Discuss:

People have the inalienable right to benefit from the use of data their activities generate.

In which your ideas are solicited

If you’re reading this, the odds are very damn good that you’ll be interested in the following:

The Architectural League of New York invites architects, artists, designers, technologists, engineers, urbanists, or teams thereof, to submit qualifications for an exhibition that will critically explore the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture. The League will commission five to seven teams to develop urban interventions–to be installed in and around New York City in spring 2009–that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Commissioned projects will receive support ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.

The exhibition continues the League’s commitment to supporting original research into the implications of ubiquitous/pervasive computing for architecture and urbanism. In fall 2006, the League, along with the Center for Virtual Architecture and the Institute for Distributed Creativity, presented “Architecture and Situated Technologies,” a 3-day symposium organized by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, that brought together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of Situated Technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. The project continued in winter 2007 with the publication “Urban Computing and Its Discontents,” the first of nine pamphlets to be published over the next three years that explores how our experience of the city and the choices we make in it are affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other Situated Technologies.

I say again: $5,000 to $25,000. OK, it’s not Emirates-grade funding, but it’s sure as hell not chicken feed either.

You can apply here. Feel free to pass the link, too. Really, go to town on this. I expect great things from you.

Reality bites

Not more than two weeks ago, Nurri’s brother Noda asked us to come up with a name and identity concept for the restaurant he and his wife were about to open in Seoul’s Shinsa neighborhood. Having done a bunch of TV cooking/lifestyle shows, he’s kind of a minor celebrity in Korea, and we were tickled by the chance to help him translate his ideas about dining into physical form and space, however late in the game our interventions struck me as being.

So out came our copy of Illustrator, out came the Pantone manual, and before you know it Nurri had three solid design directions for him to look at. The one he finally chose wasn’t actually our favorite, but that’s always the risk designers run when presenting the client with multiple alternatives. The important part is that he, his wife and their business partner were happy, and so therefore were we.

It’s what happened next that took my breath away. I’m pretty sure I’ve fully reckoned intellectually with the foreseeable implications of mass amateur fabrication, but it’s something else again to watch something ginned up on your New York laptop Monday get laser-cut into steel and mounted on a building halfway around the world by the end of the week. (Picture here.)

A lot of this, to be sure, is down to the prevailing Korean ppali-ppali (”hurry hurry”) mentality, and has little enough to do with the emergent technics of accessible fabrication: Seoul has always, in my experience, been a place where you can have objects made up quickly, from the challenge coins I remember from the Army to the RFID-enhanced keyfobs Timo Arnall had a subway merchant make him, on 24-hour turnaround, back in July 2006. And needless to say, this isn’t any algorithmically-generated, selective-laser-sintered, molecularly self-similar hunk of designy gorgeousness we’re talking about here, just a humble 3D restaurant sign.

Nevertheless, I think the more general point is sound: there will be an interval, in this lead-up to the full-fledged massification of rapid fab, during which plenty of us stand to be amazed. There may well come a day when the notion of any gap whatsoever between the imagining of a thing and its instantiation strikes all & sundry as curious, but in the meantime it’s still pretty impressive to behold.

And now, of course, I can’t wait for our next flight to Seoul, so we can actually sample chef Noda’s Korean-style-donburi goodness.

Wish I’d seen this

Matt Jones and Tom Coates on designing for the “new wave of personal informatics.”

Cut free from the surrounding “2.0″ hype, this is enormously important stuff. As someone who believes both that practically every place and object in existence should offer some form of open API, and that the design and specification of such APIs is an inherently political act, I’m tremendously interested in what Tom and Matt have to say - to my mind, anyway, the services they’ve personally been involved with, Dopplr and Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle, constitute the leading edge of thought and practice in the domain.

Both the specific types of data provided by running processes and the degree to which such data can be modified by users will, I believe, soon come to constitute the major boundary conditions for urban experience. So I’m absolutely delighted to see such fine thinkers (and friends) getting out ahead of the curve and setting forth such high expectations as clear standards to be met or exceeded.

What they’re wrestling with here is a body of amorphous and slippery but absolutely central questions: just how do everyday urban activities generate data, and how is that data represented? How, specifically, is such data captured by the notional “cloud,” passed between services within it, and then offered back to individual users? How questions like these ultimately get answered will make all the difference between cities that work for the people who live and dream in them, and ones which afford experiences of hassle, dismay and danger.

