At The Mobile City, we are currently researching the design processes that shape the cities of the 21st century, and bumped into an interesting paradox (also pointed out by others):

The experience of our present day city in every day life is increasingly a hybrid one – meaning that it is made up of both physical and mediated experiences that mutually influence, extend or contradict each other. At the same time, the design of our cities is for the most part still a rather stratified process where different disciplines shape the different ‘layers’ of the urban experience.

Planners and architects are still mostly interested in the physical, spatial design of cities. Whereas it is artists, telecom-operators, activists, and dotcom-start-ups that shape the software and interface layers through which the experience of a physical place is optimized, extended, reframed, negated, denied, contested or contradicted. What is more, these different disciplines all have their own traditions of understanding what a city is or should do. Often they don’t even understand each other’s language.

This is of course not necessarily a bad thing. Cities have always been heterogeneous or hybrid spaces where different logics are at work – and in competition with each other. Urban culture has always been a negotiation between the spatial embodied ideals of architects and the messy practices of everyday life.

At the same time we think that this time around Continue Reading »

I just visited an interesting panel on the Sonic Acts 2010 Conference called The Poetics of Hybrid Space.

When over here at The Mobile City we talk about Hybrid Space, we usually refer to the work of Adriana de Souza e Silva who in several articles has convincingly argued against the dichotomy between physical or real space on the one hand and virtual or mediated  spaces on the other. The very fact that these two can longer be separated is one of the central themes of The Mobile City: media spaces and virtual networks extend, broaden, filter or restrict the experience of  physical spaces, and the other way around.

Interestingly, over at Sonic Acts they have adopted a broader concept of hybridization. Moderator Eric Kluitenberg explained that hybrid space is not a technical concept. Rather hybridization is about heterogenic logics that are simultaneously at work in the same space. For instance there is the top down logic of the build environment developed by the architect. But the same space may also be subjected to the logic of an informal street economy that may or may not be compatible with the ideas operationalized by the architect. The mediated experiences of the mediascape make up only one of the logics that operate in a space. Sometimes these different logics clash, sometimes they overlap, sometimes they just negate each other. However, we should understand all these different logics as real. They are all operative at the same time and together make up how a place is lived and experienced.

Having said that, the addition of the new media technologies such as mobile phones has increased the density of different logics operational in (urban) space, and new cultural practices and adaptations of space are emerging as a result. This makes the urban experience more complex and Continue Reading »

A little while ago I came across a manifesto called Not In Our Name, Marke Hamburg (Sign and Sight has an English translation). In this manifesto a group of 200 artists/squaters criticise their supposed role in the cycle of life of their city, Hamburg. Using artists as tools to ’spice up’ a city leads to gentrification, they say.

As you probably know, Florida describes how ‘bohemians’ plays an important part in city regeneration. By investing themselves in less popular neighbourhoods they create neighbourhoods that are attractive to the larger creative class. The increase in social capital eventually leads to an increase in property value. Which ironically forces out the artists, as they can no longer pay rent, so they move to another neighbourhood where rent is cheap, and the cycle of economic segregation continues.

When Der Spiegel confronted Florida with the manifesto, he apparently shrugs it off. He says:

“I’ve never talked about marketing in any of my books. And I don’t want to provide any recipes for gentrification.”

While he doesn’t advocate gentrification, it can be argued that he has a stake in this debate. I’d say that gentrification was already part of the cycle of city life, and that by making this proces explicit through his studies, Florida has become a player in this debate. He can’t just say “don’t shoot the messenger”.

So what should we do with this insight?

It’s here, where observation shifts to ideology, that a next step is necessary. Florida’s ideology has created a paradoxical situation where the bohemians are recognised for the value they bring, but this value is only measured economically. This was not the recognition the artists sought. To artists, true recognition would mean adopting their notion of value.

The partial recognition has a weird effect in Hamburg: it seems that the regenerative cycle has been broken. The artists don’t want to move anymore, they want to stay and make a stand. This could be a great opportunity for them, as they have everything they need: a cheap place in the center of town, and, most surprising to them, the listening ear of the local government. This might allow them to stay there indefinately.

