Coming up is an exciting sounding workshop on the “urban internet of things — programming the real-time city.” Some more opportunities to get this one right..or at least human.
** As more people move to cities, it becomes increasingly challenging )) the necessarily understated preamble (( to build efficient )) maybe we shouldn’t even hope for efficiency (( infrastructures that support the needs of inhabitants without sacrificing the quality of life. The increasing digital instrumentation of urban areas through various networked sensors provides many opportunities to design smarter cities )) smart? i’d settle for clever and wily (( through a meaningful interpretation and usage of all this real-time data. In today’s world, there are strong incentives to leverage the most recent technologies to create digital infrastructures that foster collaboration between the different disciplines involved in urban design. By considering the IoT as a platform for engaging citizen’s action, a new design space is created where citizens are at the center of its urban environment and empowered to actively shape the city they live in.
The goal of this workshop is to gather original and inspiring contributions from technology experts, researchers in academia and industry, designers, urban planners, and architects that are willing to share their knowledge, experiences, and best practices for building smarter cities. We will explore the design of open and efficient platforms and tools to collect, analyze, store, and share the enormous amount of real-time data digital cities generate through a mix of papers, demos, invited presentations and open discussions for collectively create the city of the future. **
Microsoft Social Computing Symposium 2010 – Notes Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer var so = new SWFObject("http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swf", "PictoBrowser", "500", "500", "8", "#EEEEEE"); so.addVariable("source", "sets"); so.addVariable("names", "SCS2010"); so.addVariable("userName", "julianbleecker"); so.addVariable("userId", "66854529@N00"); so.addVariable("ids", "72157623066738659"); so.addVariable("titles", "on"); so.addVariable("displayNotes",...
David Byrne Urbanism Backstage, this plus bicycles, Notingham, England. This is a nice, succinct reflection on the characteristics of cities, and the characteristics personally likable by David Byrne, titled David Byrne’s Perfect...
Upcoming essay on the asynchronous city A high altitude imaging system for providing curious asynchronous perspectives of the world for analysis and synthesis. Artist’s interpretation, by Rhys Newman. Via Nicolas — Upcoming piece about the asynchronous...
The Sentient City Survival Kit is a design research project that explores the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing for urban environments. It takes as its method the design, fabrication and presentation of a collection of artifacts, spaces and media for survival in the near-future sentient city.
As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, information processing becomes embedded in and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space. Pervasive/ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban information systems capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this “sentient” city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring our behavior within it and becoming an active agent in the organization of our daily lives.
Few may quibble about “smart” traffic light control systems that more efficiently manage the ebbs and flows of trucks, cars and buses on our city streets. Some may be irritated when discount coupons for their favorite espresso drink are beamed to their mobile phone as they pass by Starbucks. Many are likely to protest when they are denied passage through a subway turnstile because the system “senses” that their purchasing habits, mobility patterns and current galvanic skin response (GSR) reading happens to match the profile of a terrorist.
The project aims to raise awareness of the implications for privacy, autonomy, trust and serendipity in this highly observant, ever-more efficient and over-coded city.
Personal comment:
A design research by Mark Shepard (he was the man behind Toward The Sentient City exhibition in NYC and the pamphlets that accompanied it. All of these are a good material to think about this coming "sentient city", even if to my eye, the approach is a bit too focused on located digital technologies, also known as ubiquituous computing, that might be the big tree that just hide something much bigger... Put crudely, it's a too obvious future!
Nonetheless, I like a lot this kind of speculative approach that try to question this envisioned "near future" so that we engage ourselves, take position, propose alternatives, etc.
Of course, this attitude is to be linked to its origin: Dunne & Raby from the RCA.
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
“
Why do I blog this I really enjoy this quote and find it exemplifies the ever-increasing delegation of decisions that are embedded/inscribed into technical objects. The Ubik door might certainly be the ubicomp posterchild in a parallel (and dystopic) environment but it seems highly plausible nowadays. Let’s accumulate this kind of examples and see what patterns one can find.
The response to the Systems/Layers walkshop we held in Wellington a few months back was tremendously gratifying, and given how much people seem to have gotten out of it we’ve been determined to set up similar events, in cities around the planet, ever since. (Previously on Do, and see participant CJ Wells’s writeup here.)
We’re fairly far along with plans to bring Systems/Layers to Barcelona in June (thanks Chris and Enric!), have just started getting into how we might do it in Taipei (thanks Sophie and TH!), and understand from e-mail inquiries that there’s interest in walkshops in Vancouver and Toronto as well. This is, of course, wonderfully exciting to us, and we’re hoping to learn as much from each of these as we did from Wellington.
