.

Street art: commons and conflict

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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.

I heart New York politicalartbikes

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bike_video.jpg

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.

Traces of fire

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I've got loads and loads of work to do before I start at FXPal next week, but I just wanted to post all-too-briefly about Traces of Fire, a beautiful project from Volkmar Klien and Ed Lear in Limerick that was just exhibited in the Limerick City Hall.

The idea, as I understand it, was to use the tagged transmitters often used in wildlife habitat studies to track the migratory patterns of Limerick's inhabitants. The transmitters, embedded in cigarette lighters deliberately "lost" in carefully chosen Limerick pubs, also illuminate the social relationships underlying daily habits of travel, entertainment and (nicotine) gifting.

What I like so much about this project, besides the clarity and elegance of tracking the migratory habits of the native urbanite using techniques borrowed from zoology, is the methods it suggests for finding design opportunities in urban spaces:

From daily routines, temporal cycles and locational patterns the
shapes of habitats emerge; re-animating the data creature and the
home-range its movement suggests - a glimpse of the territory in
which the subject’s life takes place.

(via)

Party games

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Maya just sent me on a nostalgia trip by posting on the party games we played in college:

Recently remembered and been delighted by one of my favorite peformative party games. It's called "you are the one." The game requires one to three players, and must take place in some kind of crowded party type atmosphere. Basically, Player A gives Player B an instruction: "You are the one who..." and Player B then begins to behave in that fashion. They trade back and forth. I have very strong memories of watching two friends play this during college. Favorites:

"You are the one who got a boob job, but doesn't want anyone to know."
"You are the one who thinks the room is bugged."
--then, "You are the one who bugged the room."

You perform these instructions without other people knowing what you're doing--increased points for using these states of being to affect your interactions with said people.

Live from Vienna...

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So word is already around and about, but a social application based on some of the design and research I was doing last summer is available for download as part of a larger project on urban life and computing.

Just so's you know.

Japanese smoking etiquette posters

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Amazing crimes and trusted computing

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When you make machines that are computers but don't look like desktop boxes an accepted part of routine transactions, it's awe-inspiring how easy it is to rip people off. For example, take ATMs and electronic voting machines. I don't think much about the former, and have pretty much exhausted my outrage over the defects of the latter. But today, John Benton reported this "elegant and malevolent" ATM scam at U Texas that reminded me of both.

The equipment used to capture your ATM card number and PIN is cleverly disguised to look like normal ATM equipment. A "skimmer" is mounted to the front of the normal ATM card slot that reads the ATM card number and transmits it to the criminals sitting in a nearby car.

At the same time, a wireless camera is disguised to look like a leaflet holder and is mounted in a position to view ATM PIN entries.

The prop leaflet container (which, if you know how to look for it, has a big ol' hole for the camera lens) reminds me of the potential exploits discovered (PDF linked here) by a team of security experts hired by Maryland to analyze the Diebold voting machines last month. Lots of ink and pixels have been expended on the potential electoral disasters discovered, but my favorite scenarios were less about scripts and more about picks. Apparently, it took an inexpert member of the team about three minutes and a cheap set of lock picks to access the box inside.

Those kinds of voting machine defects exist because Diebold employees were naive about physical data security in the face of criminal ingenuity. Just because a box is locked doesn't mean it stays closed. In the same way, just having a secret PIN doesn't mean there aren't ways to track where you put your fingers on the keypad. We tend to trust banks and, well, we used to trust the electoral system. It's disconcerting but ultimately safer to remember that neither can ever guarantee our safety from other people's malevolence.

Apologies to anyone wanting posts

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I just moved back to NYC for a temporary (but very intense) freelance job. So I'm a little distracted at the moment. A lot distracted. New York is just a ridiculously irritating and wonderful place to live. Do you know that I spent four hours on Tuesday first trying to find a curtain rod that would fit in my window, then trying to find hammer and nails? The city may never sleep, but its hardware stores are all closed by 9pm.

I'll be here for about 3 months. I should be reacclimated in a few days and posting again.

Sorry for the delay.

Embrace your blight!

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Maya just sent me this site, a collection of photographs of chain stores that have been...repurposed.

It is not without the bitter taste of self-awareness, specifically about the overwhelmingly crass and commercial (and, indeed, downtrodden and dreary, bleakly suburban, and economically grim) nature of the content of this site, that we at NFA embark on our quest to document bad conversions. That said, it is perhaps best that we look at this phenomenon as a delightful yet sad part of our culture's clattering landscape: it is an amusing diversion, it is an economic gestalt, it is a crime of design, it is a confusion to the would-be consumer. Let us rejoice in bad conversions and seek to amuse ourselves with them wherever possible, taking utmost pains to observe the careful, hopeless touches of their renovation and their indelible flourishes of nonsense on our landscape. Embrace blight! We have no other hope.