Until now Florida’s insight into how the cycle works has led Hamburg strengthen the cycle, trying to optimise its effects. Perhaps instead the cycle should be broken? It will be interesting to keep an eye on Hamburg to see how this stand-off develops.

On December 14th 2009 De Balie – an Amsterdam-based center for culture and politics – organized an evening about old and new cartographies. Participants were Ferjan Ormeling (Emeritus Professor Cartography, Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Utrecht University), Henk van Houtum (Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Political Geography, Head of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research), Maarten Keulemans (science journalist), Jelle Reumer (director Natural Museum Rotterdam, Special Professor at Utrecht University), Lucas Keijning (NEMO science center), and me. The evening was lead by Volkskrant journalist Martijn van Calmthout. The evening was set up as a prelude to the presentation of a new world map the day after in The Hague. From the announcement:

We have been making maps for centuries, to establish territorial borders or mark safe routes. A map is a model of reality, and the terrain of a fascinating branch of science: cartography. Maps represent social and political choices, which start forming their own truths. For example the Persian Gulf is not the Persian Gulf everywhere, the world on its head or with China in the middle all of a sudden looks very different, and maps today seem less complete because of an increasing number of ‘white spots’…

Some of the issues addressed this evening concerned the relation between model and reality, the consequences of new map-making media technologies for society and politics, and – unavoidably it seems in such popularizing science discussions – the question whether new developments are good or bad? I was invited to talk about the influence of mobile and locative media and cartographic representations.

Cartographer Ferjan Ormeling started the evening with an overview of cartography as a professional scientific discipline. He defined cartography as “the transmission of spatial information for decision-making”. In a few slides he walked through cartographic history, mainly from a western perspective as the attempt to explore and chart unknown territories, with ensuing overseas trade and later colonization in its wake. Some of the interesting topics he touched upon included the fact that cartography is always subjective and culturally determined. Dutch maps for instance often leave out ditches because they are everywhere, whereas in Belgium they are included on maps. The world maps we know today are clearly Euro-centric, placing other territories in the periphery of Europe. Maps were hugely important for an upcoming sense of nationalism (a point made by Benedict Anderson in his well-known work “Imagined Communities” 1991). Nation-states were now drawn in monochrome colors, clearly separating them from their neighbors. Further, names on maps are often surrounded by controversy. For example in the 1970s attempts were made to modernize the spelling of Dutch town and city names. This met with fierce opposition from local government, because this meant some places would lose their name-based exclusivity (Veghel sounds more chic than Veggel, ditto for Wijchen – Wijgen). Map-making therefore always involves selection, manipulation, and generalization. What is displayed? What is left out? Where are borders drawn? What is on the map and what lies outside of the map? Ormeling closed his talk by assessing the relevance of new technologies like Google Maps. Here it became interesting, since Ormeling tenaciously clung to the idea of the unique professional expertise of cartographers. While digital technologies certainly are useful, Ormeling argued, the role of cartographers remains important because they are the ones who “fill in” these satellite images, and “give meaning” to those satellite views. Sure, there are interesting attempts by amateurs to engage map-making (such as Openstreetmap). But there are lots of things professionals can and amateurs can’t do, like accurately mapping a rugged coastline.

Then Henk van Houtum and I joined the discussion. Van Houtum argued new geographic technologies like TomTom and Google Maps turn all of us into geographers. But very uncritical geographers. We unwittingly feed all kinds of information to search engines. Van Houtum worries about the loss of personal autonomy as we are surrender ourselves to various digital search and control systems. But on the more positive side, new technologies enable far more people to engage in place-making and representing spatial knowledge. The old monopoly of mapmaking by geographers under the auspice of the nation-state is crumbling, and that is a good thing.

