I find myself completely fascinated with this Korean competition for the design of a Central Open Space in a Multi-functional Administrative City, which comes in via the excellent suckerPUNCH.
Some of its oddness, obviously, comes from the fusion of bureaucratese and Konglish in which it’s couched, but I think the balance of the frisson I get from it is down to something else entirely. I’m thinking of it as a weak signal from one possible future-becoming-present, one in which the scale-free generative modeling processes we’ve lately fallen for are mated to the very ambitious ab initio development programs we’re starting to see in places like the UAE and the PRD.
If such a contingency came to pass, I’d imagine its characteristic artifacts would be things just like this: RFPs, in effect, for rapid-fab Lego cities, readymade to plug into existing service infrastructures.
It’s not that such a scenario is entirely incapable of being handled intelligently; I think of some of the smarter work in Typological Formations, a neat volume I picked up last week at Architectura & Natura, as exemplary in this regard. But oh, I can also see way too much potential for misery in these self-consciously generic urbanized fields – I mean, they’re not even really “cities” anymore, are they? – and the correspondingly anomic quality of life I’d imagine going hand-in-glove with any large-scale procedural rhetoric of composition. (Residents? Any, y’know, culture they might tend to accrete around them? Modular, entirely fungible.)
Now, I’d be willing to bet that peak oil is going to set real limits on this kind of hubris long before us mere critics need to worry about its implications for the texture of everyday life. But then I’ve been wrong before.
So it looks like I’m going to be keynoting the EuroIA conference in Amsterdam in September, and therefore (and not without some irony) re-engaging with the information architecture community I so vocally left behind in the fall of 2006.
Since I’m doing this literally the day after a talk at Picnic ‘08, there had been some concern regarding overlap and/or overexposure on the part of the organizers. Which is not entirely unreasonable: while the audiences are separate and distinct, this is after all going to be the third time this year I will have spoken in that fairest of cities, and at some point it’s hard to argue that you’re offering people something truly worth their investment of time.
So I think it’s only fair of me to bring the IA’s some entirely new material – something that builds on the Everyware and The City Is Here work I’ve been doing for the last four years, that is also engineered from the ground up for that specific audience.
I thought I might start with a comment from last September’s LIFT event in Seoul that kind of caught me by surprise: Bruce’s characterization of the person orchestrating a fabject’s transition into the actual as an “information architect.” I laughed at the time – I daresay that upward of 90% of the people who think of themselves as information architects have never heard the word “fabject” – but I’d also be willing to grant that those two words actually constitute an apposite term for the task and mindset any such endeavor would involve.
I was reminded of this again this morning, as I was sipping Kona and reading Archinect’s wonderful roundup of “Design and the Elastic Mind” reviews, in which Fred Scharmen makes the astute and very timely observation that
to organize and present information on a sufficiently large and complex scale is to perform a task commensurate with the orchestration and coordination necessary to construct a built space.
And lo! he drops the unutterable words, arguing that they point at
…the existence of another, more all-encompassing way of working and making: a yet-un-named field that comprises the kind of systems-level thinking that architecture itself might be a subset of.
And I find myself kind of nodding my head, y’know? I’m in broad agreement with Fred that this is a very natural way to understand and communicate what’s bound up in this critical twenty-first century domain of practice, and everything involved in shepherding (spatial, experiential and social) artifacts between their virtual and actual manifestations.
The challenge, of course, is that this is information architecture as virtually none of the people practicing that endeavor today understand it.
Now the very last thing I want to do is reactivate any of the dull, passionate, and ultimately pointless nomenclatural debates that roiled IA circa 1999-2000. I do think it would be of interest, though, to present the idea to the people currently practicing something they think of as information architecture that a phase transition may be about to unfold across their field of practice, success in which will demand the exercise of skills and orientations that are currently external to their worldview. I dunno: what do you think?
You’ve probably seen the video by now, of course, but just in case you haven’t: here’s former World Chess Champion and candidate for the Russian Presidency Garry Kasparov being heckled by a remote-control dildocopter.