What we’ve discovered is that the initial planning stages are significantly smoother if potential sponsors and other partners understand a little bit more about what Systems/Layers is, what it’s for and what people get out of it. The following is a brief summary design to answer just these questions, and you are more than welcome to use it to raise interest in your part of the world. We’d love to hold walkshops in as many cities as are interested in having them.
What
Systems/Layers is a half-day “walkshop,” held in two parts. The first portion of the activity is dedicated to a slow and considered walk through a reasonably dense and built-up section of the city at hand. What we’re looking for are appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa: apertures through which the things that happen in the real world drive the “network weather,” and contexts in which that weather affects what people see, confront and are able to do.
Participants are asked to pay particular attention to:
- Places where information is being collected by the network.
- Places where networked information is being displayed.
- Places where networked information is being acted upon, either by people directly, or by physical systems that affect the choices people have available to them.
You’ll want to bring seasonally-appropriate clothing, good comfortable shoes, and a camera. We’ll provide maps of “the box,” the area through which we’ll be walking.
This portion of the day will take around 90 minutes, after which we gather in a convenient “command post” to map, review and discuss the things we’ve encountered. We allot an hour for this, but since we’re inclined to choose a command post offering reasonably-priced food and drink, discussion can go on as long as participants feel like hanging out.
Who.
Do projects’ Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield plan and run the workshop, with the assistance of a qualified local expert/maven/mayor. (In Wellington, Tom Beard did a splendid job of this, for which we remain grateful.)
We feel the walkshop works best if it’s limited to roughly 30 participants in total, split into two teams for the walking segment and reunited for the discussion.
How.
In order for us to bring Systems/Layers to your town, we need the sponsorship of a local arts, architecture or urbanist organization — generally, but not necessarily, a non-profit. They’ll cover the cost of our travel and accommodation, and defray these expenses by charging for participation in the walkshop. In turn, we’ll ensure both that the registration fee remains reasonable, and that one or two scholarship places are available for those who absolutely cannot afford to participate otherwise.
If you’re a representative of such an organization, and you’re interested in us putting on a Systems/Layers walkshop in your area, please get in touch. If you’re not, but you still want us to come, you could try to put together enough participants who are willing to register and pay ahead of time, so we could book flights and hotels. But really, we’ve found that the best way to do things is to approach a local gallery, community group or NGO and ask them to sponsor the event.
At least as we have it set up now, you should know that we’re not financially compensated in any way for our organization of these walkshops, beyond having our travel, accommodation and transfer expenses covered.
When.
Our schedule tends to fill up 4-6 months ahead of time, so we’re already talking about events in the (Northern Hemisphere) spring of 2011. And of course, it’s generally cheapest to book flights and hotels well in advance. If you think Systems/Layers would be a good fit for your city, please do get in touch as soon as you possibly can. As we’ve mentioned, we’d be thrilled to work with you, and look forward to hearing from you with genuine anticipation and excitement. Wellington was amazing, Barcelona is shaping up to be pretty special, and Taipei, if we can pull it off, will be awesome. It’d mean a lot to us to add your city to this list. Thanks!
An interesting initiative by Adam Greefield. Reminds me a little bit about the walks in the city or urban landscapes the italian architecture group Stalker is/was doing. With different goals in mind though. And I quite like the idea of a "walkshop" too!
At The Mobile City, we are currently researching the design processes that shape the cities of the 21st century, and bumped into an interesting paradox (also pointed out by others):
The experience of our present day city in every day life is increasingly a hybrid one – meaning that it is made up of both physical and mediated experiences that mutually influence, extend or contradict each other. At the same time, the design of our cities is for the most part still a rather stratified process where different disciplines shape the different ‘layers’ of the urban experience.
Planners and architects are still mostly interested in the physical, spatial design of cities. Whereas it is artists, telecom-operators, activists, and dotcom-start-ups that shape the software and interface layers through which the experience of a physical place is optimized, extended, reframed, negated, denied, contested or contradicted. What is more, these different disciplines all have their own traditions of understanding what a city is or should do. Often they don’t even understand each other’s language.
This is of course not necessarily a bad thing. Cities have always been heterogeneous or hybrid spaces where different logics are at work – and in competition with each other. Urban culture has always been a negotiation between the spatial embodied ideals of architects and the messy practices of everyday life.
At the same time we think that this time around this negotiation is becoming more complicated. It is not just the architect or planner that sets the stage for our urban experiences. Digital media, software and embedded technologies – varying from location based services to ‘smart’ sensors – play a co-constituting role in setting and sorting the stage as well as in both enabling and regulating public interaction.
