Tuesday, October 04. 2011
Via The Funambulist
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In front of the incredible silence of the media about the Occupying Wall Street Movement -the New York Times had a very small article in the NY section about it five days ago bias(ly) entitled “Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim“- I feel obliged to talk about this extremely interesting micro-society existing right in between Ground Zero and Wall Street in New York. About this very eloquent silence in the press, you might want to read the excellent article by Gaston Gordillo on the never disappointing Critical Legal Thinking. Silence is indeed their best weapon to fight against their fear of this movement increasing.
The Police should know that its brutality is only bringing more reasons to resist the injustice that capitalism develops in its implementation and that now reach summit in the social inequalities. Nevertheless, the movement voluntarily remains absolutely non-violent and leaderless. Organization is the key notion here. A computer lab on site is relaying information directly on the Internet, a kitchen supplies food for the American indignants, and several working group gather everyday to discuss and create how this micro-society could sustain itself in time and implement outreaching actions. At the end of each day, a General Assembly is gathered in which propositions and votes are effectuated in a very communal way characterized by the mean used by the indignants to make themselves heard: one person speaks and the rest who could hear repeat for the crowd further, in a very symbolic union of voices. Here again, the organization is impressive, especially as far as the domain of law is concerned with competent lawyers -some of the National Lawyers Guild- and other Cop-watchers who make sure that nobody is left alone if arrested.
Some people outside of the movement seem to blame the lack of specific demands. I, however, would claim that this group seems to have understood something about revolt: in fact, they create a micro-society, two blocks away from their antagonistic way of life’s embodiment (Wall Street), which implements de facto the democracy and the solidarity they are calling for as a model of society. Just like for the recent Egyptian Revolution, the moment of liberation is not so much the achievement (and therefore the termination) of the resistance movement but rather the process of this movement which forces people involved in it to develop a collective identity.
Here is the minute of the General Assembly I assisted to tonight
Here is a nice short film about and by the indignents
And even more importantly, the legal rights of the protester.
Tuesday, September 20. 2011
Via Archinect
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by Archinect
Over the next six months Architecture for Humanity plans to transform their current Open Architecture Network, an online network that empowers architects, designers, builders and their clients to share architectural plans and drawings, into a robust platform that provides dialogue and tools to support a shared vision of a more sustainable future across sectors. The combined strength of these communities, both created out of the TED Prize, will help spur innovation, learning, and best practices.
Personal comment:
We used to be Worldchanging readers, now we'll probably become Open Architecture Network's ones as well.
Friday, July 29. 2011
Via The Doors of Perception
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By Kristi
I have just received a quite extraordinary 736 page book called Lean Logic: A Dictionary For The Future and How To Survive It by the English ecologist David Fleming. The publisher describes it as a "community of essays". In my words it's half encyclopedia, half commonplace book, half a secular bible, half survival guide, half ... yes, that's a lot of halves, but I hope you get the picture. I have never encountered a book that is so hard to characacterise yet so hard, despite its weight, to put down.
The editors of Lean Logic, who have completed the project following Fleming's untimely death last year, say it's about "cooperative self-reliance in the face of great uncertainty". Well, yes. But today I have also read entries on nanotechnlogy, carnival, casuistry, multiculturalism, and the 'new domestication' - and I still have more than 1,000 entries to read. Waiting for me ahead are entries on road pricing, the vernacular, trust, resilience, the marshes of Iraq...
Lean Logic does not sugar-coat the challenges we face: an economy that destroys the very foundations upon which it depends; climate weirdness; ecological systems under stress; shocks to community and culture. Neither does the book suggest that there are easy solutions to these dilemmas. As Fleming has said, "large scale problems do not require large-scale solutions - they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.
