Speaking at the Royal Society of London, 17-18 Mar 2008

I’ve been looking for an excuse to get back to London for quite some time now, and as excuses go it sure doesn’t get any better than this: I’ve been invited to give a paper on the social and ethical implications of ubiquitous computing at a Discussion Meeting of the Royal Society next March.

It’s an honor. It’s a privilege. Even as one of many participants in a Discussion Meeting, let me assure you, the pleasure is all mine. I think I danced Nurri around the house a few times. It’s better than sitting down to a fresh pot of Kona and an uncracked Ellroy, better’n the growl of a Desmodue in the next block, better still than the smell of frangipani after the monsoon rains. (My more worldly friends, y’all go ‘head and crack a smile, it’s all good.)

So you’ll come, right? I mean, I don’t know how admission works at these things, but we’ve got plenty of time to figure it out. But for all too many hours betwixt Heathrow’s Terminals 3 and 4, I haven’t set foot in the UK since the summer of ‘98. It’s about time.

Urban Computing round 1 wrapup

So we brought our first semester of Urban Computing to a close last night with a marathon four-hour review of student projects. It was exhausting, but also undeniably exhilarating, and a really nice way to wind things up for the year.

For the most part, I was delighted to see how fearlessly our students pursued their ideas despite the challenges involved in resolving projects on the conceptual, technical, and graphic levels. As an instructor, of course, it’s impossible to take any kind of credit for their hard work and inquiry, but that doesn’t stop me from being really proud of some of the work that emerged from class this semester.

These were my particular favorites:

- Catherine Colman and Angela Pablo’s Under The Level mapped the reality of New Orleans’ post-Katrina devastation onto the streets of New York, using FEMA’s rather sinister site-marking iconography as its graphic jumping-off point.

- If you’ve ever been haunted by the way waves of cicadasound arise and subside with the passage of people underneath the summertime trees, you’d recognize the intention at the heart of Michael Dory’s very poetic Concrete Crickets project, which used a self-organizing network of sound devices camouflaged as garbage to build the Lower East Side equivalent.

- Adam Simon’s ingenious scheme to deploy self-powered guerrilla BitTorrent servers out in the streets, using the familiar old-school neighborhood trope of sneakers slung over the utility lines as concealment, probably came closest to fulfilling my hopes that our students would truly grasp and fuse the “urban” and “computing” elements inherent in what they were presented.

- Chunxi Jiang amazed us with the technical virtuosity of her project, singlehandedly developing a system of camera-readable tags for printed maps that allowed the 3D virtual objects she imported from SketchUp to be superimposed on them. It’s hard to describe, but its brilliance is self-evident the moment you see it working - and the potential latent in her project, to allow anyone with a mobile device to add a layer of physical information to an otherwise-ordinary printed map, is near-limitless. (Too, the uncanniness of seeing virtual World Trade Center towers being swapped in and out with the Ground Zero pit is something that will stay with me for awhile.)

- Jonathan Cousins‘ project caught that iconic Japanese commodity of the 1980s, the boom box, at the moment of its transition into the ghetto blaster, asking how it was used to claim urban space, and how things might have been different if it used noise-canceling technology to blast the streets with silence instead of sound. The product mockups and especially the video he made to demonstrate some likely scenarios of use were a total hoot.

The diversity of these projects kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? It’s kinda gratifying to see the city picked up and considered from so many different angles.

So: my congratulations and thanks to everyone who presented, in the hope that you’ll continue to develop these incredible ideas. I’d also like to thank our semester’s esteemed guest speakers - our friends Soo-In and David from The Living and the unstoppable Roy Kozlovsky - the guys from area/code for sitting in as our impromptu murder board, and above all, from beginning to end, Kevin Slavin, for having invited me along for the ride to begin with, and for helping me understand on a weekly basis what it is to inspire.

For now, what I need more than anything else is a neck-and-shoulder rub, a vacation from ubiquitous anything, and a large volume of intravenously-administered mai tais. See you in September?

It is to be stoked: cited in The Economist!

Heh. Forgive me, and feel free to skip over this item in your feed reader. I’m just beyond chuffed to have been cited in this week’s cover story in my favorite magazine, The Economist. Check it out!

A nice big “hooah” to Mr. Nova for the catch.