While trying to get a grasp on the different ways that digital media technologies are shaping our cities and could be incorporated in the design process, we came up with a number of possible ‘design approaches’. They form a somewhat ad lib constituted list of categories, each made up of different elements that together set the boundaries for the design process. These design approaches combine certain design tools, a methodology, a particular way of understanding what a city is (often embedded in one or another discipline) and/ or particular urban ideals. A design approach thus consists of a particular way of understanding the world, and / or a particular methodology, tools and objectives to intervene in that world.
These design approaches are not neatly comparable variables: in one approach the tools might be decisive, another departs from social processes, a third from technologies and a fourth stresses a particular urban ideal. Some operate at the scale of urban planning, others mostly focus at hyperlocal interventions. Some of these approaches are overlapping, others might be combined.
This list is also not exhaustive – please feel free to add any approaches that we might have overlooked. Yet we do think that it gives a sense of all the different concurrent and sometimes competing approaches at work in the 21st century hybrid city.
· The Wiki-City – Designing with new media – How can the design process itself be restructured through the use of (social) digital media? How can one allow for more participation, bottom-up input, and engagement in a productive way? How does this change the relation between client, architects and other performers, and the audience?
· The Real Time City – Data-aggregation in the Design Process With the rise of digital and mobile media and gps receivers, urbanites have started leaving numerous digital traces behind that when aggregated reveal their usage patterns of the city. What exactly do we learn from these datasets, and how can they be incorporated in the design process?
· The Living City – Urban experience, narratives and design Digital media can be used to annotate urban spaces with people’s everyday stories and lived experiences. How does this temporal inscription of place change they way we see and interact with the urban environment?
· The Multimedia City – The design of urban screens and media facades Architecture is increasingly using multimedia components as part of their elementary set of building blocks. How can you incorporate these into urban design?
· The Augmented City – The design of informational services in a physical context In augmented reality, additional layers of information are projected on or over physical environments. Thus the domain of digital information is embedded in the physical domain. What is the potential for urban design?
· The Sentient City – Designing Responsive Architecture Various sensors can register real-time information about the environment, and movements, (social) processes and identities of people and objects. Technical systems may also respond to changing conditions. How can this be employed to adapt the shape, function, usage of or access to buildings and infrastructures?
· The Smart City – Using artificial intelligence to design urban systems that respond or anticipate what is happening Can AI be integrated in urban design to anticipate and respond to urban patterns?
· The Hybrid City – Designing for hybrid practices. Digital and mobile media have led to changing urban behaviors and the rise of new cultural practices. For instance, the advent of WiFi has increased ‘mobile work’ from (semi-)public spaces. How can these changes in cultural practices be translated back into design, either by physically accommodating them or by design interventions that discourage them?
· The Layered City – Integrated design of the parallel experiences of physical places and mediascapes If the experience of the city is shaped by both the shape of the physical city as well as through exchanges in the media landscape, can we design both layers (or ‘channels’) of an urban project in concordance with each other?
· The Plugin City – using digital media to optimize, personalize or extend the experience of the city Can digital media be designed as ‘plug ins’ to the existing city, make the usage of existing urban structures more efficient and personalized or extend and deepen their experience?
· The Tactical City – using digital media to design alternative usage of the city Can digital media be designed to open up the design of physical spaces to other users or practices than initially intended?
· The Critical City – using design to foreground and discuss the dominant discours on urban culture Can design be employed as a means to a debate on urban culture, rather than shaping urban culture itself?
· The Interface City – designing urban ‘interfaces’. Some urban theories understand the city itself as an information platform where goods, opinions and ideas are constantly exchanged. Can new services be designed that optimize or extend this function of the city as a platform of exchange into the digital domain?
· The Informational City – The design of information spaces In our understanding of the media world spatial metaphors play an important role. Some architects have made the leap from designing physical structures to using their spatial expertise in ‘information architecture’.
To follow the previous post, a list of mashup terms linking digital media and architecture/urbanism. The list seems quite complete and interesting, even so I believe it should hybrid itself with less media centered approaches (i.e. the previous post...).
The way the street feels may soon be defined by the invisible and inaudible. Cities are being laced with sensors, which in turn generate urban informatics experiences, imbuing physical space with real-time behavioural data. The urban fabric itself can become reflexive and responsive to some extent, and there are numerous implications for the design and experience of cities as a result.
Multi-sensory interaction design merges with architecture, planning and an urbanism informed by the gentle ambient drizzle of everyday data. Drawing from projects in Sydney, Masdar, Helsinki, Seoul and elsewhere, I’ll explore the opportunities implicit in this new soft city – how we might once again enable a city alive to the touch of its citizens – and what this means for an urban interaction design.