This is not a book to read from start to finish - although entry Number 1, on Abstraction, is engaging enough. Fleming defines abstraction as "Displacement of the particular - people, places, purpose - by general principle". Within a few lines Fleming introduces someone I never heard of, Alexander Herzen [1812-1870], as one of the first writers to "make the case for local detail, for pragmatic decision-making, for near-at-hand, for 'presence'. Fleming goes on to quote such other "scourges of abstraction" as Oliver Goldsmith, Montaigne, Joseph Conrad, and Matthew Arnold. And that's all on page one.
Among the incredibly useful passages I've already discovered are: a long text about 'resilience' and its multiple meanings; a clear account of Energy Decent Action Plans; an explanation of Harmonic Order; a comparative guide to barter through the ages; and a section on Lean Health.
Fleming was a co-founder of the UK Green Party, chair of the Soil Association, and active from its early days in the Transition Towns movement. He was one of the first people in the world to understand the implications for industrial civilzation of peak oil, and a good deal of the book is about energy in its many meanings. Fleming was the inventor - and advocate for more than a decade - of Tradeable Energy Quotas or TEQs. This energy rationing scheme is designed to share out fairly a nation's shrinking - as it must and will - energy/carbon budget, while allowing maximum freedom of choice over energy use.
But Lean Logic is neither a policy manifesto nor a dry technical guide. It's an incredibly nourishing cultural and scientific treasure trove. Its pages span ethics, science, culture, art, and history. The book's greatest strength, for this mesmerized reader, is the lightness with which it draws on knowledge from earlier periods of history, and from other cultures.
Lean Logic has been printed in a hardback first edition of just 500 copies, so get your order in quick.
Monday, July 18. 2011
Via Creative Applications
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by Filip
Human Interference Project is a tribute to Jean Tinguely’s Métamatics organized by the Métamatic Research Initiative. The team are creating a collection of hand-drawn mathematical figures governed by a simple set of rules. The repetitive and parameter-restricted character of the drawings draws one one much similar to machine production although in this instance is much about emphasising the human creative expression.
A number of artists were invited to produce a drawing which you can now find on the website. Each drawing was produced by following these five rules:
1. Use a white A4 sheet and a ballpoint pen.
2. Draw a closed shape on the paper.
3. Repeat the shape inside the original shape until there is no space left at its centre. Repeat the shape outside the original shape until it touches one side of the paper. Choose the distance so that you can make at least 50 iterations on the paper.
4. Try to repeat each iteration in exactly the same way.
5. Sign the drawing in its upper right corner in landscape format.
Note the beautiful interference patterns created as you move drawings over one another.
The Human Interference Project forms the basis for the new MRI website, online by May 2011 which will be a communal platform for all material around the artistic and academic research into Tinguely’s Métamatics.
Human Interference Project
/via Luis Blackaller’s blacklog who has also contributed to this project.
Personal comment:
Just because we are (very) interested into interferences... I therefore also have to mention Carsten Nicolai's beautiful book about moiré: "Moiré Index" (Gestalten Verlag).
Monday, June 20. 2011
Via DomusWeb
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An op-ed
A proposition for a different approach to designing space to succeed the single-author model includes tools from disparate sources to create new paradigms for thinking and building
The contributors to this article included Paola Antonelli, Adam Bly, Lucas Dietrich, Joseph Grima, Dan Hill, John Habraken, Alex Haw, John Maeda, Nicholas Negroponte, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlo Ratti, Casey Reas, Marco Santambrogio, Mark Shepard, Chiara Somajni, Bruce Sterling*
Open Source Architecture (OSArc) is an emerging paradigm describing new procedures for the design, construction and operation of buildings, infrastructure and spaces. Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, avant-garde architectural theory, science fiction, language theory, and others, it describes an inclusive approach to spatial design, a collaborative use of design software and the transparent operation throughout the course of a building and city's life cycle.