Someone named Liz Clayton is responsible.

BUG out

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You know, Minnesotans do have more fun, typographic and otherwise. Cf. the Design Institute's BUG

The Big Urban Game (B.U.G.) is a five-day city-wide event that transformed the Twin Cities into a 200-square-mile game board. Three B.U.G. teams raced 25-foot-tall Red, Yellow and Blue inflatable game pieces through the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul each day. As players in the B.U.G., the public chose which routes the pieces raced along, and followed the day's progress on the B.U.G. website. B.U.G. checkpoints were the start for discovery walking tours based on specially commissioned KNOWLEDGE MAPS — nine interpretive maps of the Twin Cities — available now through the Design Institute.

Inflatables + city streets + group action = so good.

Via heidi's photo albums at memyi

Subway lending libraries

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Mexico City has launched a book-lending program to promote literacy and good behavior on subways by handing out 1.5 million free books to commuters. The idea is that commuters pick up the special editions at the entrance, then return them at the exit.

So far, the program has been exceedingly popular. Many passengers said they could not remember the last time anybody gave away anything or trusted strangers. Television stations have been showing passengers reading on the subway, and in doing so, spreading the word about the program to its target audience: those who rarely read but watch a lot of television. [emph mine]

The book return rate is 64%, which is okay, if not stellar. But I don't think the cause of literacy is hurt by people taking books home to finish them later. This project reminded me a bit of Book Crossing, and I wondered what would happen if the Mexico city transit authorities started a Book Crossing-like website or, on the low-tech side, left some pages blank for people to write their own reviews.

Via WaPo

Repairing the city

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teahorse.jpg

Portland's City Repair is an all-volunteer grassroots organization helping people reclaim their urban spaces to create community-oriented places.

Their T-Horse project is a winged vehicle that travels around Portland every Monday evening during the summers.

The purpose of the T-Horse is to have neighborhood tea parties in parks, giving neighbors an opportunity to meet each other in a unique yet informal atmosphere. We flyer each neighborhood we visit, and ask neighbors to bring homemade dessert, music, and conversation to share with each other under the wings of the T-Horse. The truck provides tea and atmosphere for connections to take place.

So nice, especially when I think of the proliferation of parks in San Pedro, where I am now, and how rarely I see people in the early evening using them.

Anyway, my first thought was: "and why not add free WiFi?" Which is weird, since I'm already getting eye and wrist strain from the hours with the lid up. And also weird, since I'm already seeing a massive backlash against online connectedness, and especially against the advent of the umpteenth social software. As someone posted on one of my (too-many) mailing lists: I actually find myself withdrawing from the web: In addition to using it because of my job, I'm on only three discussion lists (on which I mostly lurk) and I keep in touch with friends and family abroad (though I find myself calling them instead of emailing these days). When I go on vacation,
I don't even check my email anymore.

Airports are great places for the kind of "take your work everywhere" ads that seem to be what marketers think business travellers will like. You know -- the ad where the guy is sitting on a swing or something with his laptop. Great. Americans now work more hours and face greater intrusion of work demands into leisure time. Cafes and parks are more and more workplaces, which is all very well. It's how I live my own life. But my own impulse to extend the permanet to the T-Horse is a symptom of my everpresent...busyness. I'm pretty much always working. Or on my way to work. Giving me more access to online communication -- even when I think I want it -- won't make my evenings any happier.

And why tie people to more screens? It's bad enough that every fifth SUV I see around LA these days seems to have a video screen hanging from the ceiling*. I love free public WiFi, as who doesn't**, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying a summer night without the glow of the monitor and the click of keys.

* Boredom is the mother of excellent car games.
** As I've already told everyone who will listen, I can't believe that T-Mobile expects to make a profit on charging for WiFi when any nearby business can reap the promotional benefits of doing it for free without also having to serve coffee or provide seating.