You go right on ahead and read that again, I’ll wait. Satirists and science-fiction writers alike, y’all can probably hang up your hats; I’m not quite sure how you’d improve on this.
I want you to go take a look at this Times Online piece, which comes my way via Chris Heathcote’s del.icio.us. (If you’re in a hurry, the gist of it is that a UK-based company called Path Intelligence is using mobile-phone microtriangulation to pinpoint customer behavior inside malls.) I cannot imagine a better-timed demonstration of so many of the facets of so-called “reality mining” that concern me.
The utility of gathering this information is clear, at least from the perspective of a retail establishment:
A shopping mall could, for example, find out that 10,000 people were still in the store at 6pm, helping to make a case for longer opening hours, or that a majority of customers who visited Gap also went to [competitor] Next, which could useful for marketing purposes.
In this case, information gathered from you without your knowledge (let alone your consent) is being used to build models of behavior from which real financial value can be derived. Do you participate in enjoyment of that value? You do not. Not unless you consider the “longer shopping hours” a plus, anyway.
That’s only one of my concerns, and at that, probably the less important one. The other and greater is that given enough data, these traces can be tied to individuals with relative ease. In this context, the assertion by a Path Intelligence spokeswoman that “[t]here’s absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual” strikes me as risible, given everything we now know about retrieving unique signatures from large data sets. Relying on the fact that a great many people use the mall, in such a comparatively limited number of ways, to disguise your particular activities – what we might call a “security through obscurity” strategy – is not a sustainable way of doing things. If anything, from what I’m told, it gets easier to extract individual records the more data you have.
Even accepting that you might well choose to give this data away if you were somehow compensated for it, how would you go about placing an appropriate value on it? It’s not at all clear to me. Some people object that, since such use data has worth only in the aggregate, any one person’s contribution is insignificant, and should be valued accordingly. I have to disagree: even as one small trace in a very large aggregate, you’re assisting in (e.g.) anomaly detection – that is, your choices as you move through the space of the mall help to establish what a statistically “normal” trajectory looks like, and that’s presumably what retailers are most interested in. Unless I’m missing something, then, each new record of individual spatial choices has a value that is disproportionate to its actual contribution, and most especially so if you can be further identified as a member of a desirable (or highly undesirable) demographic.
So we’re at a point where your own actions, sensed, recorded, and aggregated, create an informational asymmetry by way of which some party who is not you primarily benefits. Am I out to lunch in thinking that this isn’t such a great way for things to be set up?
Thanks for all of your great ideas and suggestions. I think something’s clicked into place – enough of a scaffolding, anyway, on which to sketch out the arc of a book-length argument.
And if that isn’t a mixed metaphor, I don’t know what is.
Previously:
- Project background
- Updates 001, 002 and 003.
Now that I’m something like sixty-five thousand words in, I don’t mind telling you that the last few weeks have been profoundly difficult for me writing-wise. Outright painful, in fact.
The underlying problem is one of structure, or lack of one, which in turn has to do with the heterogeneity of scale and texture of the material I want to somehow incorporate into the book. I haven’t yet found the framework that will allow me to discuss the entire spectrum of issues and topics that want to be in the book, from abstract (e.g., spatial and temporal effects of networked informatics; the use of same to afford interdiction and differential permissioning) to highly concrete (specific interactive façades, visualizations, or municipal policies).
Of course, writing Everyware was also much like pulling teeth, up until the moment I hit on the device of structuring the book as a series of theses, after which the actual writing came relatively easily. While I’m hoping something similar will turn out to be true in this case, there will be no little art in finding a form capable of containing (or at least addressing) everything a city is or does.
The minimalist in me is partial to one-word section titles – “Crowd,” “Street,” “Playground,” “Market,” and so on – the obvious trap being that a noun-centric construction like that tends to emphasize static descriptions of a city of bricks over stories about the things people choose to do there. I’m not sure verbs are any better, though: “Working,” “Shopping,” and “Getting Around” sound like sections in a Lonely Planet guide.