Cooking is often hailed as an early form of open source; vernacular architecture—producing recipes for everyday buildings—is another form of early lo-fi open-source culture, openly sharing and optimising technologies for building. A contemporary form of open-source vernacular is the Open Architecture Network launched by Architecture for Humanity, which replaces traditional copyright restrictions with Creative Commons licensing and allows open access to blueprints. Wider OSArc relies on a digital commons and the shared spaces of the World Wide Web to enable instantaneous collaboration beyond more established models of competition and profit. Traditional architectural tools like drawings and plans are supplemented and increasingly replaced by interactive software applications using relational data and parametric connectivity.
OSArc is not only involved with production; reception to a given project—critical, public, client, peer-related—can often form part of the project itself, creating a feedback loop that can ground—or unmoor—a project's intention and ultimately becomes part of it, with both positive and negative consequences. OSArc supersedes architectures of static geometrical form with the introduction of dynamic and participatory processes, networks, and systems. Its proponents see it as distinguished by code over mass, relationships over compositions, networks over structures, adaptation over stasis. Its purpose is to transform architecture from a top-down immutable delivery mechanism into a transparent, inclusive and bottom-up ecological system— even if it still includes top-down mechanisms.
OSArc relies upon amateurs as much as experienced professionals—the genius of the mass as much as that of the individual—eroding the binary distinction between author and audience. Like social software, it recognises the core role of multiple users at every stage of the process—whether as clients or communities, designers or occupants; at its best, it harnesses powerful network effects to scale systems effectively. It is typically democratic, enshrining principles of open access and participation, though political variations may range from stealth authoritarianism to communitarian consensualism.
Open Source Architecture revolutionises every step of the traditional building process, from brief-building to demolition, programming to adaptive reuse, including the following:
Funding
New economic models, exemplified by incremental microdonations and crowd-funding strategies like Sponsume and Kickstarter, offer new modes of project initiation and development, destabilising the traditionally feudal hierarchy of client/architect/occupant. Financing of private projects increasingly moves to the public domain, offering mass rather than singular ownership, whereas funding of public projects can be derived from more flexible, responsive frameworks than simple levies or taxation. OSArc has particular appeal for builders outside the mainstream economy, such as squatters, refugees and the military.
Engagement
Traditional developments deploy engagement programmes in which the community is consulted on incoming developments, with blunt tools such as focus groups, which often result in lack of representation and input, or at worst can result in NIMBYism. With crowd-funded models, forms of engagement are built into the process, enabling a kind of emergent urbanism in which use of space is optimised on terms set by its users. This reclamation of people's power can be seen as a soft, spatial version of Hacktivism. OSArc can suffer some of the organisational drawbacks of open-source software, such as project bifurcation or abandonment, clique behaviour and incompatibility with existing buildings.
Standards
Standards of collaboration are vital to OSArc's smooth operation and the facilitation of collaboration. The establishment of common, open, modular standards (such as the grid proposed by the OpenStructures project) addresses the problem of hardware compatibility and the interface between components, allowing collaborative efforts across networks in which everyone designs for everyone. Universal standards also encourage the growth of networks of non-monetary exchange (knowledge, parts, components, ideas) and remote collaboration.
Design
Mass customisation replaces standardisation as algorithms enable the generation of related but differentiated species of design objects. Parametric design tools like Grasshopper, Generative Components, Revit and Digital Project enable new user groups to interact with, navigate and modify the virtual designs, and to test and experience arrays of options at unprecedented low cost—recognising laypeople as design decision-making agents rather than just consumers. Opensource codes and scripts enable design communities to share and compare information and collectively optimise production through modular components, accelerating the historical accumulation of shared knowledge. BIM (Building Information Modelling) and related collaboration tools and practices enable cross-disciplinary co-location of design information and integration of a range of platforms and timescales. Rapid prototyping and other 3D printing technologies enable instant production of physical artefacts, both representational and functional, even on an architectural scale, to an ever-wider audience.
