jnd: An emergent vocabulary of form for urban screens

Over the past year, Helsinki has more or less quietly installed large, high-definition Symbicon displays on sidewalk locations around town (on a contract with the deeply regrettable Clear Channel, but that’s another story).

You know I’m at least mildly skeptical about the benefit of street-level screens, but two campaigns (“ads”? “clips”?) I’ve seen over the past few months have convinced me that there’s an emergent practice of programming artfully for them. I don’t know enough to say whether these strategies developed in response to cost or time constraints, as the result of some thoughtful, intentional process, or from something else entirely – in fact, it seems clear that the two examples I’m going to share with you spring from different sets of circumstances – but as far as I’m concerned you can go ahead and file them under “best practices.”

The first time I was impressed by content on Helsinki’s screens was advertising I noticed at the beginning of summer. As my mind’s eye remembers it, anyway, what appeared onscreen was a single image completely duplicating the content of an otherwise entirely conventional and inert poster appearing around town at the same time, with a single, subtle exception: the headline text, and only the headline text (i.e. not any of the other copy) animated in and out.

At first glance, this would seem to be a pretty wasteful use of the potential inherent in full-motion, HD video, but that’s the thing precisely: the first glance led to a second, and a third, in a way that a conventional video ad would not have. Like anything appearing in the banner-ad position atop a Web page, we already know to tune those things out. By contrast, I found the simple text transitions hugely compelling. However they arose, and whatever decisions led to that particular choice, the posters felt restrained and sophisticated, not impoverished: a proper deployment of form for an oversaturated age. I kept thinking, “Here’s that rare someone who has an inkling what to do with these monsters.”

I had the same reaction again the other day. The screens are currently running ads for the Swedish high-street retailer H&M, shot with a high-speed camera – models sloooooowly turning, as a cascade of red leaves ever-so-softly settles over them and to the ground. Just as with the movie posters, I found myself paying the H&M ads an inordinate amount of attention. Because the images’ figural elements evolve so glacially against a stable background, they’d found my cognitive sweet spot, that precise interval at the threshold of visual perception that makes you ask yourself: Wait, did that just change? What part of it? And I minded not at all. (In fact, I found it kind of calming. There’s a word you certainly don’t hear every day in the context of advertising.)

Taken together, I’m beginning to think these two experiences point at something counterintuitive: given the inherent dynamism of most streetscapes – yes, even Helsinki’s – perhaps the most effective presentation strategy for street-level urban media is an embrace of the jnd. By distinct contrast to the other hammeringly unsubtle screens I can think of (Shibuya kosaten, of course, but also that one on the 280 approaching Daly City), the primary mode of which seems to be epileptiform flicker, I’ve wound up disposed reasonably kindly to the displays around here, and thinking of them as an unproblematic addition to the visual environment. I think that’s about the best we can expect at this point.

UPDATE: I’ve uploaded some video of the H&M ads to Flickr so you can see them for yourselves and see what you think.

“Responsibilization” and user experience

It’s a terrible word, but maybe a terrible thing deserves one: “responsibilization” refers to an institution disavowing responsibility for some function it used to provide, and displacing that responsibility onto its constituents, customers, or users. Pat O’Malley, in the SAGE Dictionary of Policing, provides as crisp a definition as I’ve found, and it’s worth quoting here in full:

…a term developed in the governmentality literature to refer to the process whereby subjects are rendered individually responsible for a task which previously would have been the duty of another – usually a state agency – or would not have been recognized as a responsibility at all. The process is strongly associated with neoliberal political discourses, where it takes on the implication that the subject being responsibilized [!] has avoided this duty or the responsibility has been taken away from them in the welfare-state era and managed by an expert or government agency.

Of course, it’s not just state agencies. It’s every half-stepping, outsourcing, rightsizing, refocusing-on-our-core-competency business you’ve encountered in these austere days, shedding any process or activity which cannot be reimagined as a profit center. You’ll get the taste of it any time you turn to a Web community to replace the documentation or customer service manufacturers used to provide as a matter of course. More generally, we see the slow spread of attitudes like this reflected in technological artifacts like the femtocells carriers want to sell you to patch the holes in their own network coverage and semiotic artifacts like the signage here, not-so-subtly normalizing the idea that checking in for a flight is something that should be accomplished without recourse to expensive, troublesome human staff.

In both of these cases, a rhetorical sleight-of-hand is deployed to reframe the burden you must now shoulder as an opportunity – to convince you, to trot out once again a phrase that is rapidly outstaying its welcome, that what you are experiencing is a feature and not a bug. And this is the often-unacknowledged downside in the otherwise felicitous turn toward more open-ended product-service ecosystems: the price of that openness is generally increased vigilance and care on the user’s part, or “wrangling.” But there’s a stark difference, as I read it anyway, between knowingly taking on that order of obligation in the name of self-empowerment and improved choice, and having to take it on because the thing you’ve just shelled out a few hundred dollars for is an inert brick if you don’t.