Private faces, public places

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Privacy and the Urban Imagination
Christena Nippert-Eng and Jay Melican, Illinois Inst of Technology


  • “privacy work”: defending and bounding private spaces
  • privacy as umbrella (Anita Allen)
  • “Islands of Privacy” research

    exercise: emptying wallet and purse and asking people to identify what is private, public, or ambiguous

    “economy of strangers” where people must publicize their ID using mediating institutions but want to withhold as much information as possible

    development of flexible ID management tools

    “public” and “private” defined through perceived consequences of revelation

    these definitions are individual and arrived at through scenario-based reasoning

    “scenario-ization”: elaborating meaning through hypothesis – “reality-fed imagination”

    privacy is “collusive,” requiring “civil inattention” (Goffman, natch)

    good community in some ways equals good privacy

    what’s new is the extent of privacy fears (fear of loss of control over personal information)

    fed by: mobile technology, centralized, hackable databases, and the feeling of being surrounded by unseen, unknown strangers

Cafes and crowds

Eric Laurier, Glasgow


  • social history of cafes and coffeehouses
  • one view: the value of a café is in its diversity (Magary)
  • how do customers evaluate cafes?

    at-a-glance analysis

    acting/imagining self as a visitor to the city, a stranger
  • the cosmopolitan café is just one kind of café, with its own problems
  • each café cannot be everyone’s refuge; it must be different from the stret
  • Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting

Affective Cities

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Affective Cities

Nigel Thrift

Cities as “storms of affect” (How Emotions Work, Jack Katz)

Plato studied art and affect, Darwin wrote (in 1872) The Expression of Emotions

Yet affect is neglected in academic discussion. Why?


  • residual Cartesiansim
  • cultural division of labor – the arts “do” affect
  • affect is not easily captured

But we should look carefully at affect b/c it’s part of the political register

  • it is deployed to gain wealth/power
  • it’s part of how cities are understood – cities must be “expressive” to survive

What is affect (a plane we tap into)?

  • embodied practices

    phenomenology

    states that the body moves through

    words are representation of emotional state (Katz)

    we see our own emotions through the reactions of other people
  • biological drive

    in cultural translations of Freud (vehicles of libido)

    driving physical reactions (Tompkins), esp in the face
  • naturalistic/emergence from interaction

    ie, Spinoza
  • physiological change, writ on the face (Tompkins, Darwin)

    face as screen

the politics of affect

  • agencies of choice (mixed activities like electoral activities and protest politics)
  • mediatization (screen as alternate surface)
  • small spaces and times (using cinema theory to explain engineering time to produce affect based on anticipation and delay)
  • design of space (ie, urban lighting consultants and use of music in retail)

changing the politics of affect

  • skillful comportment

    disciplines for openness (Dryerson, Virella)
  • reparative knowing (ie, psychoanalytic strategies)
  • tending and neuropolitics (Spinoza, Deleuze)

    political ecology: “pruning” bad affect and tending good

    William Connolly: Neuropolitics (using layers of attention)
  • face (Bill Viola)

    gets real audience response

    audience constructs an archaeology of affect through the body

    points to neglected aspect of cities: as seas of faces

    learning how to register affect

    embedding affect in space and time

    looking at modern affect: visual reference as shortcut (Marcus)

*(uality) and the City

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more automatically on Roko.

Designing for the city

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Architecture of Subtraction

Karmen Franinovic, Ivrea

architecture as a way to subtract (reduce) unwanted information within public places

play as an “in-between” space outside of productivity (ie, it subtracts itself)

using interviews to get at ways that people (in Ivrea) draw boundaries to protect themselves from info overload (collective/personal, mental/physical)


  • subtraction from routine (ie, vacation)
  • subtraction from people
  • subtraction from environmental stressors

filtering information through physical boundaries and devices – several ideations for relational designs

Smoke City: Virtual Urban Spaces

Tim Portlock, Virtual Montmartre Project, Sorbonne

shows examples of virtual (3D) city tour of Harlem in the ‘20s and his own political/artistic virtual interactive cityscapes

Representations of the City

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Blog This!: How to Know London

Adam Reed, U of Surrey
quotes Ford Maddox Ford’s 1905 “The Soul of London,” talking about the compulsion to record a city which can never be completely grasped, only seen in fleeting impressions.

