The world-wide mobility explosion is an enormous challenge for designers. How can we convince people that current forms of continuous mobility are no longer ecologically sustainable? Should mobility simply be made unaffordably expensive? Or can we design viable alternatives
As a prelude to the ElectroSmog festival De Balie in Amsterdam will present a showcase of design proposals, practical projects and design-ideas that should persuade us to start moving less.
With on-line and on-site contributions by among others:
John Thackara, director of Doors of Perception, the international conference and knowledge network which sets new agendas for design, will highlight design projects that try to tackle the question of mobility reduction. www.doorsofperception.com
Stefan Agamanolis, director of Distance Lab, Dublin, will present the specific focus of his organisation on networking rural and remote area’s. The relevant question for the ElectroSmog festival is whether we can live in a sustainable way in the green and still connect to the rest of the world, culturally and economically? www.distancelab.org
David van Gent is a managing consultant for IBM on Learning Strategy & Technology, Virtual Worlds, Serious Gaming & Web 2.0. He will talk about and demo the Virtual Offices project of IBM, using open SIM technology (similar to second life):
( See for instance this CNN item )
The Medialab Prado, Madrid will present their recent project “In the Air” (tbc); “a visualisation project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.
(..) The project proposes a platform for individual and collective awareness and decision making, where the interpretation of results can be used for real time navigation through the city, opportunistic selection of locations according to their air conditions and a base for political action.” www.intheair.es
Eric Kluitenberg, head of the media department of De Balie and initiator of the ElectroSnog festival, will present the concept behind the festival. Besides exploring the critique of mobility theoretically, ElectroSmog will also address the issue practically. All international presentations in the festival will be realised by means of tele-connections between the different international locations.
www.electrosmogfestival.net
This program will be streamed live on the internet – for details please refer to: www.debalie.nl/live
datum | Thursday 21 January, 20.30 hrs.
language | Engels
entrance free entree
Shall we start to move less? This question will be asked (and answered?) during this coming event in Amsterdam. Some names to follow here (like John Thackara).
For my part I would rather say "move more sustainably", "move with purpose(s)" and somethimes "move in a mediated way", mix all those approaches, because I believe mobilty will increase in the future rather than the countrary.
Besides, mobility has brought a lot to the transformation of societes. In good and bad ways of course. Experimenting more with the ones that have some potential (like mixing of cultures while keeping differences or on the other side interbreeding, hybridations, some side of tourism --a tiny part--, creation of abstract and interferential environments and experiences --planes, trains, -- global spatial experiences --airports, branded hotels--, ...) would also be an interesting path to experiment while keeping a critical look to it.
One can hardly deny the fact that mobility has created new spaces (and paved the way for globalization, unsustainable at this stage) that have some potential (hybdrids, interferential, ex-dimensional, etc.). These environments add themsleves to the already existing "local spaces", that won't and shouldn't disappear. Mobility is in fact an old dream (even an old utopia from the 60ies) that is coming to reality in its own way. It's time probably to architecture this mobility and this global scale with sustainable and contemporary concepts that look further than just mere economics, profits or functionality!
Open Source House (OS-House) is a non-profit organization that aims to provide better, more sustainable housing in low-income countries. 8 Design principles are utilized by OS-House to guarantee standards of sustainability, and meet the challenge of flexibility, ensuring that all designs can be locally embedded. Establish your name, and contribute your ideas and designs in our first design competition starting on the15th of January 2010. The competition results will be shared on the OS-House platform thereby marking the beginning of this ongoing project.
OS-House is an initiative of Enviu and architect Vincent van der Meulen. Let’s generate choice for those who don’t have any.
Personal comment:
Open source comes to architecture, along with sustainability (not a surprise) and projects for developing countries.
Pachube is a web service available at http://www.pachube.com that enables you to store, share & discover realtime sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices & buildings around the world. Pachube is a convenient, secure & scalable platform that helps you connect to & build the 'internet of things'.
As a generalized realtime data brokerage platform, the key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Apart from enabling direct connections between any two environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical "patch bay" (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any participating project to "plug-in" to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive environments, networked energy meters, virtual worlds and mobile sensor devices can all "talk" and "respond" to each other.
The Pachube community and environment is growing. Can it become a sort of equivalent to Processing (to which it connects and gets inspired) for "intelligent" environments and the "internet of things"?
There's been much talk lately aboutEnviroMission's plans to build two massive solar updraft towers in the desert of Arizona, at an estimated cost of $750 million per tower for 200 megawatts of production. The monumental scale of the towers (2400 feet tall) and massive expanse of their ground level greenhouses (4 square miles) have raised some questions about the project's economic viability, especially when compared to traditional power plants. Still, the Superstudio-esque images are fascinating, and I'm impressed by the thermodynamic simplicity of the idea.
The project gets even more interesting when one considers what could happen inside the greenhouses. Enviro Mission cites the goal of growing plants, but could the program be extended? What if humans could actually live in certain parts of these vast interior spaces, turning the city-scale enclosures into climatically variable utopian desert communities? For starters, I'd love to see a plan developed that better describes the micro-environments surrounding each tower. Mr. Rahm, are you available?
We already published something similar in this blog, but I definitely think too that it would be interesting to study the micro-climates/micro-communities that such an architecture could trigger. We are here in a sort of super/hyper-vernacular architecture.
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.