I argued that under the influence of mobile and locative media, cartography has changed from being a predominantly geographical medium in which the representation of space and place is central, to a social medium in which online social networking acquires a cartographic element. Our mediated social relations are now being ‘rooted’ in physical places. A good example of such a locative social network is Bliin, a project by Selene Kolman, who was in the audience, and Stef Kolman.

This has in part been a response to our perception of the internet as placeless, and broader social and spatial shifts often grouped under the name ‘globalization’. Further, New technologies offer people the opportunity to write space and place with their own experiences (e.g. by ‘geotagging’ places), rather than just reading the maps made by others (see e.g. Greenfield & Shepard about “read/write urbanism” p. 12-13). This means cartography is no longer the prerogative of professionals but indeed, as Henk van Houtum said, we have all become geographers. Already in 1946 geographer J.K. Wright proposed in front of the Association of American Geographers that the earth had been largely mapped by conventional geographical method. The time had come to map our earth all over again. Wright called upon geographers to map folk knowledge of places, and more aesthetic experiences of our environments. This would vastly expand the terrain of classic geography to include what Wright called ‘geosophical’ knowledge. Wright would probably have been thrilled to see how his plea is being realized today… A third change is that maps now consist not only of mostly spatial information but also temporal information. The historicity of place as a process is made visible by the range of micro-narratives that are attached to places through locative media. Maps become far more dynamic representations of spatial and temporal knowledge. A nice example is the project Droombeek, by Edward Mac Gillavry, who was also present this evening, and Peter Dubois.

In this project inhabitants of Roombeek, an area of the city Enschede which was destroyed in 2000 by a huge fireworks disaster, recount their memories and stories of their neighborhood. These stories are made available to others by taking a GPS-walk. A fourth change is the database structure of geographical knowledge captured in maps. We can now query items through maps. Most of these searches are about simple properties like categories of places and proximity, such as finding restaurants nearby. However while we still can’t search for sadness in New York (PDF 2,4 MB; Russell – Headmap Manifesto – p. 31), we are already awfully close.. Fifth, new cartographies alter our subjective experiences of space and place. For instance, locative media can inform a more aesthetic experience of space and mobility. Someone who is working on GPS-based cartography as a new form of landscape painting is Esther Polak, who also joined this evening – just back from a trip to Nigeria. And what about the fact that in many locative media views the ego is the center of the map? You no longer have to first find your position on the map. Rather, the environment revolves around you. Does this literally lead to a more ‘ego-centric’ worldview? Finally, maps are increasingly often used as a way to visualize and transfer increasingly complex datasets. Maps are becoming metaphors to represent information, and for thinking. An organization that has been doing this for while is Informationlab by ‘information architect’ Auke Touwslager, who also attended the evening (yes, good crowd present..). To summarize, under the influence of locative media mapping tends to shift from mostly objectifying representations to highly subjective, from general to thematic representations, and from visualizing topological rather than topographical information. I wanted to raise some more ‘political’ issues of these developments but – alas – time was running short… (I couldn’t even bring in half of the above).

It was interesting to see how the audience, and ‘old school geographer’ Ormeling, reacted to this new media story. Ormeling himself did not feel these developments had much to do with his profession as a cartographer, apart from being handy new instruments. This strikingly parallels the dominant reaction of another professional audience: architects and planners. New media technologies as instruments yes, but investigating the consequences of these technologies for the professional practice itself… no. In the audience, meanwhile, someone wondered in exasperation “this is al very nice but who actually wants to know all the time where their friends are?”. Indeed only one or two people raised their hands. Although the predominantly white middle-aged male audience perhaps might not exactly be representative of very active mobile media users, this question of course is a legitimate one. All talks about new representations of knowledge and new ‘participant audiences’ or ‘networked publics’ in spite, who are “we” (we – the people more or less professionally dealing with geo-locative media) actually representing in our talks and thoughts? The majority of people, at least during this evening, seem very skeptical about these developments. The discussion immediately turned to the pervasive influence of mobile media themselves in everyday life and all sorts of ethical discussions, rather than pausing for a moment to look at media developments and their influence on cartography. Too bad this somewhat fell of radar at the end of the evening. Luckily, columnist Jelle Reumer restored this by evoking the poetics of maps. Looking at maps above all brings up half-forgotten memories of the places one once was and where beautiful or sad things happened. Maps also stir the imagination about places one would perhaps never go. I thought Reumer’s short talk was a nice closure of the evening, which put matters in a broader perspective. Aside from their obvious differences (differences that do matter, as I’ve tried to show here), to what extend does it matter whether such imaginations occur by holding a map made of paper or by looking at a handheld screen?

