Monday, August 11. 2008The web & beyondThursday May 22 2008 I visited the CHI conference The Web and Beyond: Mobility in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers were: Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia).
Greenfield starts by stating his affiliation with the urbanist tradition of Jane Jacobs and others, who see the city made up of bottom-up processes by ‘ordinary people’. He then described the current state of the city. The (American) city nowadays is characterized by repetition, deliberate attempts to make certain public spaces less attractive to dwell in, and a lot of junk space and privatized commons [although Martijns' recent post shows how these kind of spaces are re-appropriated by kids].
The result, Greenfield says, is a withdrawal of people into mobile phone’s private spaces. The challenge is to overcome these threats to urban life - “the crisis of the American city” - by refinding what constitutes the city in Jacobs’ tradition. Greenfield tries to find that answer in ubiquitous computing. Networked processors are already showing up in new places, on the level of bodies and on the level of the streets. These become social objects. They help create an “ambient informatics”: delivering information locally upon which you can act. This really becomes ambient when information processing dissolves into behavior. Greenfield gives an example of a woman he saw using her transit card in public transport by swinging her handbag in full speed in front of the reader, almost becoming a choreography. Architecture and building is becoming increasingly shaped by computation. It changes the city-scape. It changes mobility too. Objects become accessible, scriptable, queryable, and connected. All this changes the way we use cities from browsing to searching. We can now directly look for something and this search can be customized by recombining elements. Greenfield is somewhat critical of all kinds of informational mapping projects such as the Oakland crime map. People have started to how up at the precinct with such maps demanding more police presence! So are these maps really representing actual risks on the streets, or are they misleading? There are other things more likely to kill you than street crime. Greenfield goes on to talk about “the big now” and “the long here”. He talks about Twitter, and how it is used to become immersed in other places at the same time. This changes city life. Greenfield calls this “The Big Now”. But places are also accessible from multiple other places. Greenfield calls this “The Long Here”: you don’t enter a place, you enter a time. Another thing we should be critical of is “differential permissioning”, the way technologies are used to differentiate people into allowed access or denied access to certain places based on predefined characteristics (this is what Graham calls “the software sorted city”). What is happening to public space? Formerly, everyone had the right to use pavements, parks, etc. We’re moving away from guaranteed availability and access, to differential access. [But hasn’t urban space always been differentiated? For example the ghetto vs. the theater, each barring off groups of people that 'do not belong there'.] We have to keep in mind that cities are not all the same, but all have their own particularity. We also have to take into account unexpected emerging behavior. These “ambient informatics” objects may be hackable and even used for dangerous/bad ends. Greenfield ends with some “proposals for the real time city” that urban/media designers should leep in mind: 1. Create beautiful seams: read/write access to city 2. Underspecify: do not too much closure to space. 3. Understand changing city life: from flaneur to consumer to user. Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
09:30
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, conferences, localized, mobility, territory, theory, thinkers, urbanism
The Media City
I just finished reading the highly interesting book The Media City by Scott McQuire. It is a philosophical approach to the role of media in the experience of the city. I found two insights worth sharing here. The first is that McQuire sees media not as a means of representation, but rather as a technology that co-constitutes the experience of the city. In other words, what is interesting is not so much how a movie or tv show represents the city. What is interesting is how media can provide new frames for making sense of the city; how it provides new ways of experiencing the city. Second, I liked his approach of technology: McQuire is interested in the way in which new technologies are incorporated into everyday life, how they are turned from ‘disembedding technologies’ into embedded media practices: when new technologies are introduced – be it the telegraph or the internet – they are usually seen as disruptive technologies that will ‘annihilate time and space’ and disembed existing social relations. However, usually after a certain period of time, some of these technologies have become so normal that we do not even notice them anymore. They are so embedded in our everyday practice that we simply can’t imagine what life would be without them. It is the phase in between that is interesting. ‘What may in retrospect seem the logical pathway of future development is not yet inevitable; other possibilities remain open.’ Will these new technologies be applied in a reactionary or in revolutionary way? When looking at locative media and the experience of the city, we might well be in the ‘in between phase’. There is still a lot of bewilderment and excitement about the technologies. Yet clear practices haven’t emerged, although McQuire is critical about the general direction of innovation. It’s mainly pushed by commercial providers aiming at instant gratification for their customer base. There is less attention for usages that might benefit a more public, collective culture. Let’s have a more detailed look at what McQuire means when he says that