Biography
Dan Hill is a designer and urbanist. He’s been working at the forefront of interaction design since the early ‘90s and is responsible for shaping many innovative, popular and critically acclaimed products and services. He is currently a senior consultant at Arup in Sydney.
As Head of Interactive Technology & Design at the BBC in London, he led design across their award-winning websites as well as conducting significant strategic work, re-thinking the organisation for the on-demand age. He co-founded the global media product Monocle, and is one of the organisers of the acclaimed architecture and urbanism event Postopolis!, running in New York and Los Angeles. He also writes City of Sound, generally thought of as one of the leading architecture and urbanism websites.
For Arup, Dan is exploring the possibilities of urban informatics from a creative, design-led perspective, re-thinking how real-time information networks change streets and cities, neighbourhoods and organisations, mobility and work, play and public space. He works on major urban development projects worldwide.
We met last year with Dan Hill during Postopolis!L.A. and just collaborated on a "IBA Smart House" competition, along with Philippe Rahm who was in chare of the main design.
The occasion to listen in this video to Dan's sharp ideas about "urban informatics".
Aujourd’hui c’est au rapport fusionnel que les habitants de la ville entretiennent avec leur téléphone portable que nous nous intéressons. Tokyo est sans doute la ville qui a développé le plus vaste maillage de réseaux d’informations technologiques, où chaque rue, chaque bâtiment, chaque boutique communique avec le piéton via son portable. Dans son livre “Les Japonais”, publié aux éditions Tallandier, la journaliste Karyn Poupée souligne quelques caractéristiques du comportement local qui sous-tendent le fonctionnement social: respect des conventions, ponctualité, ou encore adhésion sans appréhension aux nouvelles technologies. Leur conception de la vie privée est aussi très différente de celle qui prévaut en Europe. Crise ou pas, la société japonaise ne cesse d’être submergée par une offre sans cesse renouvelée de produits et de services technologiques. Les Japonais sont sensibles aux innovations fonctionnelles. Et l’intégration de systèmes GPS, de navigateur par satellite dans leur téléphones mobiles ne posent pas pour eux, de problèmes de violation éventuelle de leur vie privée. Dans un Japon obnubilé par le culte du mieux, ce suivi de personnes par GPS, l’authentification biométrique au bureau, la caisse enregistreuse a la cantine qui vous reconnaît et vous rappelle que vous avez déjà choisi le même repas la veille, toutes ces innovations fonctionnelles ne sont pas perçues comme une atteinte a la liberté. C’est un moyen d’optimiser la production, le service, la qualité, la sécurité et l’efficacité.
C'est évidemment très intéressant de constater les différences d'appréciations relatives aux technologies entre Japon et Europe. D'un côté un engouement presque aveugle, mais culturellement enraciné, de l'autre une acceptation empreinte de doutes et de suspicions quasi protestantes...
New dispatch: “A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing” by Julian Bleecker and myself has just been released. It’s a discussion between the two us from the Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League. This series aims at exploring the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities?
Introduced by the editor as:
“In the last five years, the urban computing field has featured an impressive emphasis on the so-called “real-time, database-enabled city” with its synchronized Internet of Things. In Situated Technologies Pamphlets 5, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova argue to invert this common perspective and speculate on the existence of an “asynchronous city.” Through a discussion of objects that blog, they forecast situated technologies based on weak signals that show the importance of time on human practices. They imagine the emergence of truly social technologies that through thoughtful provocation can invert and disrupt common perspective.“
We’d like to thank Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz and Mark Shepard for this great opportunity!
A very recent publication by Nicolas Nova & Julian Bleecker on the Situated technologies Pamphlets serie. Haven't read it yet, looking forward to do so!
There’s a slide in my current presentation deck asserting that one of the transitions cities can expect to undergo in the turn toward a fully robust networked urbanism is that from “constant” to “variable.” I’m often asked just what I mean by this, and I’d like to use the following example – first suggested to me by Kevin Slavin – as a jumping-off point for the discussion.
Nestled at the intersection of two autobahnen some five miles north-northeast of central Munich lies an enormous torus whose surface is quilted with thousands of silvery facets set in a diamond grid – 2,874 of them, to be precise. The street on which the torus sits is named for Werner Heisenberg, the legendary 20th Century physicist who first articulated the principle of formal uncertainty often associated with his name, and as we shall see, this turns out to be curiously apropos.