[I’m reminded of the “secret knowledge” of LA, which is all about the “back way,” which has fewer stop signs/traffic lights/cars]

for London bloggers the city looms large in entries and in daily life

blogs help bloggers define themselves and London as subjects ‡ impulse to blog immediately, all the time

Listening to the Gateposts…: Reflecting on “The City”

Simon Grimble, Cambridge
thinking about the first view of the city, from one approaching (in Jude the Obscure and Great Expectations) – the city seen from the air and far away, vs the city seen close-up and from street level

Urban governance and bureaucratic representations of the city in Almaty, Kazakhstan

Catherine Alexander, Goldsmiths

parallels between city change, personal change, and the big questions of the future

the city plan as a plan to think with, yet the city plan for Almaty is increasingly out of touch b/c official statistics are not measuring reality

Q: (Jonathan W) highlight forms of movement?
Catherine A: movement into and out of city seen as dangerous, with SARS, immigration, and the global market threatening
Simon G: movement into the city (London) can be ironic/playful
Adam R: movement around London as way to index the city


Q: (Christena N-E) look at artifacts and visual narratives (instead of just texts)?

City as Airport

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Keynote: City as Airport

Harvey Molotch, NYU


sociology of product designers


  • connecting culture and economy
  • high art as a “semiotic handle” for design
  • design as a “technology of enchantment”

airport security

  • security is “submarket” – it is not governed by market forces
  • security is the product of a “command and control” ethic
  • there’s no R+D, none of the “useful and approachable” aesthetic of product design
  • the security gate at the airport becomes the model for the security state in toto
  • part of the work of “doing security” is showing that security is “being done” [security is performative – but who is the audience? what purpose does bad design serve?]
  • the “massive idiocies” of airport security: the difficulties created for families with children, the picnic tables used as baggage depositories, the Rubbermaid containers used for change
  • yet flight attendants are “nice” and “do security” – part of their job is the doing of security work in a non-confrontational and reassuring manner
  • we all do security, though. we all scan the world around us for threats
  • Disneyland does security and crowd control well; it may seem like heresy, but why can’t airport security be more like Disneyland?
  • airport as welcoming device (ex: LAX’s neon pillars)
  • suggestion that airports have security personnel as dedicated “helpers” of passengers, not as guards – “Helping is learning rich”
  • the example of the busybody, who is helpful but who also performs neighborhood surveillance [as in Jane Jacob’s neighborhood studies]

Questions/Discussion

  • Q: (Christena N-E) “Security” for whom? Points out the anxiety produced by security measures in families with children, and the workarounds instituted by other travelers
  • Q: (Genevieve B) (1) The way the experience is gendered, especially in the rules about who can search women. (2) who takes security seriously: big cities vs. little ones.
  • Q: (John U.) Is this a US-specific question? Schipol and Shanghai are great.
  • Q: (Adam R.) Airport as liminal space of city: on the geographic margins, but the cause/center of urban catastrophes.
  • Q: (Giles L.) What is the difference between “security” and “safety” Security is retrospective; safety is proactive.
  • Q: (Nigel T) Bad design is functional; it enacts dramas that construct anxiety.
  • Q: (Elizabeth G) The extent to which bad design performs earnestness, sincerity, urgency in gov’t activities (ie, as Americans we think good design is somehow commercial, and bad design non-profit)
  • Q: (Tim B) The social value of “putting up with it” breeds solidarity
    A: Yes, it can be about “doing your part” – security as solidarity
  • Q: (Nalini) But I like the Rubbermaid containers! Isn’t this an argument about what “good design” really is?
  • Q: (Giles L) Well, think about how good at design the Dutch are. Isn’t there a way in which “good design” can be so good it’s restrictive?
  • Q: (Eric) Getting through security is like getting a gold star in class. Maybe you should get a printed copy of your X-rayed baggage after you get through, to commemorate the parade of your containers past the eyes of the guard.
  • Q: Police outsource distrust – they do it so we don’t have to.
  • Q: Security depends upon performing pleasure and performing anxiety at different points in the process – need to have both happen.
  • Q: (Christena N-E) [An answer to the good design thread] Designers make us feel better, and airports make us feel worse.
    A: It’s the spatial articulation of the good cop/bad cop narrative. It’s the small details that make us feel the anxiety of being strangers there, like not being able to open a door.

Underdogs and Superheroes

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Underdogs and Superheroes is "a research project exploring design interventions for public places" from Play Research. This essay is an articulate explanation of how games and make-belief can help the design process.

Game and performance genres provide techniques for imagining and evolving concepts as well as the means for coordinating a complex activity involving reflection both in action and in context. They provide sets of rules and expectations that structure participation in an activity while supporting imagination and play. Techniques such as enactment, narrative, and improvisation support immersion in characterizations and situations, structured evolution of concepts, and frameworks for inventing new possibilities. Through the application of temporal and physical formats, such as procedures and props, they structure participation and interaction, effectively creating a separate safe space and time for participants to engage in imagination, play, and creative activity.