McQuire gives several historic examples. For instance he looks at the serial photographs that Marville took in 19th Century Paris before and after Hausmann’s crew had swooshed through the neighborhood. These photos were not meant to be experienced as single objects of art, but rather as a series. ‘The most significant legacy of Marville’s work is the way it registers the transition from individual views to the cumulative knowledge established by the series or the set. … images coalesce into an information flow in which relations between images assume heightened importance.’ McQuire notes that around the same time picture postcards started to become a popular medium as well, and their serial logic could have had an interesting impact on the way we imagine the city:
Related Links:Unleash the gamersFrom Roland Piquepaille on Smart Mobs - GPS cellphones to unleash gamers onto the streets They may not yet know it, but gamers will soon be quitting their living rooms and heading outdoors. Handheld consoles and laptops made gaming portable, while the Nintendo Wii made gaming active. Now active, portable gaming is possible thanks to GPS and improved graphics becoming standard in cellphones. [...] Games studios are racing to exploit a new world of what is called “pervasive gaming”, where everyone carries a powerful gaming machine in their pocket. Related Links:Personal comment: Rien qu'on ne sache déjà: le mélange entre environnements réels et de jeux vidéo (ou de fictions: romans, récits, films, ...) a été imaginé dans le cadre de projets depuis un moment déjà (par exemple en 2002 par un groupe d'artistes anglais qui a bénéficié de pas mal de buzz: Blast Theory). Comme pour beaucoup d'autres projets de cette période, les idées sont arrivées avant les "devices" intégrant les différentes technologies qui devaient permettre de les réaliser. C'est encore un peu tôt, mais ceux-ci sont sur le point de débarquer massivement...
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Territory
at
09:01
Defined tags for this entry: artists, culture & society, design (interactions), devices, games, interferences, mobile, science & technology, territory
Data island (suite)[The continuous interior of data centers is a palace to the monolithic slabs of data storage.]
In an increasingly ubi-comp environment, massive data centers processing or storing data continue to sprout up in contexts and sites of economic and geographic convenience. In a post-Silicone-valley glow, many sites are happy to promote their contexts as ideal for these data centers. Iceland promotes itself as just such a site. [Brochure pitching Iceland as the ideal environment for massive data centers.]
With clean water, stable power and cool air as an ideal location, Iceland is lobbying for the search engines and IT firms to come into the cold. The most alluring project within this agenda is Data Islandia. Data Islandia is a storage company based in Iceland that has tabled a green data center (link via Drunken Data) in the town of Sandgerdi in southwest Iceland. The facility will be built near a former US Naval Air Station, and will use natural wind cooling to reduce energy usage. And I am sure that abundant geothermal is figuring into the convenience to boot. The landform references Icelandic turf farms and makes extensive use of the landscape. [The rolling hills of a proposed server farm in Iceland from Data Islandia designed by architect Robert Örn Arnarson.]
The Sandgerdi data centre will have a moss roof. Putting plants on the roof doesn’t just drop a building into the landscape, it can absorb excess water, protect the materials of the roof from the sun, and increase the diversity of flora and fauna. The 4,000 m2 digital data archive is designed by Danish architect Robert Örn Arnarson. [IBM\'s Project Big Green.]
IBM’s Project Big Green is another green data center proposal responding to the economic (and environmental) inefficiency. Today, roughly 50 cents is spent on energy for every dollar of computer hardware. And this is only expected to increase. [Strangely religious overtones from the imagery package for IBM\'s Project Green.]
Related Links:Personal comment: See also this post about "Inverst in Iceland": http://www.invest.is/investment-opportunities/data-centers-in-iceland/ (thanks Philippe Rahm for the link).
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Territory
at
08:48
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, climate, data, globalization, interferences, sustainability, territory
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fabric | rblgThis 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.
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