At the same time, though, I also like the way the Headmap Manifesto ordered things: its sections were introduced with brief topic lines that occasionally even amounted to natural-language sentences (“Landscapes have a biography and are authored”). I might even take that a step further and try writing an essay-length introduction, decomposable into sentences each of which becomes the topic of a section – blame my inner Oulipo fan, but I’m kind of into the idea of a table of contents that functions almost as an acrostic, or at any rate something to be unpacked.
Well, anyway, that’s where we are. I know basically what I want the book to say and to be about, I’m just having significant trouble devising a compelling narrative frame for everything to live in – especially because I want it all to be accessible to a nonspecialist audience. (Ironically, things would be (much) easier if I thought of the content as a series of blog posts instead of a proper book.)
Do me a favor and share your thoughts in comments? I recognize from experience that I’m at the point in the writing where the right idea will help everything fall into place properly, and not so stupid that I’m not acutely aware that the necessary spark might well come from the book’s prospective readership itself. : . )
There’s been a decent amount of buzz lately over something called the Motorola Sparrow, a prototype device featured in MoMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind” show – I notice that the current ID, for example, features a piece on it. (As it was the only interesting-looking piece in the book, and I’m well past the point of buying a paper magazine for a single article, I’m afraid I haven’t read it. Apologies if any of the following substantively duplicates that article’s findings.)
It doesn’t surprise me that Sparrow’s getting this kind of attention: aside from being more than usually pretty, the device is a reasonably clear indication of where a few converging lines of thought and technical possibility are taking us. To quote Motorola’s blurb, Sparrow “combines a scanner, point-of-sale system, communication device and credit-card reader into one mobile handheld object. It allows customers to get information about products of interest, receive instant promotions based on their shopping behavior, and make purchases anywhere in the store, in real time.”
In other words, it blends two extant, off-the-shelf technologies – the product scanners retail floor staff already have access to, and wireless payment systems – and makes of them something entirely new, something akin to a point-and-buy gun. That, in turn, brings us well within range of a prospect that must loom like the Holy Grail for all too many retailers: a store utterly stripped of checkout lines, cash registers, and the revenue-depleting experiential kinks they so often give rise to. Putting aside for a second both my (significant) despair over yet another example of pervasive technology at the service of materialism and meaningless churn, and the fact that Motorola’s designers manage to work Experience Interaction Design Cliché No. 2* into their very pitch, there’s at first blush a lot that’s attractive about that scenario.
[*Location- or context-aware coupons. The pillow you hug, causing its remote twin owned by your lover 3000 miles away, to light up or vibrate? No. 1.]
But then you start to think about what all that really means, and the reservations blossom. In fact, in Sparrow it’s pretty clear what happens to retail in the near future: it becomes a matter of just-in-time warehousing, in which an ever-greater percentage of the amenities and services we typically think of part of the retail experience is offloaded onto the customer him- or herself, and realtime consumption-cycle data gets coupled to demand forecasts and Global South production in an ever-tighter loop. (You can almost see the quants rubbing their hands, chortling as they contemplate the potential for chain-wide destaffing.)
There are also significant problems with the device itself, most notably the fact that Motorola apparently believes (believed?) that this functionality would reside in a separate, stand-alone object, and not simply be incorporated into the one people already carry – no wonder they’re doing so well. And yes, I know it’s just a mockup, but we’re already in trouble if one of the UI alerts actually says “RFID detected.” I mean, you know I’m all in favor of seamful design, but that’s ridiculous.
Sparrow itself is almost certainly a design exercise, à la Detroit’s classic concept cars: the kind of thing that previews future corporate design directions, but not actually intended to see production. I’m not at all sure, further, that the diminished post-partition Motorola will have the resources to bring something this radical to market. Nevertheless, sooner or later it’s all but inevitable that someone’s going to pull this concept off. I think that someone should be careful what it is that they’re asking for, because they – and we – just might get it.
UPDATE 08 May 10.54 EDT: Bonus link! Chris Woebken on the future of money. Too frazzled now to integrate these thoughts into something coherent, but it’s coming. It’ll wind up in the book, at very least.