(download as PDF >>)

How can architects relate to digital media?

The Mobile City keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’: outcomes and further thoughts

written by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal

Introducing the main questions

What do developments in digital media have to do with architecture? And how should architects and urbanists relate to developments in new media? The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) and Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA) invited The Mobile City to address that question for the yearly ‘Day of the Young Architect’, on November 7th 2009 in the NAi in Rotterdam. This day was themed ‘the virtual’, and was organized as part of the overarching ‘connectivity’ cluster during the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR).

We gladly accepted this challenge, since this very issue was one of the main reasons we founded The Mobile City two years ago. After all, as the boundaries between physical and digital spaces blur, this should have profound consequences not only for new media developers but also for those professionals who traditionally deal with physical spaces. We surely did not expect this to be already obvious for most architects. But the fact that only half of the audience raised their hands when asked by moderator JaapJan Berg whether architects should deal with digital media in their profession showed there is still some way to go.

This report contains the main argument of our talk. But it also presents some additional reflections, and is an attempt to take our argument further than we did at the NAi/BNA day. We address the following questions: what position can architects, planners and urbanists take in their design profession vis-a-vis new media? Why should they bother with new media in the first place? What are the challenges they face? And what are future directions and chances for these professions?

In answering these questions, we make a strong plea for an attitude of ‘critical engagement’. This posits architects should neither ignore nor completely embrace digital media. Rather we would urge them to think of themselves as designers who primarily shape social processes, and only second as designers who shape spatial forms. Which social processes underly new commissions? What kind of activities, social interactions or exclusions should a new project encourage or discourage? How can these be shaped through spatial forms? And what roles do digital media play in this? We think architects shouldn’t just build an urban screen just because you can, or the Kunsthaus in Graz has one too. Rather they should start by asking: what kind of social processes do we want to provoke or hope to avoid? Can an urban screen indeed contribute to these processes or will it disturb them? What other disciplines do we need to invite to the table to meaningfully program an urban screen so that it goes beyond mere window dressing and indeed enhances the project?

Architecture and new media

Now let us work out this argument in more detail. But first a small aside. Some might quickly object that our initial questions have already been superseded. After all, architects and urbanists have long embraced digital media in their professional practice. They have been quick to employ computers and other digital media technologies as instruments in the design process itself (computer-aided design), and to create new visualizations. Initially simply as an addition to- and replacement of hand-drawing and modeling. Later the processing power of computers was used to calculate new spaces that would otherwise not have been possible. This would lead to a second phase in the relationship between spatial design and new media, namely the creation of spatial forms that reflected the rise of the digital age. A new visual language emerged in spatial design that explored the semantics of new media. In addition, new media (and in particular ‘virtual reality’) were seen as a new spatial realm that could be shaped by a ‘virtual architecture’.

Yet we believe a new phase has ushered in. This phase is characterized by increasing overlap and integration of digital space and physical space. Rather than being a separate realm of their own (labelled by terms like cyberspace, virtual reality, digital domain, and so on), new media technologies – and mobile media in particular – have become an inseparable part of everyday life. Internet-enabled mobile phones, GPS navigation, entry cards with integrated RFID chips, CCTV cameras, media facades, and so on are embedded in the urban fabric (see our 2008 conference text).

We propose that this new phase impels architecture to relate to digital media in a new way, beyond merely using them as instruments, to represent their spatial logic in design, or to design for virtual worlds. We have seen three different attitudes towards the emerging hybrid city, that we will now briefly describe.