FDNY: Let Animals be Animals

I have to confess that the current drive move to clean up firefighter unit nomenclature and insignia on the part of New York Fire Department brass makes me more than a little sad.

The gist is that, in the wake of several embarrassing incidents of (alcohol-fueled and otherwise) misconduct among firefighters, the department bureaucracy wants to do away with long-standing stationhouse identities like Animal House, 90 Proof, and the Clown College. Presumably, their assertion is that such sobriquets act to validate the kind of unprofessional behavior that might have passed for “high-spirited” in an earlier age, but these days constitutes a blemish on the department’s image (and a liability risk besides).

I have to wonder, though, if it might not be better to concentrate on punishing actual bad conduct - and I’m sure there’s plenty to be found - instead of attacking intangibles like unit monikers?

You know I’m not one to bandy around the term “politically correct” in circumstances like these. Even before its wholesale adoption by the right (a cohort to whom it means, essentially, “anything that acts to threaten the unearned privileges we’ve enjoyed since time immemorial”), it had already become one of those phrases that tended to nullify thought wherever it appeared. But, y’know, it’s difficult to think of a better way to describe what’s going on here.

I totally get how things like locker-room centerfolds and whatnot can reinforce a hostile work environment. I have no problem with regulating such displays out of existence - you wanna do that, do it on your own time, and not in a space that us taxpayers provide for you. And actual workplace behavior can and should be (and, of course, already is, at least in theory) subject to the strictest standards.

But anybody who’s ever spent time in any kind of uniformed service will understand immediately and intimately how crucial elements like unique insignia, heraldry, and slogans are to small-unit cohesion - how displays of unit pride that seem trivial or silly to outsiders function to hold a group together under pressure, and how easily morale can be crushed when they’re taken away. I can’t imagine that the nominal offense caused by allowing a stationhouse to dub itself “Southern Comfort” outweighs the benefit to the community inherent in that stationhouse having a vivid sense of itself and its heritage of service.

More importantly still, names like these are part of the swagger, the vigor and the vibrancy of the city I love - I’d almost say, of any city worth loving. If the suits and quants upstairs decree that “professionalizing” the Fire Department means that a hook-and-ladder company can no longer dub itself the Happy Hookers, I’m not really sure who benefits from it, but I’ll tell you who loses out: we do. Our city is subtly but immeasurably the poorer for it. And if you don’t like it, I’m sure you’ll feel at home in plenty of other places - Salt Lake City comes to mind, or Colorado Springs. This is New York, baby.

There’s a new sheriff in town

I am delighted - delighted - to announce this next bit of news:

From this week, my speaking arrangements will be handled through the Leigh Bureau. The folks at Leigh have eight decades of experience connecting knowledgeable speakers with audiences hungry to hear what they have to say, and I am honored and humbled to be in such stellar company.

Event planners and others interested in having me appear should deal directly with Leigh. I know it seems like an extra step, but believe me, this will streamline and simplify things considerably.

My heartfelt thanks to danah boyd for making the initial introduction.

Big “hooah”

…to our Urban Computing students Christian Croft, Kate Hartman, and Adam Simon, very nicely featured in this CNet story on ITP.

Serra at MoMA: Approaching the religious

Boy howdy, I cannot wait for the Richard Serra retrospective opening at MoMA in a little over a month. Serra is very probably my favorite sculptor: his work never fails to provide me with moments of awe, peace, and stillness - even, and this is the real trick, while overrun by gleeful, shouting kids, or uncomprehending tourists. (Perhaps surprisingly, given the uncompromising brutalism of his work, children seem to have some special affinity for Serra. I’ve seen the selfsame uncomplicated pleasure at Dia:Beacon, at the Bilbao Guggenheim, and now at MoMA.)

Through their monumentality and mass, through the way they inscribe space with crisp gradients of sound volume and ambient temperature, Serra’s sculptures do what very few other works of art I’ve seen can: they create environments all their own. They’re at least as much assertions of architecture as they are anything else.

And for me, anyway, these assertions are never neutral. I always feel somehow holy inside a Serra, where by “holy” I mean richly called to contemplation, to reflection, to being-in-the-moment. Whatever it is that the man does to these slabs of shipbuilding steel, it consistently and reliably takes me to the best place that’s in me. (In some obscure way, too, this feeling is informed by my knowledge that Serra shares with the Christos the unwanted distinction that a piece of his has collapsed on a bystander with fatal results. There is some element of risk attendant on walking through a Serra piece, however attenuated: matter matters.)