This is the Allianz Arena, a football stadium designed by the highly-regarded Swiss architectural firm of Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, and the facets might be taken as something of a minor motif in the firm’s output. Superficially, at least, Allianz appears to employ a vocabulary of form similar to that the partnership had previously used to great effect on their exquisite, jewel-like building for Prada in the Aoyama district of Tokyo. But where the latter is a structure designed for low traffic and a single, very specific type of user, the Allianz is a building meant from the very beginning for the masses.
At least two masses, actually, and those starkly different from one another. For as it happens, Munich is home to not one but two football clubs: TSV 1860 München, whose at-home uniform is blue, and FC Bayern München, who wear red. Nor are these the only teams who might plausibly claim Allianz as home ground: the German national team also occasionally plays matches there, and their color is white.
Responding to the diverging requirements of 1860 and FCB, as they alternate possession on a near-daily basis during the Bundesliga season, is a nontrivial exercise for any structure the size of a stadium. And as anyone even slightly acquainted with a football supporter can imagine, this is if anything even truer as regards the two teams’ respective followers.
Most arenas facing a similar situation might acknowledge the alternation of teams and audiences by some superficially convincing means – perhaps by swapping out the banners and flags hung about the peristyle. But the remarkable thing about Allianz is that the building itself has been given a way to address this change in conditions.
The structure’s exoskeleton is wrapped with a lightweight foil of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, or ETFE. And where ordinarily, one of ETFE’s notable properties is its very high degree of transparency, in this case each panel has been stippled with a fritting of miniscule dots. The result is a milky semi-opacity that, when backlit by tunable LEDs, causes each panel to emit a highly-saturated glow of whatever color desired. Now intensely red, now a truly uncanny blue: one structure, but two very different buildings.
For anyone in the crowd, the effect – on mood, on sense of presence, on awareness of the surrounding space, on perception of belonging to some larger community – is nothing less than total. Change some settings, and you change the kind of person who will feel at home in the building, the range of things they will feel comfortable expressing and doing there, and more generally the possibilities for collective action.
A thought experiment: take things one simple step further. Open those settings up; plug them into the global data network in such a way as to close a feedback loop between the building and all the people currently using it. And by so doing, couple the building’s radiant color to spectators’ average heart rate, level of activity or emotional state. Connect those parameters to outside control, and you can think of that entire building, its affect and meaning, as an asset of the network.
At a crucial moment, the opposing team scores a telling goal. Suddenly you’ve got the ability to modulate and dampen the crowd’s disappointment or, if you so choose, heighten and exacerbate it. Write a few lines of code mapping different patterns of illumination to various contingencies that may arise, and the building becomes a subtler tool, one you can use to settle and reassure, to tweak and goad, even to urge a swift and orderly flow to the exits.
What’s going on here?
This is new-media theorist Lev Manovich, describing a very different building – Lars Spuybroek’s Water Pavilion – in a 2002 essay: “Its continuously changing surfaces illustrate the key effect of a computer revolution: substitution of every constant by a variable.” In this case, Manovich is specifically referring to the effect of computational design on the contours of a single building, but it’s a profoundly insightful comment, and it points directly at the question of interest. Driven by networked computation, architecture – that slowest-moving and stateliest of arts – is learning to dance.
What’s at stake is nothing less than the basic phenomenology of buildings, and of the cities composed of buildings: how they exist in the world, how we encounter them, what possibilities they afford us. We’re used to buildings being one color or another, confronting us with this shape or another, holding one consistent form and aspect for as long as we care to engage them, and all of these verities are now coming into question.
I hardly need to point out that cities are infinitely more than collections of buildings. By the same token, though, the exterior surfaces of buildings, and the negative spaces and voids they define, constitute primary conditions for urban experience. And when these envelopes and hollows – thanks to their investment with computational sensing and response – become subject to change over time scales far shorter than those to which we’ve become accustomed, it’s clear to me that we’re talking about a new and very different set of prospects and potentials for the city.
Evidemment, je rementionne dans le contexte de l'article d' A . Greenfield notre projet de recherche terminé il y a deux ans sur la question de la variabilité. Nous avions alors entièrement thématisé cette idée de la "ville variable" ou des "environnement variables" (voir lien ci-dessus), en réalité vieux "serpent de mer" de l'architeture.
Toutefois je ne suis pas entièrement Greenfield dans ses conclusions et il y a là à mon sens une des grosses erreurs de l'architecture dite interactive: le bâtiment qui "reflète l'activité de ..." ou "l'état de ... (ses utilisateurs)", etc. Bien sûr, cela peut-être très beau à observer de l'extérieur et dans le cas décrit par Greefield pour l'aréna en particulier (voir l'architecture "pulser" au rythme des émotions du public) mais être par contre totalement inintéressant à habiter: imaginez vivre dans un environnement qui ne propose que de l'"enfermement" (c'est à dire qu'il vous dit et reconfirme --enfermement-- ce que vous êtes en train de faire). Je crois qu'un bonne architecture à quelquechose de beaucoup plus ouvert: on y habite, on y crée (des manières d'habiter) et celles-ci évoluent, varient.