I’m not sure there’s any longterm fix for this tendency in a world bracketed by the needs of institutions driven primarily by analyst calls, quarterly earnings estimates and shareholder fanservice on one flank, and deeply seamful technologies on the other. The pressures all operate in one direction: you’re the one left having to pick up a sandwich before your five-hour flight, figure out what on earth a “self-assigned IP address” means, and help moribund companies “innovate” their way out of a paper bag, for free. So if you manage an organization, of whatever size or kind, that’s in the position of having to do this to your users or customers, you definitely have the zeitgeist defense going for you. But at least have the common decency not to piss on people’s heads and tell them it’s raining.

There’s more on such “boundary shifts” here, and I’ll be writing much more about their consequences for the user experience over the next few months. For now, it’s enough to identify the tendency…and maybe begin to think about a more euphonious name for it, as well.

New nurri.com/Feeder opening on October 8th

Briefest of notes to put out the word that Nurri’s updated her website to feature recent work, including a very partial selection of pieces from her mammoth Feeder project. This is also the perfect excuse to mention her solo show of Feeder at Helsinki’s Hippolyte gallery, running October 9th through November 1st.

There’ll be an opening at Hippolyte on October 8th, 2009, from 17.00-19.00, featuring the usual cheap chablis in plastic cups and little cubes of cheddar cheese on toothpicks. I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world, and I sure hope to see you there. (One or two lucky attendees might even get selected to be the next recipients of the Feeder lunch boxes!)

Networked urbanism: From constant to variable

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.

Nearness

Sometimes I stand in awe at my friends’ talent and dedication. It happens pretty often, actually: every so often somebody I know will release a piece they’ve been working on that’s just so right it’s difficult to do anything but stand back and say: Yeah: that. That precisely. I find it both humbling and inspiring. I’m sure you know the feeling.

I never do get quite used to it, either. Today’s frisson is provided by Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze, who’ve between them put together this exquisite film illustrating near-field communication (NFC) interactions in the style of Weiss and Fischli’s The Way Things Go.

What really gets me about it is the fusion of technical insight, aesthetic sense, skill in execution and sheer patience it represents. If every made thing in the world were even one-twentieth as carefully thought out as the most offhanded gesture here, we’d all of us be in inestimably better shape. Maximum kudos.

“Urban mobility”

As most of you know, I pay a decent amount of attention to products offered under the Puma brand. Even when a particular item or line doesn’t quite do it for me – and this happens more and more often with every passing year, presumably because I’m ever more decisively aging out of their target demo – there’s generally something ever so slightly more interesting about the stance and overall aesthetic of the things they sell than those of competitors Adidas and Nike.

Nor should it come as any surprise that I’m going to be especially interested in a line called “Urban Mobility,” which has at various points over the last two years consisted of shoes, baggage, clothing, and even a white-labeled Biomega bike.

In Puma’s conception, urban mobility apparently has to do with affording the wearer free movement of the body, protecting him or her against inclement conditions, and offering plenty of pockets. These are not clothes for sitting in cars, riding on buses, or waiting on subway platforms, in other words; apparently, getting around the city is something that must be negotiated parkour-style, in the remorseless arena of the physical, unaided by anything infrastructural.

I’m not necessary put out by the fact that the line invests the act of getting around the city with a glamour entirely missing from most of the actual, everyday transactions involved – after all, isn’t that kind of the point of fashion? Nor am I even that surprised by the relative functional underperformance of the garments and luggage, their elevation of (nice-ish) typography and silly posturing over any real utility. (Though if you’re going to do “urban mobility,” you might as well do it.)

No, the biggest disappointment to me in all of this, by far, is that not a single one of the artifacts included in the Urban Mobility line partakes of or refers to the networked information real-world city mobility is increasingly built upon. It’s not just a question of Puma being a maker of stuff, not services; remember, even the abortive Trainaway offering included online and audio components. It’s a failure of imagination and understanding.

At the very least, how hard would it have been to gin up an Urban Mobility iPhone app? I mean, sure, it’s the kind of flavor-of-the-month thing I generally decry, an initative which would at first blush appear heir to all the sad-ass metooism of most such marketing efforts. But in this case there would at least be some logic and justification underwriting the effort, considering that urban mobility is manifestly what people do with these devices.

I know, I know: I’m being too literal. I’m failing to grasp that concern for function is too often the death of fantasy. More importantly, I’m failing to account for the fact that the whole collection is past its sell-by date (and doesn’t seem to have done that well to begin with). I’m showing my age, my lack of edge, whatever. Mark my words, though: such efforts are going to feel increasingly weak and incomplete without a networked component of some type, and the more so the greater the degree to which the posture subtends a domain in which the informatic is primary.

Zeitgeist week ’09

If you’re at all interested in questions of networked urbanism, digital fabrication or interactive architecture – and let’s be honest: you’re here, so I know you are – there’s a pair of must-see events, bookending the Atlantic, that open/happen next week:

- If you’re lucky enough to be in New York, you have a solid two months to take in Toward the Sentient City, the Architectural League show curated by Mark Shepard and constituting a culmination of the two-year Situated Technologies process.

Sentient City is just jammed with the provocative work of good friends David Benjamin and Soo-In Yang, Usman Haque, Carlo Ratti, Anthony Townsend and Laura Forlano, and I cannot imagine that you’d come away from seeing it with anything less than a head full of new ideas about urban space and how to use it. At the League space, 457 Madison Avenue, through 7th November 2009.