Construction
The burgeoning Open Source Hardware movement enables sharing of and collaboration on the hardware involved in designing kinetic or smart environments that tightly integrate software, hardware and mechanisms. Sensor data brings live inputs to inert material and enables spaces to become protoorganic in operation; design becomes an ongoing, evolutionary process, as opposed to the one-off, disjointed fire-and-forget methodology of traditional architecture. Operating systems emerge to manage the design, construction and occupancy phases, created as open platforms that foster and nourish a rich ecosystem of "apps". Various practices jostle to become the Linux, Facebook or iTunes of architectural software, engaging in "platform plays" on different scales rather than delivery of plans and sections. Embedded sensing and computing increasingly mesh all materials within the larger "Internet of things", evolving ever closer towards Bruce Sterling's vision of a world of spimes. Materials communicate their position and state during fabrication and construction, aiding positioning, fixing and verification, and continue to communicate with distributed databases for the extent of their lifetime.
Occupancy
OSArc enables inhabitants to control and shape their personal environment—"to Inhabit is to Design", as John Habraken put it. Fully sentient networked spaces constantly communicate their various properties, states and attributes—often through decentralised and devolved systems. System feedback is supplied by a wide range of users and occupants, often either by miniature electronic devices or mobile phones— crowd-sourcing (like crowd-funding) large volumes of small data feeds to provide accurate and expansive real-time information. Personalisation replaces standardisation as spaces "intelligently" recognise and respond to individual occupants. Representations of spaces become as vital after construction as they were before; real-time monitoring, feedback and ambient display become integral elements to the ongoing life of spaces and objects. Maintenance and operations become extended inseparable phases of the construction process; a building is never "complete" in OSArc's world of growth and change. If tomorrow's buildings and cities will now be more like computers—than machines—to live in, OSArc provides an open, collaborative framework for writing their operating software.
References
— R. Botson, R. Rogers, What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, HarperCollins, New York City 2010
— M. Fuller, U. Haque, "Urban Versioning System 1.0", in Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series, Architectural League of New York, New York City 2008
— J. Habraken, Supports—An Alternative to Mass Housing, The Architectural Press, London 1972
— U. Haque, Open Source Architecture Experiment, 2003-05
— D. Kaspori, "A Communism of Ideas: towards an architectural open source practice", in Archis, 2003
— K. Kelly, Out of Control: the rise of neo-biological civilization, Perseus Books, New York City 1994
—C. Leadbeater, We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity, Profile Books, London 2008
—Nettime mailing lists: mailing lists for networked cultures, politics, and tactics
—Open Building Network / Working Commission W104, "Open Building Implementation" of the CIB, The International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (meets in a different country every year since its first meeting in Tokyo in 1994)
—C. Price, R. Banham, P. Barker, P. Hall, "Non Plan: an experiment in freedom", in New Society, no. 338, 1969
—M. Shepard (editor), Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, MIT Press, Boston 2011
—B. Sterling, "Beyond the Beyond", blog on Wired Magazine
*As part of the special report on open-source design published in issue 948, Domus approached Carlo Ratti to write an op-ed on the theme of open-source architecture. He responded with an unusual suggestion: why not write it collaboratively, as an open-source document? Within a few hours a page was started on Wikipedia, and an invitation sent to an initial network of contributors. The outcome of this collaborative effort is presented below. The article is a capture of the text as of 11 May 2011, but the Wikipedia page remains online as an open canvas—a 21st-century manifesto of sorts, which by definition is in permanent evolution.
Monday, April 04. 2011
Via OWNI
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by Marie D. Martel
Nous dirigeons-nous vers une technoculture du prêt, du partage, du streaming ?
Trop d’objets autour de nous, trop de bruit dans notre champ visuel, dans nos agrégateurs, dans nos résultats de recherche, trop de super-butinage (power-browsing), trop consommer, accumuler, remplir, excéder, évaluer, élaguer, se débarrasser, recycler-réduire-réutiliser, ouvrir la fenêtre, pas quinze fenêtres, respirer, relaxer, se vider l’esprit. C’est le printemps et une saison nouvelle qui s’annonce aux teintes discrètes (chromophobes ?) du néominimalisme.