L'architecture doit je crois proposer de l'ouverture (de l'air!), créer du décallage ou éventuellent solliciter les émotions, les sens et l'intellects de ses habitants: tout le contraire d'un miroir.
Bref, je crois qu'il y a encore beaucoup à réfléchir sur le sens sde l'interactivité en architecture.
The following “interview” with me appears in the July/August 2009 issue of Interactions magazine, the ACM’s journal on interaction design. I say “interview” because it’s basically an edit on the sprawling chat Tish Shute had with me for her site, back in February of this year; as we know, even minor editorial alterations can produce disproportionate shifts in tone and emphasis, and that’s certainly the case here.
I should say from the outset that I don’t have much use for the ACM, and in particular greatly dislike their stance on access to publications, which flies in the face of my own conviction that the point (and power) of knowledge is to share it. Accordingly, I’m republishing the piece in its entirety here. For the sake of accuracy, I’ve left the editorial characterization of me and my work intact, but you should never, ever construe this as an endorsement of same. As ever, I hope you enjoy it.
“At the end of the world, plant a tree”
Six questions for Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield is Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, and the author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing and the upcoming The City Is Here For You To Use. He is also an impactful speaker and articulate blogger, and has become a major authority in the thinking about the impact of future ubiquitous technologies on people and society.Interactions Magazine.
In a lengthy interview with Tish Shute recently published on UgoTrade.com, Greenfield ranged over topics including augmented reality, Usman Haque’s Pachube project, the networked book, the networked city, and what to do at the end of the world.
The interview is dense and rich, with many of the questions raised relevant to our audience. We asked Adam to expand on some of his answers for
TS: The legal scholar Eben Moglen has identified three elements of privacy: anonymity, secrecy and most importantly autonomy. How do you see Moglen’s three elements being worked out in a ubiquitously networked world? Are there ways we could design ubiquitous systems that might support personal autonomy?
AG: If we accept for the moment a definition of autonomy as a feeling of being master of one’s own fate, then absolutely yes. One thing I talk about a good deal is using ambient situational awareness to lower decision costs – that is, to lower the information costs associated with arriving at a choice presented to you, and at the same time mitigate the opportunity costs of having committed yourself to a course of action. When given some kind of real-time overview of all of the options available to you in a given time, place and context – and especially if that comes wrapped up in some kind of visualization that makes anomaly detection a matter of instantaneous gestalt, to be grasped in a single glance – your personal autonomy is tremendously enhanced. Tremendously enhanced.
What do I mean by that? It’s really simple: you don’t head out to the bus stop until your phone tells you a bus is a minute away, and you don’t walk down the street where more than some threshold number of muggings happen – in fact, by default it doesn’t even show up on your maps – and you don’t eat at the restaurant whose forty-eight recent health code violations cause its name to flash red in your address book. And all these decisions are made possible because networked informatics have effectively rendered the obscure and the hidden transparent to inquiry. And there’s no doubt in my mind that life is thusly made just that little bit better.
But there’s a cost – there’s always a cost. Serendipity, solitude, anonymity, most of what we now recognize as the makings of urban savoir faire: it all goes by the wayside. And yes, we’re richer and safer and maybe even happier with the advent of the services and systems I’m so interested in, but by the same token we’re that much poorer for the loss of these intangibles. It’s a complicated trade-off, and I believe in most places it’s one we’re making without really examining what’s at stake.
So as to how this local autonomy could be deployed in Moglen’s more general terms, I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone does. Because he’s absolutely right: Bernard Stiegler reminds us that the network constitutes a global mnemotechnics, a persistent memory store for planet Earth, and yet we’ve structured our systems of jurisprudence and our life practices and even our psyches around the idea that information about us eventually expires and leaves the world. Its failure to do so in the context of Facebook and Flickr and Twitter is clearly one of the ways in which the elaboration of our digital selves constrains our real-world behavior. Let just one picture of you grabbing a cardboard cutout’s breast or taking a bong hit leak onto the network, and see how the career options available to you shift in response.
This is what’s behind Anne Galloway’s calls for a “forgetting machine.” An everyware that did that – that massively spoofed our traces in the world, that threw up enormous clouds of winnow and chaff to give us plausible deniability about our whereabouts and so on – might give us a fighting chance.