The two pieces already in the Sculpture Garden - Intersection II (1992-3) and Torqued Ellipse IV (1998) - epitomize all of this. You can experience them for yourself, even before the show proper kicks off.

As placed here, Torqued Ellipse even manages something I didn’t think anything or -one could pull off: it redeems the single most wretched thing on Manhattan’s skyline, the Chippendale crenelation on the pediment of Philip Johnson’s atrocious AT&T Building. When you stand just so in Ellipse, in the hour before dusk, the two circles rhyme, the enclosing curve of the sculpture coming neatly into alignment with the egregious Johnson. It’s a moment of grace that I very much doubt is accidental.

It’s true that the two Serras kind of overwhelm the carefully proportioned garden - the Taniguchi redesign apparently didn’t countenance the idea that objects of this scale would take up residence here, even temporarily. It has to be conceded that this is not the ideal environment for these pieces, nor are they ideal for this environment - if nothing else, those rust streaks look like they’ll be a pain in the ass to remove. Nevertheless, what a treat it is to have them right here in Manhattan for a little while, a walk or at most a subway ride away.

A footnote: as it happens, we weren’t even at MoMA to see the Serras in the first place. What drew us was “Fifty Years of Helvetica,” and as wonderful as it is that my favorite font is celebrated in this way, to call the actual show a disappointment would be an understatement.

For starters, this is more an installation than it is an exhibition: one paltry vitrine, a few paragraphs of curatorial copy and a mere handful of (admittedly fabulous) examples do not a proper explanation make. The most important font of the twentieth century deserves more and better than the few pieces you can see here, a plurality of which aren’t even set in Helvetica - you know I love me some Akzidenz Grotesk, but come on. The whole thing stinks of missed opportunity.

The Running Mann

So there’s a passage in Everyware that states, more or less verbatim, that a good long run is one of those things I could not conceive of being improved by an overlay of real-time informatics. This, mind you, was before the Nike+/iPod sport kit hit the market, and ever since I’ve been wondering if maybe I wasn’t, y’know, wrong.

Only one way to find out, of course. I’m now two weeks into my experiment with Nike+, and my feelings are decidedly mixed. On the one hand, I have unquestionably run more and harder - much more and harder - in this two-week interval than I would have otherwise, and this is almost exclusively due to the fact that the Nike+ site has made my running performance public, social, and therefore competitive vis à vis people I know and care about. The results speak for themselves.

On the other, I fully endorse everything Chris Heathcote says here, and I have a few reservations of my own at the level of experience design.

For one, the voice actors are all wrong, all wrong. The voiceovers (”Turnaround point! Thirty minutes remaining”) are such an intimate presence that any offness registers disproportionately, so it would be a very nice thing indeed to have a wider selection of voices available. Also, while in some sense it’s certainly nice for one’s athletic accomplishments to be recognized, even the incremental ones, it’s a little silly to be congratulated for things like “your longest run ever!” And I especially don’t give a fuhuck when such blandishments are offered by the likes of (Nike shill?) Lance Armstrong.

But these are obviously quibbles. To reiterate my fundamental finding: I’m running more, I’m running harder, I’m having fun with the online challenges (come find me, I’m “speedbird+”), and I’m in better shape. I may have to alter, or at least soften, my judgment on such interventions in the second edition.

Just for shits’n'giggles, I threw on an old Triax C8 heart-rate monitor when I went for today’s six-miler. All I need now is a pair of adidas_1s, and I’ll disappear into a vortex of relational locative biotelemetry every time I head out to the trail.

I wonder if Steve Mann jogs?

Quick! The modo signal!

Anybody out there work on the modo, especially its interaction design, or know anyone who did? For all that modo got wrong, it also got a tremendous amount of very difficult things about mobile/urban service design right, and I’d like to talk to whoever was responsible.

(Question prompted by the years-belated realization that the very pleasant guy responsible for above tribute page - the same who contacted me regarding our shared modo fetish circa 2001 - was none other than area/code’s newest hire, Dennis Crowley.)

Seven-second review of John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity

Thrown in the garbage, after reaching the clause “Great movies, like the films directed by M. Night Shyamalan…” (p. 41).