Continue reading

The second issue of the RMIT journal Second Nature is about “Games, Locative & Mobile Media”. I wrote a short article about urban games and their importance for the issues we address with The Mobile City.

In this article I discern five possible ‘levels’ to understand urban games: (1) the city is often used as a model to construct an architecture of computer and video games; (2) the city itself has historically been understood in multiple ways as a game or playground; (3) pervasive games take digital games out to the streets and bridge the digital-physical distinction; (4) (serious) games are used in the process of (re)building actual cities; (5) urban games are a metaphorical lens through which to look at utopian and dystopian futures of cities. For each of these ‘levels’ I raise some relevant questions.

You can read the article here >> or download a PDF of the article (1,6 MB).

There are a number of other interesting contributions. See the journal’s table of contents.

On November 6th 2009 The Mobile City organized the Sentient Rotterdam Workshop in collaboration with Mark Shepard. About 20 participants from varying disciplines came together to discuss the role of sentient technology in urban culture. Participants were divided in small groups of 4-5 people to work on a possible intervention in the city of Rotterdam that would make use of a sentient technology, and evoke discussions about its workings.

These projects did not have to be executable. Rather, the goal was to ‘design for debate’. The proposed interventions should be seen as ‘conversation pieces’. They should bring up important design issues with regard to urban media and urban culture in playful ways.

Designs for ubiquitous computing aims to make technologies disappear in the background of our daily lives, to become seamlessly integrated and invisible. With this approach on the other hand the purpose was to make visible the ideological and cultural ideas at work in the construction and appropriation of these technologies. What urban ideals and ideas about society are used as a point of departure in the design of urban media? And what alternatives could we imagine? (The original workshop brief can be found here )

The workshop took place at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, and was part of the International Architecure Biennale Rotterdam.

Below an overview of the four projects that were developed during the workshop. Continue Reading »

At certain points in the history of architecture and urban planning, the internal debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the boundaries of the discipline.

At those times, the hopes and fears found in the disputes between architects, policy makers, engineers and planners are extended to a broader discussion about urban and societal change. Then, the central issue is not merely how to solve a specific spatial problem with the help of new technology. Rather, the debate starts to revolve around its possible impact on urban society at large. What does this new technology mean for urban culture, what impact does it have on how we shape our identities and live together in the city?

When those questions emerge, Dutch philosopher René Boomkens argues, the professional debate has turned ‘philosophical’.

The exhibition ‘Toward the Sentient City’ – running at the Architectural League NY until November 7 2009 – can be understood as such a philosophical enterprise. On display are five commissioned projects that make use of ‘sentient technologies’ or ‘ubiquitous computing’ – technologies that are currently ‘coming of age’ and promise to change the way we experience the city.

Yet, this exhibit is no World Fair where we are to marvel at the new new things, born out of the brains of our smartest engineers, flaunted on shiny pedestals, stirring up our imagination, arousing our desire, promising us an ever better future. Nor is it a disciplinary affair where architects and media designers exchange ‘best practices’ of how to best make use of new sensing and actuating technologies.

Curator Mark Shepard wants to ‘raise questions rather than pose answers’. The goal is Continue Reading »

At Picnic I attended an interesting session called The City as an Interaction Platform that took this theme as its point of departure:

Cities have always been about providing frameworks of services to improve the quality of life for residents and businesses. How will social networks, mobile devices, reactive environments, and cloud-based data services transform the experiences of living in cities in the coming years? What new municipal infrastructure will evolve to meet the needs of citizens looking for the type of real time information and configurability they have come to expect from Internet applications?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crossmediaweek/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

It was interesting to see three completely different takes on these issues. First Ben Cerveny of Vurb sketched an optimistic view of the ‘cloud city’ – a future scenario in which citizens could get easy access to urban informatics and use those as the foundation for a blossoming civil society. Greg Skibiski of Sense Networks provided another optimist vision – be it based on a different paradigm – in which urban computing is used as the base of offering ever more personalized information and localization services for urbanites. Adam Greenfield however argued that when taken up in a certain way, the rise of urban computing might do urban culture more harm than good. What is at stake, he argued, are some of the essences of urban culture.