TS: Early theorizing of a “calm,” “invisible” ubicomp seems out of synch with the present-day reality of services like Twitter and Facebook, where active, engaged, contact-driven users continually manage their networked identity. How will the processes of contact and identity-sharing that have seemingly captured the popular imagination be or not be part of the city that is Here For You To Use?
AG: Let’s remember that ubicomp itself, as a discipline, has largely moved on from the Weiserian discourse of “calm technology”; Yvonne Rogers, for example, now speaks of “proactive systems for proactive people.” You can look at this as a necessary accommodation with the reality principle, which it is, or as kind of a shame – which it also happens to be, at least in my opinion. Either way, though, I don’t think anybody can credibly argue any longer that just because informatic systems pervade our lives, designers will be compelled to craft encalming interfaces to them. That notion of Mark Weiser’s was never particularly convincing, and as far as I’m concerned it’s been thoroughly refuted by the unfolding actuality of post-PC informatics.
All the available evidence, on the contrary, supports the idea that we will have to actively fight for moments of calm and reflection, as individuals and as collectivities. And not only that, as it happens, but for spaces in which we’re able to engage with the Other on neutral turf, as it were, since the logic of “social media” seems to be producing Big Sort-like effects and echo chambers. When given the tools that allow us to do so, we seem to surround ourselves with people who look and think and consume like we do, and the result is that the tools allowing us to become involved with anything but the self, or selves that strongly resemble it, are atrophying.
So when people complain about K-Mart and Starbucks and American Eagle Outfitters coming to Manhattan, and how it means the suburbanization of the city, I have to laugh. Because the real suburbanization is the smoothening-out of our social interaction until it only encompasses the congenial. A gated community where everyone looks and acts the same? That’s the suburbs, wherever and however it instantiates, and I don’t care how precious and edgy your tastes may be. Richard Sennett argued that what makes urbanity is precisely the quality of necessary, daily, cheek-by-jowl confrontation with a panoply of the different, and as far as I can tell he’s spot on.
We have to devise platforms that accommodate and yet buffer that confrontation. We have to create the safe(r) spaces that allow us to negotiate that difference. The alternative to doing so is creating a world of ten million autistic, utterly atomic and mutually incomprehensible tribelets, each reinforced in the illusion of its own impeccable correctness: duller than dull, except at the flashpoints between. And those become murderous. Nope. Unacceptable outcome.
TS: What new imaginings or possibilities do you see when pixels anywhere are linked to everyware?
AG: Limitless opportunities for product placement. Commercial insertions and injections, mostly.
Beyond that: one of the places where shallowly Weiserian logic breaks down is in thinking that the platforms we use now disappear from the world just because ubiquitous computing has arrived. We’ve still got radio, for example – OK, now it’s satellite radio and streaming Internet feeds, but the interaction metaphor isn’t any different. By the same token, we’re still going to be using reasonably conventional-looking laptops and desktop keyboard/display combos for a while yet. The form factor is pretty well optimized for the delivery of a certain class of services, it’s a convenient and well-assimilated interaction vocabulary, none of that’s going away just yet. And the same goes for billboards and “TV” screens.
But all of those things become entirely different propositions in everyware world: more open, more modular, ever more conceived of as network resources with particular input and output affordances. We already see some signs of this with Microsoft’s recent “Social Desktop” prototype – which, mind you, is a very bad idea as it currently stands, especially as implemented on something with the kind of security record that Windows enjoys – and we’ll be seeing many more.
If every display in the world has an IP address and a self-descriptor indicating what kind of protocols it’s capable of handling, then you begin to get into some really interesting and thorny territory. The first things to go away, off the top of my head, are screens for a certain class of mobile device – why power a screen off your battery when you can push the data to a nearby display that’s much bigger, much brighter, much more social? – and conventional projectors.
Then we get into some very interesting issues around large, public interactive displays – who “drives” the display, and so forth. But here again, we’ll have to fight to keep these things sane. It’s past time for a public debate around these issues, because they’re unquestionably going to condition the everyday experience of walking down the street in most of our cities. And that’s difficult to do when times are hard and people have more pressing concerns on their mind.
TS: The science-fiction writer David Brin sees two potential futures: in the first, the government watches everybody, and in the second everybody watches everybody. (The latter he calls sousveillance.) It has been suggested by the artificial-intelligence enthusiast Ben Goertzel that providing an artificial intelligence with access to a massive datastore fed by ubicomp is the first step toward effective sousveillance.
What do you think the role of AI in ubicomp will be? Is it worth thinking about what the first important application of such technologies might be?