After the bacchanal of post-modernism, the time has again come for neo-minimalism, neo-ascetism, neo-denial and sublime poverty. (Juhani Pallasmaa, cité dans Wikipedia)
ou encore :
By definition, « neo-minimalists » don’t have an overabundance of things in their lives. But one thing they tend to have more and more of these days is visibility. Recently, The New York Times talked to some people participating in the 100 Thing Challenge about how it has affected their lives; The BBC looked into the « Cult of Less; » and here on Boing Boing, Mark has beengetting down to the nitty-gritty of what the « lifestyle hack » involves. The common thread here is a growing number of people are realizing that our mountains of physical stuff are actually cluttering up more than just our houses. »
Cet extrait provient d’un article publié sur Boing Boing (traduit dans Le Courrier International), dans lequel Sean Bonner explore la dématérialisation ou la décroissance matérielle comme une possibilité issue des technologies actuelles et qui nous permet de reconsidérer nos interactions avec le monde et les autres en favorisant l’expérience plutôt que la consommation. À Toronto, le même auteur a aussi animé une présentation [en] sur le courant des technomades.
L’usage de circonstance par le prêt, le partage, le streaming
D’autres journalistes, comme Ramon Munez d’El Païs ont, dans la même perspective, élaboré l’idée que la propriété est un fardeau et que l’avenir de la consommation de la culture n’est plus lié à la propriété mais à l’usage de circonstance par le prêt, le partage, le streaming :
Après avoir été pendant trois siècles la valeur suprême de la civilisation occidentale, la propriété cesse d’être à la mode. Ne vous y trompez pas : il ne s’agit pas d’un retour du communisme ou d’une vague de ferveur qui nous ramènerait au détachement matériel des premières communautés chrétiennes. Ce sont le capitalisme lui-même, son incitation permanente à consommer et les technologies liées à Internet qui viennent bousculer des habitudes que l’on croyait bien enracinées. À quoi bon posséder des biens, les stocker, les entretenir, les protéger des voleurs, lorsqu’on dispose d’une offre illimitée de produits et de services accessibles en quelques clics ou moyennant la signature d’un contrat de location ?
Si cette tendance ne se limite pas au numérique, c’est sur Internet que la révolution est le plus avancée. Le téléchargement de contenus cède du terrain au streaming [diffusion en continu], c’est-à-dire à la reproduction instantanée de musique et de vidéos sans qu’il soit besoin de les conserver sur le disque dur de l’ordinateur. Des milliers de sites, légaux et illégaux, proposent un catalogue illimité de logiciels, films, morceaux de musique et jeux vidéo. Le succès du site de musique suédois Spotify ou du portail espagnol de séries télévisées Seriesyonkis vient bousculer les habitudes des consommateurs.
YouTube, le célèbre portail de vidéos en ligne de Google, est le symbole de la révolution en marche. Ses chiffres laissent pantois. Sur toutes les vidéos regardées chaque mois aux États-Unis, 43% (14,63 milliards) sont diffusées par YouTube, selon la société d’études de marché comScore. YouTube est suivi de près par Hulu, un site de streaming qui propose gratuitement des films et des séries télévisées. Avec 1,2 milliard de vidéos regardées, Hulu dépasse non seulement des monstres d’Internet comme Yahoo! ou Microsoft, mais aussi les portails de chaînes et de studios comme Viacom, CBS ou Fox.
D’après une étude sur le paysage audiovisuel espagnol réalisée en 2010 pour le compte de l’opérateur Telefónica et de la chaîne de télévision privée Antena, 3, 30% des internautes espagnols déclarent télécharger moins de fichiers, tandis que la moitié d’entre eux assurent que le streaming est leur manière habituelle de consommer des contenus audiovisuels sur Internet. “On constate un essor du streaming depuis au moins le printemps 2009”, assure Felipe Romero, l’un des auteurs de l’étude. “À court terme, les deux méthodes – téléchargement et streaming – vont coexister, mais il est clair que la seconde va prendre de plus en plus d’ampleur.”