I particularly like the emphasis here on “politeness,” a quality that genuinely suffuses Dopplr’s extant tone, voice and interface and a consideration that extends to how read/write privileges are handled, how data expiry (”forgetfulness”) is managed, and especially what happens at the endgame. Compare the nightmarish experiences people have had on trying to leave Facebook with the neat way Dopplr handles account closure, for example: one can never be quite sure one is entirely shut of the former, while the latter deletes all of your user information, tells you it’s done so (important!), and leaves you with a zipped file of everything it had been holding. In the hands of folks like Dopplr’s ace developer Matt Biddulph, you’d almost believe that software engineering had finally reckoned fully with the Golden Rule.

In this regard, what exemplars like Dopplr and Fire Eagle demonstrate beautifully is the clear recognition that in any network of distributed functionality, the seams between systems are as important to the way a service is ultimately experienced as the more obvious interface between system and human user. If nothing else, it should be clear that “user experience design” can no longer be understood as being somehow identical with “user interface design.” To my mind, these new standard setters demonstrate just how deep the design of humane systems runs.

I’m not sure why Rick Poynor is picking a fight with me

here:

By taking this one quote, very much out of context, he’s making it seem as if I’m somehow arguing against the very thing I’ve spent much of my career trying to support, which is the central role of the trained designer in improving user experience. He also seems to believe I would somehow underwrite the essential vacuity of the consultant class, when nothing could be further from the truth.

I’m upset at this sort of cherry-picking simply because it’s intellectually dishonest, of course. But more broadly, the entire piece portrays Poynor as some kind of Lone Gunslinger fighting the good fight, when the reality is that there are plenty of people struggling right alongside him to achieve the same ends.

For the record (though it will seem laughably redundant to anyone who knows me well, like insisting I really do like Citroëns, or gin and tonics, or Jane Jacobs): I regard “innovation” as an all-but-meaningless buzzword, “design thinking” as weak sauce indeed, and design itself as an indispensible desideratum in the genesis of humane products, systems and services. As I have fought and fought hard for these values, publicly, prominently, and at not-insignificant cost to my career and prospects, I very much resent any implication that I have ever either believed or acted any differently.

UPDATE: Ah, sorry. For those of you who don’t know who Rick Poynor is: among critics of graphic design, he’s definitely counted one of the usual suspects.

Bookproject update 003: The daunting

Third in a series.

The way people invariably start conversations with me these days is to ask that one question you are never, ever supposed to ask a writer.

So. How is the book going?

What I can tell you is that we’re currently holding steady at 55,241 words. I always hedge this accounting, though, by admitting that I’m not sure more any more than about eight hundred of them are the right ones.

And I’m not. I’m really not sure of this, because the scope of what I have to cover in this book is positively daunting. If you’re remotely serious about furnishing a comprehensive account of urban computing and its prospects - and I like to think that I am - you have to consider the city-under-ambient-informatics at a number of different scales, and from a very wide variety of angles:

First, background. There’s the form of the city taken as a whole. I’ve got a stack of work on this, from Lewis Mumford in The City in History to the far more contemporary, Deleuze-inflected approach Manuel de Landa takes in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. They’re all useful, but they take a long time to digest and absorb.

(Did someone say “Deleuze”? Yeah. It’d be hard to talk about the potential impacts of pervasive and ambient sensing, representation and effector technologies without starting with “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”)

In order to understand how the technologies we’re interested in might shape how people understand and use the spaces those cities are built up from, I’ve first had to wrap my head around what an architect might call the “as built” condition. Holly Whyte’s classic empirical work in City and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is crucial here - but also Lefebvre, and if Lefebvre than certainly Iain Borden’s guerrilla reading of him in the brilliant Skateboarding, Space and the City. There’s also the “schizogeography” Mark Shepard and I talk about in our pamphlet to follow up on, hopefully to deepen.

It’s hard to think about any of this without wondering how the advent of these technologies inflects conceptions of space in the social imagination, and so I’ve turned to Kristen Ross and her dazzling The Emergence of Social Space as grounding, before looking at gamespace and other contemporary artifacts.

I don’t, in the slightest, want to limit myself to discussing conditions relevant solely to the developed world, or to the privileged segments of cities anywhere, so Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh’s Off the Books and Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums become pointedly relevant, as does a whole stack of work on Lagos and Manila and Mumbai and the favelas of Rio.

Of course I’m going to make an argument that ambient informatics begins to wear away at our understanding of what constitutes public space, that our newfound ability to track and meter the use of streets and sidewalks can easily erode the rights of use and enjoyment inscribed in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Conversations with legal scholar M. Scott Boone have been super-helpful here, as has Kristine Miller’s wonderful Designs on the Public.