AG: I don’t believe that artificial intelligence as the term is generally understood – which is to say, a self-aware, general-purpose intelligence of human capacity or greater – is likely to appear within my lifetime, or for a comfortably long time thereafter.
Having said that, Goertzel seems to be making the titanic (and enormously difficult to justify) assumption that a self-aware artificial intelligence would share any perspectives, goals, priorities or values whatsoever with the human species, let alone with that fraction of the human species that could use a little help in countering watchfulness from above. “Hooking [an] AI up to a massive datastore fed by ubicomp” sounds to me more like the first step toward enslavement…if not outright digestion.
Sousveillance – the term is Steve Mann’s, originally – doesn’t imply “everybody watching everybody” to me, anyway, so much as a consciously political act of turning infrastructures of observation and control back on those specific institutions most used to employing same toward their own prerogatives. Think Rodney King, think Oscar Grant.
TS: You seem to be skeptical about the role everyware can play in sustainable living. And yet at the moment it seems that – in the hacker and business communities at least – the role of everyware in reducing carbon footprint/energy management, etc., is the great green hope.
Will everyware enable or hinder fundamental changes at the level of culture and identity necessary to support the urgent global need “to consume less and redefine prosperity”?
AG: I’m not skeptical about the potential of ubiquitous systems to meter energy use, and maybe even incentivize some reduction in that use – not at all. I’m simply not convinced that anything we do will make any difference.
Look, I think we really, seriously screwed the pooch on this. We have fouled the nest so thoroughly and in so many ways that I would be absolutely shocked if humanity comes out the other end of this century with any level of organization above that of clans and villages. It’s not just carbon emissions and global warming, it’s depleted soil fertility, it’s synthetic estrogens bio-accumulating in the aquatic food chain, it’s our inability to stop using antibiotics in a way that gives rise to multiple drug resistance in microbes.
Any one of these threats in isolation would pose a challenge to our ability to collectively identify and respond to it, as it’s clear anthropogenic global warming already does. Put all of these things together, assess the total threat they pose in the light of our societies’ willingness and/or capacity to reckon with them, and I think any moderately knowledgeable and intellectually honest person has to conclude that it’s more or less “game over, man” – that sometime in the next sixty years or so a convergence of Extremely Bad Circumstances is going to put an effective end to our ability to conduct highly ordered and highly energy-intensive civilization on this planet, for something on the order of thousands of years to come.
So with all apologies to Bruce Sterling, I just don’t buy the idea that we’re going to consume our way to Ecotopia. Nor is any symbolic act of abjection on my part going to postpone the inevitable by so much as a second, nor would such a sacrifice do anything meaningful to improve anybody else’s outcomes. I’d rather live comfortably – hopefully not obscenely so – in the years we have remaining to us, use my skills as they are most valuable to people, and cherish each moment for what it uniquely offers.
Maybe some people would find that prospect morbid, or nihilistic, but I find it kind of inspiring. It becomes even more crucial that we not waste the little time we do have on broken systems, broken ways of doing things. The primary question for the designers of urban informatics under such circumstances is to design systems that underwrite autonomy, that allow people to make the best and wisest and most resonant use of whatever time they have left on the planet. And who knows? That effort may bear fruit in ways we have no way of anticipating at the moment. As it says in the Qu’ran, gorgeously: “At the end of the world, plant a tree.”
TS: The concept of autonomy is signaled clearly in the title you have chosen for your next book, The City Is Here For You To Use, and seems to be a consistent theme in your writing. While you have in the past (notably in Everyware) discussed the possible constraints to presentation of self and threats to a flexible identity posed by ubiquitous computing, your next book signals optimism. What are your key grounds for this optimism?
AG: It’s not optimism so much as hope. Whether it’s well-founded or not is not for me to decide. I guess I just trust people to make reasonably good choices, when they’re both aware of the stakes and have been presented with sound, accurate decision-support material.
Putting a fine point on it: I believe that most people don’t actually want to be dicks. We may have differing conceptions of the good, our choices may impinge on one another’s autonomy. But I think most of us, if confronted with the humanity of the Other and offered the ability to do so, would want to find some arrangement that lets everyone find some satisfaction in the world. And in its ability to assist us in signaling our needs and desires, in its potential to mediate the mutual fulfillment of same, in its promise to reduce the fear people face when confronted with the immediate necessity to make a decision on radically imperfect information, a properly-designed networked informatics could underwrite the most transformative expansions of people’s ability to determine the circumstances of their own lives.
Now that’s epochal. If that isn’t cause for hope, then I don’t know what is.
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