While I'm at it, I should also cite Faraway, another exercise in games as research, It has a designer in common. Faraway was at the user_mode exhibit at the Tate Modern, which happened before I got this blog and thus was buried somewhere in a list of bookmarks for the past nine months. Frustratingly, I can't find the link to the very good exhibit catalogue that I clearly remember browsing back in May.

Got my radio on

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One two three four five six
Roadrunner roadrunner
Going faster miles an hour
Gonna ride by the Stop-n-Shop
With the radio on
I'm in love with the modern world
I'm in touch I'm a modern girl
USA when it's late at night
I got the radio on
I'm like a roadrunner yeah

Okay, so the blog is back on after a harrowing holiday season involving multiple rounds of parties and an extraordinarily gluttonous New Year’s Eve. Yeah, you heard me right. Gluttonous.

I’m back in LA and thinking a lot about cars. Since I don’t have one yet, you can imagine that mostly my thoughts are full of longing. Filled to the brim with longing, actually. But there was also a post in City Comforts late in the year that got me started thinking about ubicomp and cars.

Cars carve up the experience of the city into plastic- and metal-wrapped single serving-size packets. I especially like to drive alone, late at night, and feel more connected to the DJ on the radio than to the people waiting for me at home or the people I left on the onramp. At midnight on the 405, Garth Trinidad, the voice of Chocolate City on KCRW 89.9, seems closer to me than anyone else on the road. He has a name, and he’s inside my car with me. Other drivers are just license plates and car makes.

So, yes. Ubicomp. Or rather, Pervycomp*. And parking. Admittedly, parking is much less romantic than driving around at night listening to the radio, but after doing a quick check around for ubiquitous computing projects on cars I got a long list of projects designed to help people deal with parking. In HCI, everyday irritations trump romance nine times out of ten. (The tenth, of course, makes my day.)

City Comforts cites this article about SmartPark, the Whistler, BC in-car parking meter system

Motorists purchase one of the devices for $90 along with a rechargeable “smart” card. When drivers decide to park in municipally operated pay parking stalls, they activate the unit by swiping their card, which then deducts an amount of money from the total value of the card based on the amount of time used.

The device, known as an ICPM (In-Car Parking Meter), is then displayed on the vehicle’s rear-view mirror or dashboard for the benefit of pay-parking attendants.

This could tremendously improve the management of scarce urban resources. (Of course, you have to wonder how visitors to the city pay for parking.) In future versions, could the city dynamically change the metered rates over the day depending on supply and demand of spaces per block? Would this, perhaps, someday encourage people to carpool on Saturday nights because parking near bars costs the earth and thus reduce the number of drunken idiots on the 405? Just asking.

What does a city without parking meters look like? Is it like a city without pay phones or without bank branches with tellers? A toll road without booths? How would we know when to pay, and how much will it cost? This is the Internet city, where intelligence is shifted to the edges of the network. As much as I like it in theory (I like the Internet, after all) I don’t know about the practice…

These individual parking meters are a good example of how ubiquitous computing can displace civic infrastructure onto individuals. Which is one way to say that this is a more intrusive continuation of the interaction with government services created by printing your own stamps from the Internet. The on-board parking meter is an extension of the presence of state influence within the previously inviolable space of the car interior.

The ICPM is not ubiquitous computing, exactly. It’s pervasive. It invites the state into a previously privately controlled zone. It dematerializes transactions between individuals and cities into transactions between individuals and personal computing equipment. It’s the plastic- and metal-wrapped single-serving size packet of civic governance.

I’m not quite talking here about the GPS-enabled fear of stalkers and nasty rental car companies. That’s scary too, but it’s a different pervasive computing nightmare. I’m talking here about a gradual fading away of visible confirmations that civic life is a compact between individuals and something exterior to themselves. A lot of the benefits of healthy cities are negative – the litter that isn’t on the streets, the time you didn’t get mugged coming home late at night. So it’s important to have some tangible, ritual interaction with the city infrastructure, even if the infrastructure is as ugly and poorly designed as a parking meter.

And now I’m thinking about radio again. Of Garth Trinidad, in fact, and the way I tune into KCRW late at night, when I’m starting the long dive south on the 405. He’s dematerialized too, just a set of waves on a certain frequency. (It’s funny, isn’t it, how some types of radios are so new I don’t think of them yet as radios, and how some types of radios are so old I forget what they really are?) The ICPM isn’t actually a radio, mind you -– the actual hardware seems to be just a smart card reader/writer. But it’s a next step down the path that began when radios were first routinely installed in automobiles. Folktales tell us to be careful of what we invite across the threshold. We invited the radio frequencies in –- traffic reports, morning talk shows, and all. Garth Trinidad is just a voice in my ear, but through his voice he’s real to me. Here’s the question: could city governance get even realer if it turned into a box on your dashboard? Can we design a box that might make it as real as the voice on the radio? And how freaky would that be?

