Elastic Mind: Here’s A Bunch Of Really Cool Stuff

Last week was without question the week of Design and the Elastic Mind in my personal universe. With not merely multiple friends but multiple sets of friends and co-conspirators represented in it, a constellation of related events dominated my social life every bit as much as the content of the show occupied my thoughts.

It’s that content that I want to say a few words about, now that I’ve had a few days to digest it. I will certainly need to go back and see the show at some quieter time, or times, in order to render a fairer and more lasting judgment, but I did want to get these thoughts out before that initial impression fades.

Here’s the thing: curatorially, “Design” is a mess. Overly ambitious, overreaching, it tries to shoehorn too many entirely unrelated phenomena into one proposition, while at the same time failing to draw at least some of the really interesting connections that should have been made. (This is me all over the place, so YMM certainly V, but I was particularly disappointed that the show didn’t connect the dots between Aranda/Lasch’s awesome generative-algorithm piece Rules of Six and Tomás Gabzdil Libertiny’s equally beautiful, made-entirely-by-bees Honeycomb Vase.)

Many of the more conceptual pieces - and here I’m thinking particularly of Noam Toran’s and Dunne & Raby’s - need a good deal more explication, at least if visitors outside the particular social/intellectual fold in which these artifacts were produced are not to take them at face value, which is something I overheard happening. The show’s Web site is all but useless, and the attempt at information-design graphics bizarre and ineffectual. (What was up with all those weird little illegible “scale” icons?) Honestly, I would have had much, much more respect for Paola Antonelli and MoMA had they merely called their show “Here’s A Bunch Of Really Cool Stuff,” and left it at that.

However. All that said, it’s a great show. It’s great because these are exactly the ideas and materials and practices and strategies that I’d want an authoritative institution like MoMA presenting to its audience at this point in history. It’s great because it doesn’t need to be coherent to be important. It’s great because you can never say “selective laser sintering” too many times. Never least, it’s great because of the sheer and considerable beauty of so many of the artifacts on view.

I mean, of course I’m biased, but Stamen’s Cabspotting in the new, bespoke colorway produced for the show? Stunning - but not more stunning than Joris Laarman’s Bone Chair, Rules of Six, or Brad Paley’s TextArc.

So, if you can unpack the actual projects on display from the relatively unconvincing rhetoric surrounding them - and fortunately, this is not difficult - you will have a wonderful time at “Design and the Elastic Mind.” You will definitely see minds being blown and fun being had, simultaneously, which is a neat trick for any cultural institution to pull off, and especially one so set in its tracks as MoMA. There is of course always abundant reason to be depressed about the state of the world, but in some of the specific strategies, philosophies and processes on view here there’s also just enough support for reasoned hope. Experienced in the presence of others’ (occasionally perplexed, but genuine) delight, if the prospect of that hope doesn’t get you out to MoMA to check this show out, then nothing will.

Quasi-Public, tomorrow night at the New Museum

Short notice, I know, but why not join me tomorrow night at seven at the New Museum, for the Design Trust for Public Space event “Quasi-Public”?

The event is billed as a conversation between ace restaurateur Danny Meyer (of Union Square Café/Gramercy Tavern/Shake Shack fame) and New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger; the Design Trust folks have kindly slipped me into the agenda as a kind of discussant after Paul and Danny throw down. I imagine they’ll want me to talk about some of the new possibilities for public space presented by ambient informatics, as well as all the ways in which these technologies tend to erode our conceptions of same if designed thoughtlessly or maliciously.

Should be fun, and, as usual, there’ll be G&T’s after. See you on the Bowery.

Maximum d’oh! Through some inexplicable cockup on my part, I totally dropkicked the date on this. It was last night, and I hear it went well. My apologies to everyone at the Design Trust for leaving them in the lurch.

Needless to say, as well, don’t show up at the New Museum tonight expecting to see anything resembling that described above. ; . )

Against go bag silliness

Sigh. OK.

