Wednesday, October 28. 2009
Want to spy, er, keep track of your kids? Best Buy’s house brand, Insignia, recently released a new device that can help you do just that.
The device, known as the Little Buddy Child Tracker (available here) is a small portable GPS tracker that can be stored (or snuck) into a backpack, lunchbox, or pencil case. Parents can then log onto the web and see where their child is at all times, or receive SMS alerts if they leave a designated area.
It looks like you can track where your child is using a Google Maps Street View type feature, designate a perimeter that your child is supposed to stay in, and make a note of different destinations. The end result supposedly is that your kids are safer (assuming they don’t chuck the device onto the kid next to them on the bus or clip it to the family dog), because you can always know where they are.
In reality, the idea — while attractive for the paranoid parent — is also a kind of creepy. I mean, what fun is it to be 14 and skip going to the library after school and instead hang out at Taco Bell with the high schoolers if your mom is going to be trying to track your whereabouts from her BlackBerry?
-----
Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Is this good or is this bad? Hard to say isn't it?
Who wouldn't keep an eye on his small child to avoid him/her some harm? But it turns you then instantly into somebody you might not want to become... The tiles of the post "(...) makes spying on your kids easy" is terrible...
Friday, October 16. 2009
I see that Dan Hill put the post from the Toward the Sentient City exhibit up at City of Sound, and that version improves on the version at Toward the Sentient City by including links and images. Reading Hill’s post again, I noticed a couple paragraphs that bear on the post below regarding architecture and “urban systems design”, which I’ll quote at length:
Gregory Weissner’s introduction indicates that the show is “intended to bring architects and urban designers into a conversation that until now has been limited largely to technologists.” He continues:
“Don’t be confused by the technology (and the terminology), though. What we are talking about is nothing short of a complete reorientation of our relationship to the built environment and the unintended consequences are not going to be all positive. Either architects and urban designers insert themselves now into the discussion about how these technologies are conceptualized and deployed or they risk diminishing the unique contributions they bring to shaping our world.”
Architecture and urban design should be in this debate, no doubt, but its entire practice, sensibility and economic model may need redressing (as with many other fields, of course.) Given their previous predilections, the lack of technical and conceptual understanding - never mind an apparently congenital inability to design a decent website - the profession has a long way to go before it can demand a seat at the table. An admittedly fading tradition of thinking of itself as the ‘master builder’ needs to be entirely excoriated once and for all. Devising the architect’s new sensibility - what Paul Dourish would describe as “the designer’s stance” for the discipline - will also be fundamentally important. Either way, complex urban systems are well beyond the ken of the sole master builder; they have been for years, but increasingly so with this ever more multi-layered understanding of the city.
Other design disciplines - interaction design, industrial design, service design, to name three - are currently far better placed to lead on these ideas, within multidisciplinary design teams. So the architect may be best-placed as part of that team, leading on spatial intelligence just as others might lead on information and communication systems, materials, structures, embodied interaction, behavioural psychology, topography, acoustics, biodiversity and so on. In a recent conversation with the SENSEable City Lab’s Carlo Ratti, we ended up sketching out a loosely multidisciplinary team in which the architect was one of perhaps ten different disciplines, all of whom would lead at various points.
Which reinforces my impression that the architect’s role in future design conversations will have less to do with a particular kind of technical expertise (as Hill points out, architects are way behind technologists in developing the technical expertise necessary to design for a sentient city) and more to do with a peculiar way of thinking (or kind of intelligence). Doesn’t do much to explain why the “spatial intelligence” architects provide is particularly useful or important, but when architects are conversing with themselves, that’s probably less important than pointing out disciplinary deficiencies.
-----
Via Mammoth
Personal comment:
Quelques remarques intéressantes ' propos de l'exposition The Sentient City organisée à NY par The Architectural League
A conversation worth following: the original piece is Matt Jones’s “The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future” at io9, in which Matt draws connections between Archigram, the architecture of science fiction and comics, ubiquitous computing, and the future of mega-cities.
Varnelis responds, arguing that Jones’ rhetorical adoption of Archigram inadvertently reveals an absence of critique in contemporary urbanism. The comments on Varnelis’s post, including those from Enrique (a456) and Geoff (bldgblog), are perceptive. I’d like to think that its possible to be both enthusiastic and critical, or at least that there’s room for both enthusiasts and critics. If one accepts Geoff’s description in which criticism describes problems and enthusiasm locates positives, then it seems rather obvious that both are necessary. So while the presence of only one but not the other is certainly problematic, I’d be more likely to describe architecture as suffering from a deficit of both done well (particularly if ‘enthusiasm’ is defined as something like a BLDGBLOG-ian, wide-ranging sense of wonder, rather than the mere acceptance/promotion of whatever seems exciting) than as being dominated by one or the other.