I don’t know if I’m explaining this correctly; I don’t know why this is such a sticking point with me. If anyone has any thoughts, could they please comment?

Radio on I felt in touch with the modern world
Radio on I fell in love with the modern world
Radio on I feel in love, feelin' love I got the
Radio on like the power, got the magic
Radio on got the AM
Radio on got the FM
Radio on 50,000 watts of power
Radio on going faster miles an hour
Radio on and the neon and it's cold outside
Radio on I feel in touch I feel in love I feel in love
Radio on I got the I got the I got the
Radio on I got the I got the I got the I got the
Radio on again
Radio on

* If I call ubiquitous computing “ubicomp,” can I call pervasive computing “pervycomp?” And how many people have made this joke before? I bet it’s ubiquitous. Oh, I just kill myself.

Playing with strangers, v2

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Also in the news today: Howard Rheingold in The Feature on Location-aware devices, privacy, and UI design:

Location-aware devices and services are emerging at the intersection of empowerment and surveillance: the same technology that could let you know if a good Chinese restaurant or old friend is in the vicinity could also betray your location to a totalitarian government, neighborhood spammers, and your vindictive ex-spouse.

Aside from being an apt recitation of all the awful things that ubiquitous location-aware technologies could bring us, this quote reminds me of Scott's point about everyday privacy: when it comes to location-aware devices, the question is not, "What do people want to know about you?" but rather, "Who's asking?"

And also, of course, Louise's study on privacy concerns around location-aware services.

The comments section on the article also brings up dodgeball's lowtech solution. Dodgeball's "location tracking" relies on users self-reporting their location through text messaging. This kind of location reporting works particularly well for d-ball, which is all about connecting friends in NYC through bars and restaurants. And because participation in dodgeball social groups is strictly voluntary, it neatly solves the "who's asking?" issue as well.

In order to "watch" the correct entity, surveillance mechanisms need specific information about the target's social identity or physical location or both. Think about one of Raymond Chandler's gumshoes trailing an elusive blonde through Los Angeles. Either the detective has the car license plate, or the blonde's name, or a really good fix on the roadster's taillights as the it speeds away. And he probably has two out of three. So goes location-based applications.

The initial piece of information is the gateway: either an observer uses location data to get some social information (as in, say, the movie Fulltime Killer, where a contract assassin spies on his housekeeper while she's cleaning his living room), or an observer uses social identifiers to resolve the target's location and activities (as in, say, Minority Report). So on the one hand, the bluejacker gets more social information about an unknown entity whose location is already known. And on the other hand, Rheingold's examples presuppose a remote observer who accesses location/activity info for an already identified target.

This is probably obvious to everyone reading this already, but the two situations are great illustrations of a couple of related difficulties in implementing ubiquitous computing applications. In a Minority Report-type scenario, for example, Rheingold's hypothetical neighborhood spammers don't physically threaten the person whose cell phone they're bombarding*. And in the Fulltime Killer scenario, a hypothetical bluejacker sending creepy messages to nearby women will not also have access to the women's credit records because he doesn't know their legal names. The first scenario implies a loss of privacy -- that is, control over the knowledge other people have about you. The second suggests a mounting vulnerability -- that is, a sense of personal violability. Which scenario you find creepier depends, I suppose, on personal temperament.

*Although an implied threat of this scenario is that a powerful entity like a government or multinational corporation will be able to physically threaten individuals using information about their location and their activities. But for the moment, the most likely location-aware abuse will come from spammers.

Playing with strangers

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Notwithstanding the widespread belief that computer-mediated social interaction is all about finding more people to date, there seems to be a lot of talk recently about playing well with strangers.

... what social conventions will we build around this? What mechanisms will we use to advertise the fact that we are interested in playing games with (or sharing media with, or learning more about) people around us who we don't know? And how will we politely request these contatcs?

from Tom Hume: Bluejacking as a learning opportunity, via blackbeltjones

When I had just moved from New York to Berkeley, I could barely walk down the street without feeling vaguely threatened by all the people who were, you know, staring at me... Since New York social norms forbidding staring and eye contact just don't apply on the West Coast, I often felt like I was about to be mugged. Usually, the would-be mugged was just some guy checking me out. (Aside: there's got to be a good word for the epistemological state of being-about-to-be-mugged.) In one particularly paranoid moment, I nearly slugged a homeless guy who was just trying to be helpful.