Lookit: if you’re going to call it a “go bag,” make sure you know what you’re talking about. These are not go bags.

A proper “go bag” (also known as a “bug-out bag”) has to hold enough gear to protect and sustain you under uncertain conditions for no less than 72 hours. You can go all OCD parsing things out into modular A-, B- and C-loads if you want to, varying them by expected duration and mission, but that’s the nub of it.

Packing lists will vary by locale, terrain, and personal preference, and you’ll find ostensibly comprehensive and authoritative ones all over the Web. I have no intention of adding to them. If you’re serious about putting any such bag together, though, and intend to rely on it for real, please please please consider the following:

- You will need more socks than you think - like, double the amount. Two pair/person/day, at an absolute minimum. Polypro is acceptable, good ol’ fashioned wool arguably better. The old drill-sergeant saw is absolutely on the money: take care of your feet and they will take care of you. This is not the place to economize.

- I strongly recommend using dry bags, like these. There are many on the market, some better than others. The important things you’re looking for: transparent, hermetic seal, available in a variety of sizes. You will sort all of your smaller gear into these and you will label them with their contents and date last checked.

- Dummy cords. These are simply lengths of standard OD nylon para cord (”550 cord”) that you’ll cut to size, fuse the ends of, and use to tie items like your knife and your flashlight to tie-off points on the bag itself. Yes, some care must be taken to avoid entanglement, but this will keep you from losing these high-value items in the dark or in emergent situations. I cannot overemphasize the value of dummy cording: it’s saved my ass many times.

- My personal opinion? Forget anything with a battery. Hand-crank radios and flashlights are preferable.

- You’ll want maps of your area at multiple scales. In the States, you’re looking for USGS topo maps; in the UK, I’m pretty sure Ordnance Survey still makes the ones you’ll want. Laminate each, pop a hole in one corner, clip them together with a keyring or similar, dummy-cord a grease pencil to the ring and the ring to your bag.

- Don’t get fancy with knives, etc. Find out what operators recommend (or EMS personnel if for whatever reason you want to avoid the military resonances) and go with that - these recommendations will still be a matter of opinion, but it will be informed opinion. You want functional, not Rambo (and god help us, not Klingon).

- A couple of good, real, climbing-rated carabiners will always prove useful; if clanking is an issue for you, you can tape them down. (For that matter, a roll of subdued gaffers-type tape should be a part of any go bag.)

- Obtain copies of your birth certificate, passport photo page, driver’s license, deed of ownership or title, insurance policy, etc. Laminate these, seal them in a dry envelope, attach a strip of Velcro to the back, and physically attach it to the bottom of your bag.

- The standard-issue US Army poncho liner was the single best piece of gear I ever managed to lay my hands on, and I hear the Thinsulate ones are even better. It’s lightweight, highly packable and incredibly versatile, useful for many, many things, up to and including improvised shelter.

- I hate to be the one to say it, but this seems like sexy vaporware, not anything you’d want to rely on. Anyway, what do you need a sniper mat for?

- Do not be afraid to personalize your kit. I can tell you from personal experience that you will be infinitely thankful for the reassurance and psychological cushioning that comes from having some small and familiar comfort to draw on at difficult moments - an icon or fetish, worry beads, whatever. It shouldn’t be large or heavy, of course, but you’ll need something beyond iron rations to sustain you psychically in the event of your world turning upside down. I used to pack (don’t laugh) a faintly lavender-scented buckwheat-filled eyemask in my deployment bag. It was a tiny but concrete and verifiable piece of sanity, and it saw me through some very trying times in the field.

- This last bit is crucial, but surprisingly often overlooked: don’t spend a month and $500 at REI building up your über-1337 go bag and then stash it in the lightless depths of your closet; conversely, don’t raid it for camping supplies or Burning Man or what-have-you. Make it up once, store it in such a way that it’s handy to your most likely route of egress, and check it quarterly. You might even want to gin up a packing list, laminate that, Velcro it to the inside top flap, and then check your bag’s contents against it on a reasonably regular basis.