Sur le blog Agnostic, May Be, on mentionne également cet article qui témoigne de l’émergence de la culture du partage dans le Time [en] :
[T]he ownership society was rotting from the inside out. Its demise began with Napster. The digitalization of music and the ability to share it made owning CDs superfluous. Then Napsterization spread to nearly all other media, and by 2008 the financial architecture that had been built to support all that ownership — the subprime mortgages and the credit-default swaps — had collapsed on top of us. Ownership hadn’t made the U.S. vital; it had just about ruined the country.
L’étape suivante franchie par le blogueur Andy Woodworth [en] (incidemment élu dans le palmarès 2010 des Shakers and Movers [en]) m’intéresse tout particulièrement. Il fait l’hypothèse qu’en ce moment l’attrait pour les bibliothèques reposerait peut-être moins sur la récession économique que sur l’accroissement du nombre de gens qui préfèrent emprunter plutôt que posséder.
L’émergence de cette culture suggère des possibilités et des tendances sur lesquelles les bibliothèques pourraient largement capitaliser, dit-il. Comment ? Pas seulement en incarnant elles-mêmes les instances équipées pour prêter des documents à partir de leurs collections mais peut-être surtout en se positionnant comme des facilitateurs, ou des médiateurs, capables de négocier et de supporter les citoyens en vue d’accéder aux ressources disponibles dans la déferlante du web.
Mais la question la plus évidente est la suivante : est-ce que les bibliothèques seront en mesure de profiter de l’apparition de cette société du prêt et du partage ? Elles apparaissent elles-mêmes souvent éreintées par les résistances, trop déboussolées pour servir de guide à qui ce soit, sans vision, sans plan pour penser la culture numérique au-delà de cet effort qui les amène à prononcer et à servir à toutes les sauces, le mot magique de la « bibliothèque numérique ».
Tuesday, March 29. 2011
Via MIT Technology (Blogs)
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Bill Atkinson invented everything from the menu bar to hypercard--the program that inspired the first wiki.
The wiki is a funny thing: unlike the blog, which is a bastard child of the human need to record life's events and the exhibitionistic tendencies the Internet encourages, there is nothing all that obvious about it.
Ward Cunningham, the programmer who invented the modern wiki, has said that this is precisely what made it so compelling -- it was one of those too-obvious ideas that doesn't really make sense until you've seen it in action. To judge by the level of discourse in the average well-trafficked comment thread, to put a page on the internet and to invite all to edit it is a recipe for defacement and worse. Yet it works -- in part due to its occasionally ant-democratic nature.
Unlike the first weblogs, which were personal diaries, the very first wiki -- it still exists -- is devoted to software development. But where did its creator get the idea to create a wiki (then called a WikiWiki) in the first place?
Hypercard.
It's a name that will mean a great deal to anyone who can identify this creature:
Hypercard was the world wide web before the web even existed. Only it wasn't available across a network, and instead of hypertext, it was merely hypermedia -- in other words, different parts of the individual 'cards' one could create with it were linkable to other cards.
The most famous application ever to be built with Hypercard is the original version of the computer game Myst. (Which, like seemingly every other bit of puzzle, arcade and adventure game nostalgia, has been reconstituted on the iPhone.)
Hypercard made it easy to build "stacks" of graphically rich (for the time, anyway) "cards" that could be interlinked. Cunningham built a stack in Hypercard that documented computer programmers and their ideas, and, later, programming patterns. The web allowed him to realize an analogous "stack" in a public space; the last step was to allow anyone to add to it.
Bill Atkinson, the Apple programmer who invented Hypercard, also invented MacPaint, the QuickDraw toolbox that the original Macintosh used for graphics, and the Menu bar. He is literally one of those foundational programmers whose ideas -- or at least their expression -- have influenced millions, and have descendants on practically every computer in existence.