- Equally ludicrous in the degree of its thrill-power, but concentrated into a single day, the Digital Architecture London conference features Tony Dunne, the ubiquitous Usman, yon BERGman Matt Webb, and more squamous, imbricated, invaginated, Voronoi-ular and otherwise procedural dynamics of structuration than you can shake a stick at. 21st September at The Building Centre, Store Street, London WC1E 7BT.

Go to one, go to both, come away inspired.

Update: D’oh! Not to mention, this year’s Conflux is that week. As usual, too much going on to namecheck properly, but for sure see Urban Omnibus‘s Cassim Shepard, Mark’s Sentient City Survival Kit, Eve Mosher’s Insert _______ Here, the Waterpod, and Transportation Alternatives‘ POP.Park: Reclaim Your Street. Also, tons of distributed ZOMG-grade awesome at Conflux City. Looks like Conflux is bigger and better’n ever.

Update: Paris event added to fall schedule

Super-stoked to be joining my esteemed colleagues Julian Bleecker, Nicolas Nova and Daniel Kaplan at a discussion of “the unfinished object” on Friday the 27th of November, 2009, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This’ll be part of a multi-day forum on the “New Industrial World” presented by the Pompidou’s Institute for Research and Innovation, and I’m delighted to see questions around networked objects engaged from that direction.

For better or worse, that week is already chock full of appearances – it will be a real relief to arrive via Eurostar and not have to spend yet another day of my year in the air. If you’re planning to be in Paris in the last week of November, it’d be great to see you there.

Installed infrastructure, latent knowledge and the small-batch aesthetic

So the great Russell Davies showed this slide during his talk at dConstruct in Brighton the other day, which I wanted to riff on a little. He’s specifically talking about the existing, truly global infrastructure of newspaper printing presses – heavy iron that’s newly available in the eclipse of the business logic that underwrote its original deployment – and what might be done with that infrastructure by the sufficiently motivated.

But Russell’s talk, in the context of my experiences in San Francisco a day or two before I got to Brighton, reminds me that there’s also a sense in which latent knowledge constitutes an infrastructure to be picked up and repurposed.

Consider: over the last several years, San Francisco in particular has become a field of premium and super-premium, small-run craft production: Ice cream. Bicycles. Coffee. Spirits. Clothing. An audience primed to expect, desire and demand the provenance of the “lovingly handcrafted,” and pitch-perfect retail tuned to that demand. Especially for someone like me, whose senses have become inured to the increasingly homogenized material landscape of Manhattan, it’s hard to escape the sense that the last decade’s activity amounts to nothing less than a local renaissance of craft and technique and pride.

It’s not difficult to infer that this all happened when it did, where it did, because of the post-dotcom-crash emergence of a healthy cohort of talented (and relatively well-capitalized) folks hungry to make something with their lives just a little more tangible than some evanescent Web portal. I’m also willing to bet that the relatively low barriers to entry involved in successful push-button publishing of the early blog era convinced a whole lot of people in the Bay Area that it was safe to try their hand at other, more ambitious endeavors – that is, that blogging constituted a kind of gateway drug.

And yeah, sure, this can occasionally be a little insular and precious, a little twee: the kind of hipster-doofus affectation that makes a nice fat target for equally nitwit parody. But it’s also, hopefully, something that speaks to Russell’s more general point, and is therefore replicable elsewhere, in whatever ways are most true to those places and desires. The San Francisco resurgence would not – could not – have happened if there were not at this point literally several hundred years of insight into craft technique just lying on the ground, for just about any domain of productive activity you can imagine.

I can imagine that it’s not always easy to reacquire this knowledge. Almost by definition, it’s the kind of thing that lives in underutilized libraries and dusty used bookshops, the very existence of which is threatened by digital successors, and in heads long gone grey. What’s worse, the day-to-day praxis of a given tradition will likely have resided in particular material/semiotic networks – delicate configurations of workbenches and tools and scrawled annotations that have most likely been scattered to the four winds, and must now be painstakingly reassembled – and have found its maximum expression in the scenius of some years-gone barstool or coffeehouse community.

All of which is to say that you can’t simply pick up an 1895 copper fermentation vat at a flea market and expect to begin pumping out the craft IPA. But the knowledge is there, the networks can still (just) be recreated, and the results speak for themselves. I’m sure for some, or many, it’s just another kind of performative display, an increasingly mannered and exclusive elaboration on consumerism, but I can’t help but feeling that being able to partake of products like these on a regular basis is living in every sense a better life: locally rooted, profoundly respectful of hard-won human achievement, and sustainable in the best and truest sense. This wealth is scattered everywhere around us, lying there in plain sight just waiting to be picked up and used. What are you going to do with it?

Addendum. I don’t think it’s any accident at all that so much of the above-referenced activity is happening in the Mission, richly provisioned as it is with relatively affordable storefront retail. (As usual, Jane said it best: “Sometimes new ideas need old spaces.”) But I don’t think that’s all there is to it, and more about that in short order.