That’s about all I have to say on the subject. It’s a difficult thing to talk about, actually. Having lived through the Oakland Hills fire, I’ve seen how very quickly it can all go away, right down to the basic infrastructure. I definitely believe that everyone should be prepared to go wheels-up on ten minutes’ notice, and be capable of subsisting unaided for three days when they get to a place of safety. But it’s also all too easy to geek out on this stuff, to wind up inadvertently fetishizing disaster, catastrophe and heartbreak.

So try to remember that this isn’t about playing Sekrit Ninja. It’s about being able to take minimal care of yourself under circumstances that, however hard to imagine, are never all that far away from any one of us. Provide for yourself, and you’ll be that much more likely to survive with life, limb and sanity intact, and that much better equipped to care for the others who will surely need it. That’s it. No need to make a big deal of it.

Elastic in February

Do yourself a favor and get on over to MoMA for their new show, “Design and the Elastic Mind,” featuring our friends Anab Jain and Stamen. It sounds and looks like a damn good time, though having missed our first window to see it before the crowds descend, we won’t be able to verify in field for another day yet.

At any rate, Ouroussoff raves like he’s possessed by the shade of Herbert M. So clearly there’s something going on over there. See you on 53rd.

Interval

Don’t be fooled by the apparently slow doings hereabouts: big news brewing, announcement shortly.

Meantime, be excellent to each other.

Dreams of poste restante

I’m into a passage in the writing where I talk about the functions that were once bound up in discrete, dedicated spaces now being, in William Mitchell’s words, “completely smeared across urban space.”

It’s a simple shift with profound implications for how we experience cities, and I’m definitely having fun exploring those. (Surprisingly, that’s been the primary valence of my writing these last few weeks: fun.) But it’s also reminding me of one of my major fantasies, at the age of 12 or 13, which was to have poste restante left for me c/o the local American Express office, the way a Paul Bowles or a Graham Greene protagonist might have, in Saigon or Tangiers.

Man, that sounded romantic to me. And while I bet you could still do that if you were absolutely dead-set on it, what would be the point? The functionality of the American Express office has been smeared out just like everything else, so there’s nothing and no place to serve as expat social nexus in quite the same way.

Girding the globe with digital networks has undeniably made life easier, in so very many respects - as long ago as 1994, it was cause for marvel that I could use my then-Washingtonian bank card to draw baht at a street-side ATM in Bangkok - but I must say, it’s been at the cost of a certain panache.

Working the same side of the street

If you’re interesting in catching a strong flavor of The City Is Here For You To Use - and I understand from the feedback I’ve received after last Friday’s New Museum talk that there are a lot of you of whom this could fairly be said - you couldn’t do much better than to check out Dan Hill’s megapost “The Street As Platform.”

It’s an almost uncanny prefiguration of the book’s themes, from new forms of interdictory space, to the importance of read/write APIs in public objects, to the pivotal (and not always salutary) role of the Californian ideology in shaping informatics-mediated experiences. You’ll also find, in addition, considerations of one or two things that I won’t be dealing with - Dan’s much stronger on transmedia and new media-consumption patterns than I am, and I don’t share his interest in issues of sustainability (long story), so he’s really to go-to guy on these issues as they play out in the urban-informatic context.

If you’ve been reading Speedbird for awhile, of course, none of this is likely to come as a 2×4 to the head, but if you’re newly considering this domain, Dan’s piece is an excellent place to start.

Shielding, undistraction and conviviality, and my central dogma

In our Urban Computing class this year, I’ve gone out on a limb and offered our students the following “central dogma”:

That which primarily conditions choice and action in the urban environment is no longer physical, but resides in the invisible and intangible overlay of digital information that enfolds it.

At first blush, this is not a particularly timid way of framing our concerns. But while I think there’s plenty of room to demur as to whether this is already fully the case, or merely a matter for the near future, I genuinely do not believe the central argument is open to question.