Which means Atkinson gave birth to a system elegant enough to presage the world wide web, inspire the first Wiki (without which Wikipedia, begun in 2001, would have been impossible) and give rise to the most haunting computer game of a generation. Both Atkinson and Cunningham are links in a long chain of inspiration and evolution stretching back to the earliest notions of hypertext.
And that's how Apple -- or specifically Bill Atkinson -- helped give birth to the wiki. Which is 16 years old today!
Monday, March 21. 2011
Via Andreas Angelidakis
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by Andreas Angelidakis
After a really long time, I found myself in Second Life Again
at first I thought the teleport took me to the wrong place
Could this really be the same lazy suburban island I left a few years ago?
And where was everybody? The place felf like the day after an invisible bomb
I guess this was not a regular bomb, it was just an explosion of development,
it made me think of all the hype that surrounded Second Life a few years back.
Obviously made invertors placed their money here. I guess they lost it,
and most probably because they promoted Second Life as a "digital revolution",
and not as the niche geekfest it really is.
another failed capitalist expansion, that took everybody to nowhere.
I peeked at vacant spaces inside generic corporate salary-buildings
flew up to the sky, and decided to leave
I saw a bridge and another, uninhabited island, strangely cut in half.
I assumed it was the graphics setting on my pc,
and as I flew closer the rest of the island would come into view
but no, the island was indeed cut off.
The development ended abrupty at sea.
I examined the cut, it was clean
the topography sliced by the programmer who ran out of space on his server?
Was this the real City of Bits? Cloud Computing Urbanisim?
hovering above the sea,
I appreciated the new graphics settings,
where the sea soflty glistens under the moonlight,
as it would any other full moon weekend
Personal comment:
Artificial cities also experience (invisible) cataclysms.
Tuesday, February 01. 2011
Via Information Aesthetics
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The recently released Free Encyclopedia of Interactive Design, Usability and User Experience [interaction-design.org] has been developed under the manifesto of "Democratization of Knowledge", as it aims for people from all the far corners of the world to get free access to world-class educational materials. It also deliberately takes the opposite approach of Wikipedia or other crowd-sourcing initiatives, as all entries are written by leading figures who either invented or contributed significantly to a particular topic.
The website contains various topics that relate to data visualization. For instance, one can enjoy an elaborate introduction on visual representation by Alan Blackwell (with additional commentaries by some renowned professors like Ben Shneiderman, Clive Richards and Brad A. Myers), or more specifically dive into the topic of Data Visualization for Human Perception by Stephen Few (including a blog shortlist on which I will refrain commenting).
Be sure to check out the other topics that have been covered in a chapter, and might well be interesting to you.
Wednesday, January 26. 2011
Via TreeHugger
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Image via TED
The rise of lending libraries, swapping sites, and product as a service systems over the last 5 years or so has been impressive. We've seen an upswing in everything from clothing swap parties to local rental communities, to big services like Zipcar for getting around without having to own a car and even AirBnB for renting spare bedrooms from locals rather than hotel rooms. Rachel Botsman is the co-author of the book What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. She studies how we're switching to a culture of sharing, and how that will transform business, consumerism, and the meaning and impact of social networking in our lives. She took the time to answer a few questions from us about what's behind collaborative consumerism, and what we can expect over the next few years.
Photo by Jamiesrabbits via Flickr Creative Commons
Lending libraries, rental sites for stuff, and even car sharing is getting more popular these days. But what area of consumables have you seen the most growth in for sharing or swapping among community members?
Swapping sites for goods with limited value or that fulfill a temporary need such a baby goods, books and DVDs are growing at a staggering rate; Peer-to-peer space rental sites (homes, gardens, parking spaces, storage etc.) such as AirBnb, Landshare and Parkatmyhouse are exploding in mainstream popularity; Bike sharing is the fastest growing form of transportation in the world; Co-working spaces are popping up in the world's major cities; I think 2011 is the year that we start to see skill or 'favor' share communities such as TaskRabbit, Skillshare and Hey Neighbor start to take off.