The closer a virtual identity -- ie, your device's bluetooth name -- to the physical body, the more deservedly paranoid people tend to be. Part of the appeal of cities, big cities especially, is the sensation of being invisible and unnoticed in the midst of crowds. That's why bluejacking is such a fun prank. It violates all these social commandments ("thou shalt not approach strangers"..."thou shalt not make comments about other people's appearance where they could overhear you," etc.) But pranks exist to violate social norms, whereas games and more polite interactions need to exist within them.

The useful mechanisms we've developed to help us play online with strangers, especially in MMPOGs, don't translate so well when our real-life bodies and legal identities are on the line. I wish I knew how to politely request gameplay without freaking someone out, or accept such a request without feeling a little creeped out myself. The problem is not, as Matt Jones suggests, just a question of manners -- although an etiquette of public computer-mediated contact with strangers is a good start. It's a question of physical vulnerability, and how close we will allow virtual strangers to get before we start slugging.

Community ICT in NYC

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From the Urban Technology and Telecommunications List

OASIS is a one-stop, interactive mapping resource to enhance the stewardship of open space for the benefit of all New York City residents. We are the New York City Open Accessible Space Information System Cooperative (OASIS).

The maps include aerial photos, community gardens, real property data (look up your own building for a transparent government thrill!) and, recently, neighborhood tree plantings.

Now, what would happen if they combined it with COMNet?

Helloworld

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The Helloworld Project is a global interactive text installation combining language, landscapes and communication technology to create a visual dialogue. From December 9-12, 2003, people from all over the world will be invited to send in messages, either by sending an SMS to a dedicated number or by going to www.helloworldproject.com.
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These messages will be projected almost instantly onto mountains and buildings in Mumbai, Geneva, Rio de Janeiro, New York. Video images of the projections will be broadcast live on the project website and at the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva.

Portable architecture

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I could post for myself on this stuff, but sometimes I wonder why when Jonah Brucker-Cohen has such a good rundown and a priceless entry title:

So you need a new ass? covers temporary plastic bag shelters for the homeless and much, much more. Parasite structures, yes - but also the possibility for inexpensive, transformations of urban space like those of City Repair in Portland.

Also to remember: Lucy Orta's refuge wear.

TagAndScan

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Overview
TagandScan is a service for your mobile phone that enables you to mark real physical locations with an electronic tag. 

Tags
Tags automatically contain the time and location where and when the tag was made. They also can contain a title, description, and a photo.

Grids
Each tag is saved in one of many private or public grids. Grids help organize tags and control who can detect them. You can create as many private grids as you want.

Scans
You can scan for tags by proximity and keyword and can display them on a map.

I find TagAndScan pretty exciting for one reason: it's a commercial service on the phone. There are other applications that do stuff like this - it's not a mindblowingly new concept in this geo-everything moment - but it's nice to see the "let's leave virtual location-tagged notes" concept in a usable form that doesn't require technical oomph and a PDA. Not that there's anything wrong with technical oomph and a PDA, but I'm interested in how - and whether - non-techies approach this application.

Like my other big favorite, Shazam, it's only available in the UK.

Plus, I have this small-medium-large theory about people and their personal devices. Anyone addicted to the permanet has to carry around either one small and one large device (ie, a phone and a laptop) or one medium device (ie, a PDA or palmtop). Me, I am a small-large person. There are incredible PDA projects -- but I'm kind of prejudiced towards applications for devices I actually use.

Via telecom-cities mailing list and, any time now, numerous blogs.

Agar and agorae

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Just looked at Matthew Mankin's work on 'Location Linked Information,' his Master's thesis. His Smart Cities Overview is a detailed look at "space-based computing" and the addition of an overlay of communications technology to physical space. For him, building the technologically-augmented city requires a kind of "agar" - "a contained space in which digital life can flourish, yet be controlled and contained." (7). It's a reference to the idea of ICTs as a kind of invisible "goo" that bridges the physical gaps between places, and the social gaps between people. So far so good.

Though the two words are not etymologically related, I can't help but think of the old concept of the agora, the marketplace of ancient Greece. (Agar is actually of Malaysian derivation.) Agar and agora are two metaphors for connectedness: the dish of jelly within which bacteria thrive and the gathering space for human endeavor. The agora is an empty space bounded by buildings; agar is a substance that flows to fill up empty space.