Or maybe it’s not such a bold assertion? As has so often been the case as I’ve thought and written about ubiquitous technologies, an argument that sounds dramatic and science-fictional when stated formally like that turns out to be much less controversial - in fact, all but trivial - when moored to the real-world examples that substantiate it. Here’s an everyday example of choice and action being conditioned by the invisible informational layer that brings it all back home.

We’ve all heard by now of those cafés that have instituted a “no WiFi” policy, generally at peak hours or on weekends. In some cases the establishments in question have gone as far as to physically remove the routers they’ve not too long ago paid to have installed. And what these cafés are reacting to is the empirical finding that WiFi changes the way we use public space.

In many cases, I’m sure we’ll find that owners and operators are doing this out of an understandable commitment to their own profitability: there’s an imperative to turn the tables inscribed pretty implacably in the calculus of commercial real estate, and margins are already vanishingly thin. Since every nomad knowledge worker that springs three bucks for coffee and a bagel and then sits there officing for the next two hours is a direct hit on the bottom line, this is behavior you’d understandably want to discourage if your financial viability is at risk.

But I think we’ll also find that to some extent such decisions are motivated by a recognition that technologies of abstract interconnection undercut the logic of place pretty badly. Consider what Seattle coffeehouse owner Jen Strongin had to say on the subject way back in 2005, when she made what was at the time a strangely radical-seeming decision to deny her customers network access on weekends: “[W]e noticed a significant change in the environment of the cafe…nobody talks to each other any more.”

The digital layer’s availability or nonavailability demonstrably toggles behavior in the space between two different conditions, and it changes what the café is in the profoundest sort of way. I’m sure you could feel the difference blindfolded, and with ears plugged. It’s not necessarily what Kazys Varnelis means by “network culture,” but it sure is an example of same.

This accords entirely with the idea of “multiple adjacency” that Mark Shepard and I discuss in our “Urban Computing and Its Discontents” pamphlet, and our thinking as to which end of the equation generally suffers under such constraints. The mere existence of options that allow for a customer physically present in the room to invest the weight of their consciousness outside of it changes that place, changes what is done there, changes what sorts of options it presents to you as someone walking through the door for the first time not so equipped.

This goes back to the joke I always make about opening a chain of coffeehouses called Faraday’s: under the condition of ambient informatics, we will need to consciously create platforms for the specific kind of conviviality we recognize as animating our “third places,” and we will generally have to do this by physically denying, buffering or mitigating the Hertzian overlay. And this will be true at least as long as we recognize that there is an inherent value to the specific kinds of interactions we only tend to have when confined to the possibilities physically present in the room. Or to the degree that we do recognize that, anyway.

Simple, concrete example. No need for the maximal case of perfect, seamless, context-aware inference-engine ubicomp, let alone (cough) “utility fog.” We see here how the presence or absence of an invisible informational overlay changes behavior in this place in every important respect. That’s what (and all, so far) we’re arguing. What do you think?

Nextsuccess

Just a brief note to thank everyone for coming out to the New Museum for last night’s Nextcity talk - and to apologize to everyone who came but couldn’t get in. Next time we’ll find a bigger room. : . )

Thanks so much to Christian, Meejin and Eric for sharing your beautiful work and sparkling insight, and to Lauren Cornell at Rhizome for having planted the seed of an idea. Oh, and to the ever-patient folks at Temple Bar, for accommodating our caipiriña-fueled territorializing strategies with a smile.

I hear Régine’s coming to town for the next New Silent talk. I sure plan to be there, and you should, too.

Thought I want to come back to

It leaves one breathless to remember how quickly [Oscar Newman's concept of] defensible space, originally a tactic for the further liberation of society’s disadvantaged, was “consumed,” or turned in on itself and reconstituted as a strategy to “control” space in global enclaves of privilege.

That’s John Kaliski, in his introduction to Steven Flusty’s Buidling Paranoia. It’s strikingly apropos to recent discussions (in class and outside of it) as to whether artifacts can meaningfully be said to have politics. More about this very soon.