As collaborative consumerism becomes more practical and popular, how do you think it will shift our economy as a whole?
Big picture (and I am talking in 10-20 years time), I think we will see the way we measure 'wealth', 'growth' and 'happiness' being completely redefined. We are already seeing countries such as the UK, Canada and France looking at reinventing measures beyond GDP that give a picture of the holistic well-being of a nation. As Sarkozy commented, "So many things that are important to individuals are not included in GDP."
The way assets and income are taxed is going to be an interesting area as more people become "micro-entrepreneurs" earning money renting out their assets or bartering their skills. Peer-to-peer marketplaces essentially cut out a lot of middlemen but in the process create a whole array of cottage industries. Just think of Etsy. It's going to be interesting to see whether big brands and global businesses retain their appeal or whether small really is the next big thing.
Photo by Orin Zebest via Flickr Creative Commons
Some of the big environmental benefits we can see with a culture of sharing goods is reduced production of stuff, and definitely less waste. What are some of the lesser seen eco-benefits we might see?
In short, a) better utilization of assets b) products designed for longevity not obsolescence and c) mindset and behavior change.
All around us, we are surrounded by stuff that has what I call 'idling capacity', the untapped value of unused or underused assets. There are different kinds of idling capacity. Products that are underutilized (e.g. the average car that sits parked for 23 hours a day); products that fulfill a temporary need (e.g. baby goods and clothes): or those that diminish in appeal and value after usage (e.g. a movie or a book). At the heart of Collaborative Consumption is how we can use the latest technologies to redistribute 'idling capacity' and maximize usage.
I could not think of a more exciting time to be a designer. Longevity does not just mean designing with durable materials but making goods with modularity that can be seamlessly updated, as well as easily broken down for future reuse, resale or repair. It will mean designing products that can be easily shared, customized and personalized by different users. If a designer had a blank sheet of paper and was designing a car for shared usage versus individual ownership how would it differ? How can we use RFID tags to embed stories, images, and videos into shared goods so they become smarter and more interesting than individually owned products? There are endless sustainable design opportunities...
When people start using different examples of Collaborative Consumption they frequently describe a 'mindset change.' There are examples like car sharing where users think twice about whether they need to drive and thereby reduce their miles travelled by an approximated 45%. And there are examples like peer-to-peer rental, where people are using platforms such as Neighborgoods or Snapgoods. 'Owners' are realizing they can make money from renting out their assets peer-to-peer and 'renters' are experiencing the benefits of not needing to own. Finally, you have examples like 'swap trading' where people suddenly realize they are surrounded by assets they can swap to get what they want versus buying new stuff. The behaviour becomes addictive.
How far do you think we are from having collaborative consumerism be a mainstream way of using goods, and what are some of the steps we still need to take to get there?
We are just in the nascent stages of Collaborative Consumption. We have already seen examples like Netflix, eBay and Zipcar become household names but that has taken a decade - technology and consumer values were playing catch-up. But I think the current massive cultural and technological shift is accelerating the next wave of Collaborative Consumption at an astonishing rate.
I think it's critical for more big brands to enter the space. BMW, Daimler and Peugeot have all recently launched car sharing models. Amazon just announced its 'Buy Back' scheme of second-hand unwanted books. I would love to see a big bank enter the social lending space; for a retail giant like Target to launch an innovative rental model; for a brand like Zappos to create a shoe swapping and repair platform....
Big brands can reach scale faster, they prove there are real business models behind Collaborative Consumption (and there are), but they also create the social proof, the cultural cache for this new cultural and economy to become mainstream.
More on Collaborative Consumerism
Meet Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers Authors of What's Mine Is Yours
TED Talk: Systems of Sharing About to Revolutionize Consumerism
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