45.509327-122.647966

Municipal design

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I've been thinking a lot recently about designing for citizenship -- for participation in government at an individual level. Thus: ComNET:

ComNET, a program created by the Fund's Center on Municipal Government Performance (CMGP), introduces easily operated hand-held computers to community organizations so that troublesome street level conditions can be recorded and tabulated quickly, easily and accurately. via Purselipsquarejaw via Jonah Brucker-Cohen

I'm also thinking of the BBC's iCan, which is a site designed to help people start organizing public interest campaigns around issues of importance to them -- and help them figure out what those issues might be. Anti-Mega notes on an iCan presentation.

Familiar Stranger update

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Here's a ridiculously complete summary of the research Eric Paulos and I did on strangers, play, and public places during this summer (and part of fall) at Intel Research Berkeley.

And while I'm on the subject of anxiety and comfort in public places (not to mention inflatables), how about Karen Lancel's Agora Phobia (digitalis), which was apparently at Eyebeam this September? The artist describes it as an "Isolation Pillar / Free Zone" and invites participants (who sit inside an inflatable structure only large enough for one person and a computer) to have an online dialogue with:
someone living in prison,
someone who lives in a cloister,
a digipersona, a pilgrim,
a 'prisoner of war' (POW),
somebody dealing with agora phobia.

In reference to the discussions about vulnerability and intimacy at Ubicomp, it's interesting to see Lancel ask questions like, "What is it about a space that makes you feel vulnerable?"

Lighter-than-air blogging

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Carlos Gomez de Llarena, of Noderunner fame (or pseudo-fame, or obscurity, depending on your acquaintance with interactive art) has a new project through Eyebeam, in glorious NYC-o-vision. Urballoon:

Urballoon is an interactive communication balloon. It is a wireless project for that exists in digital and physical dimensions embodied by a levitating globe. Urbaloon works by letting people explore and express themselves in public spaces through the use of wireless networks. Attached to the balloon is a rig containing a video projector, a wi-fi laptop and a webcam. By accessing www.urballoon.com people can type, draw or submit files that will be projected by the balloon wherever it is. They can also watch a live bird's eye view webcast from the balloon's camera.

It sounds like the project is in the initial stages; there's a blog (of course) to keep everyone up to date on its progress. Reminds me a little of Mark and Ahmi's Bass-Station. Also, Eric's PRoPs. Since I spent part of this summer looking at integrating online and offline social spaces, this looks pretty interesting. Plus, I like all things inflatable. Especially balloons. Balloons! The bigger the better! Whee!

I See You

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This is old news, but the Institute for Applied Autonomy's iSee mapping webapp, which generates surveillance-camera-free paths through New York, is useful and beautiful and I want their mapping code for New York for Fiasco. Plus, they have the only Flash intro that's not a waste of time that I've ever seen.

Geocoding via Geowanking

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This software detects street addresses (such as "2400 Bayshore Parkway,
Mountain View, CA 94043") in a corpus of text and converts them into
geographical coordinates (such as "122.09720 W, 37.42532 N"). These
coordinates are indexed in a two-dimensional index along with a conventional
keyword index of the corpus. A query processor is then able to rapidly
process queries which ask for documents which match certain keywords and/or
contain addresses within a certain radius of a specified target address.
(Think "bookstores near me".)

Sonny Parafina reminds me that the winner of Google's programming contest last year is this amazingly versatile and useful Google geocoding app by Dan Egnor. Details here. And download here.

via Geowanking, my new favorite list. Big signal, little noise.

Googlism for today

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Strangely familiar

Crowds

Design

Architecture

Strangely Familiar is...
strangely familiar is art for the mind
strangely familiar is this unfamiliar domain which mysteriously mirrors our unconscious
strangely familiar is standing here
strangely familiar is sitting there reading a newsheet
strangely familiar is for telling stories about random encounters in everyday life
strangely familiar is a book about the unexpected
strangely familiar is that u emma???? ignor the idiots look at the door behind is that some kind of ghostly face????
strangely familiar is that a similar tragic event occured at the same club a few years ago

this is so genius. click through until you get to the very, very end. the instructions for young graffiti artists are amazing:

When explaining yourself to the Police its worth being as reasonable as possible. Graffiti writers are not real villains. I am always reminded of this by real villains who consider the idea of breaking in someplace, not stealing anything and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard.

Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.

http://www.banksy.co.uk/menu.html

via Anne Galloway of course

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