And then there’s staying on top of relevant built or deployed projects, especially difficult because coverage of same tends to be parceled out among six or seven discrete and mutually non-communicating disciplinary communities. For just one example, the interactive façades that Peder Burgaard’s turned me onto belong to the same conceptual universe as the transit interventions Dan Hill’s done such an incredible job of cataloguing here, and while anybody reading this site understands at first glance how each (at least potentially) relates to the other, transit planning and interactive art/chitecture still tend to be two very different silos. At the very least, I find myself having to maintain realtime awareness of blogs dealing with architecture, industrial design, service design, urban planning, transit, geography, real estate, theory, information visualization, materials, and, of course, “technology.” (I at the very least have to be able to discuss the granular details of the technologies I discuss as they affect higher-level processes and experiences. So add a whole bunch of information on the ins and outs of APIs, authentication protocols, sensor specifications, and so on to the growing pile.)

Finally, it can’t hurt to develop a sense for global-scale intercity flows - both the highly abstract ones that Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells are good on, and those person-to-person connections SENSEable City Lab’s NYTE provides such an incredible window on. Kazys Varnelis’s thoughts on “network culture” are particularly apropos in this regard.

Point is: all of these things are “urban computing,” and any book claiming to treat that topic had better be founded on an account of all of them. It’s, admittedly, more work than I had figured, but I think the results will reward this kind of in-depth interrogation of the entire topic space. And, of course, I believe (and hope) you’ll agree.

A buzzing swarm of “I’s,” or: any Friday night on Third Avenue in the Thirties

What we call morality began in the mores, the life-conserving customs, of the village. When these primary bonds dissolve, when the intimate visible community ceases to be a watchful, identifiable, deeply concerned group [emphasis added], then the “We” becomes a buzzing swarm of “I’s,” and secondary ties and allegiances become too feeble to halt the disintegration of the urban community.

Lewis Mumford, from 1961’s The City in History. A profoundly conservative viewpoint, to be sure, but for all that one that identifiably bears some resemblance to what I can see around me.

Not that I’m at all exempting myself from this: I’m as bad, surely as high-maintenance and self-important as anyone else in this crypto- or crapto-Darwinian scrum we dignify with the tag of “neighborhood.” Hard to see a way out, either: the valuations inscribed in our market economy, the local architectonic microstructure, and especially the ways these things dock with our own homegrown psychopathologies all seem to conspire against it.

I’m not happy about it, but I don’t have the foggiest idea what to do about any of it. Except “leave,” maybe - but that’s a cop-out, and not any kind of an answer.

Twittereminder

Looks like it’s time to enunciate this ag’in: I only share Twitter access with folks who are actually known to me. With whom I share a history, in other words. In realspace.

Preferably over cocktails.

Don’t be miffed if you get denied. It’s not about you.

Vélibertarians

Lovely readers: who here has used Vélib? And more to the point, who’s gamed it?

Back from Boston

This is just the briefest of entries thanking Fabien and his SENSEable City Lab cohorts for an amazing discussion yesterday. I think the talk went really well, and it certainly seemed to generate precisely the sorts of connections I know Fabien was hoping for.

It’s a young lab, but the SENSEable folks are up to some really impressive stuff; certainly their New York Talk Exchange visualizations were one of the standout pieces in MoMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind” show. (The latter’s still on, by the way, in case you haven’t yet had the chance to reckon with it.)

Stoked, particularly, to chat with Jonathan Raper and Paul Torrens - not that I’m on board with each and every assertion either one of them made, but they sure furnished the best kind of minds to hone arguments against, and were wicked good company - and, as always, great to see Bryan and Beth.

The roundtable itself gathered a nicely variegated audience, I thought. It’s true that geographers predominated, but then their 7,000-strong annual conference was in town - and anyway, I tend to like geographers, and to value their insights. Also, as you’d imagine, a decent scattering of architects, new-media and technology types, some policy folks, and maybe one or two profoundly undisciplinary* sorts like me. (*HT to teh Bleecker.) All in all, it struck me as the kind of room where “Schelling point” perplexes half the audience and “read/write API” the other half, and that’s a good and a happy thing in my book - or is as long as the initial perplexity eventually gets resolved, anyway.

So once again, congratulations to indefatigable Fabien, to Carlo, and to everyone at SENSEable. My SENSE is that a lot of the ideas that got generated and shared yesterday are going to linger for awhile.