Things also respond, exploring the persistence of, well, things in the utopian data city. See also Millennium People’s comment on Things’s comment on Jones’s comment…
Lebbeus Woods’s recent post on utopia isn’t explicitly linked to this conversation, but Varnelis’s comment on the “decline of utopian thought” makes the connection obvious.
-----
Via Mammoth
Personal comment:
Assez incroyable de constater l'influence actuelle des architectes et architectures radicales des années 60 (pour nous aussi...). Cité partout et par tout le monde, Archigram en particulier deviendrait-il la figure de proue rétro-futuriste et à posteriori d'une radicalité nouvelle?
Je n'ai pas encore pu lire l'article mentionné ici, raison pour laquelle je mets ce post dans la "collection", pour lecture future...
Monday, October 12. 2009
We’ve seen Tweets posted by plants, a space shuttle and even a house, so we shouldn’t be particularly surprised to hear that commercial jets are now Tweeting and posting Facebook messages (sorta). In fact, we think the idea is ingenious.
Admittedly, it’s not the plane itself doing the Tweeting: it’s the airline. Lufthansa has set up a new service named MySkyStatus that automatically posts the current position of your flight to Twitter or Facebook so your friends can follow your travels (and your friends living in those cities can look up!).
Typical status updates read “flying over San Francisco Intl, California 94030, USA on United Airlines” or “flying over Grantsville, UT 84029, USA on United Airlines”. It seems the system posts the flight’s position around once per hour, pulling info from a database of flight information.
Here’s the really smart bit: I stumbled on the service because one of my Facebook friends was on a United Airlines flight today. Clicking the link in the update, of course, directs you to the Lufthansa MySkyStatus page with a Google Map of the flight’s position, meaning that Lufthansa is getting free social media promotion from people travelling on all airlines. Pretty smart.
On a long haul flight, of course, the system may post 20 updates or more, but the functionality is so cool that I’m prepared to give some slack to those Twitter and Facebook friends who have decided to put their updates on autopilot.
-----
Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Real life & positioning & objects status, etc. to text... Interesting to see how Twitter becomes a sort of real time textual mirror to life and social life in general. A sort of textual and live version Google Earth (and more)!
I understand why developing a good and efficient search engine for Twitter or Facebook might compete with Google, at least on the (permanent) "real time" status of the planet.
Adam Greenfield, as usual critically interrogating the potential of the networked city, in the unedited version of a piece that’s running in this month’s Wired UK:
…the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.
In fact, it’s surpassingly hard to be appropriately critical and to make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us. Understanding networked urbanism on its own terms, however wise it might be, requires an investment of time and effort beyond the reach of most. (”I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original,” said the great 20th Century architectural critic Reyner Banham, and the systems we’re talking about are orders of magnitude more complex than mere cars and freeways.)
In the networked city, therefore, the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them. This will be a primary occupation for urbanists and technologists both, for the foreseeable future, as will ensuring that the public’s right to benefit from the data they themselves generate is recognized in law. If we’re reaching the point where it makes sense to consider the city as a fabric of addressable, queryable, even scriptable objects and surfaces – to reimagine its pavements, building façades and parking meters as network resources – this raises an order of questions never before confronted, ethical as much as practical: who has the right of access to these resources, or the ability to set their permissions?
These are essential questions, as the application of any technology which transforms the city so thoroughly contains the potential for abuse, whether born out of intent sinister or noble but misguided.
-----
Via Mammoth
Personal comment:
Ces questionnements sur la propriété des données générées par la "ville en réseau" sont évidemment très importantes pour les architectes et urbanistes. En passant, questions que nous avions adressées en 2004 à travers la pièce A.I. vs A.I. (Electroscape 004). Même si cette thématique n'était pas directement au centre de la pièce.
Notre collaboration actuelle autour d'un dispositif théâtral avec l'écrivain et théoricien français Eric Sadin (projet actuellement nommé Globale Surveillance, d'après le récent livre d'E.S.) et dans laquelle nous réaliserions une installation nommée Paranoid Shelter, devrait nous permettre de prolonger ces questions au nivea spatial.
|