Ben Cerveny / Vurb

Cerveny’s argument is centered on the premise that the city has always been Continue Reading »

This year’s PICNIC (September 23-25 2009 in Amsterdam) had some really great sessions and speakers. The Mobile City couldn’t possibly attend everything. Therefore I will zoom in on two sessions that were particularly interesting for our themes. One on Wednesday Sept. 23, about augmented reality. And the other on Friday Sept. 25, about eco-mapping. In this post I report on the first.

augmented reality

Augmented reality (from now on: AR) adds one or more layers of – mostly visual – information to physical space. Other than Virtual reality (VR), which tries to supplant the everyday experience with an immersive virtual experience, AR’s ideal is to blend virtual information more or less seamlessly into what people are normally seeing. AR has evolved from clunky head-mounted displays, to glasses, to even integration with contact lenses. However, in actual practice information is now often projected on screens, e.g. the car windshield or on the most ubiquitous screen we carry with us all the time: the mobile phone. For a read-up on AR see Lev Manovich – “The Poetics of Augmented Space” (2005) (MS Word alert).

Under the name Augmented City Lab, Waag Society, 7scenes, and Layar organized a plenary morning session and afternoon workshop, moderated by Ronald Lenz (Waag Society & 7Scenes). Speakers in the plenary session were: Frank Kresin (Waag Society), Raimo van der Klein (Layar), Kevin Slavin (Area/Code), Rick Batelaan (City directorate for transport, Amsterdam), Ben Cerveny (Vurb).

Continue Reading »

In The Cybercities Reader (2004) Stephen Graham – at that time Professor of Urban Technology in Newcastle – bundles a great number of seminal texts about the intersections of digital media technologies and urban life. Some articles were written especially for this reader. Others were previously published. The book departs from the premisse that “[t]he so-called ‘information society’ is an increasingly urban society. The ‘digital age’ is an age which is dominated by cities and metropolitan regions to an extent that is unprecedented in human history” (p. 3). Thus the starting proposition of this book is “the irrefutable reality that the twenty-first century will be a century marked by both the deepening urbanisation of all parts of our planet and a growing reliance on fast-advancing information and communication technologies” (p. 22). In his introductory article Graham argues against two related ideas that were dominant between the 1960s and 1990s. The first is that the physical domain of cities and the digital domain of ICTs are largely separate realms. The second is that ICTs are a substitute for urban life, and undermine the city. Throughout the book the main argument is that ICTs and the global city are not substitutes but complementary, and often modify each other in qualitative new ways. In the competitive global economy, ICTs support specialization and concentration of ‘innovative milieux’ in urban centres, while the demand for ICTs is largely an urban affair, driven by growth of metropolitan regions.

First Graham sets out to tackle the “anything-anywhere-anytime dream” of ICTs as transcending urbanization. It was long held that new technologies would overcome the need for spatial proximity in cities, ushering a “post-urban age”. Graham distinguishes four strands of ‘post-urban’ thought. First, there have been utopian visions of Cyberspace as a parallel universe that would overcome the ballast of filthy material reality. Second are the pervasive ideas about the ‘death of distance’ and ‘friction-free capitalism’ thanks to ICTs, in which cities no longer played a significant role. Third are the disembodied hopes of Cyberlibertarians that ICTs would create inherently democratic and egalitarian communities without the restraints of (urban) geography. Fourth, there have been visions of new kinds of transparant citizenship and telepresence that would replace the ‘city of atoms’ with the ‘city of bits’.

Graham then forwards six weaknesses of these “anything-anywhere-anytime dreams”. 1) They are empirically wrong since they ignore actual trends of global urbanization and mobility. 2) They ignore the material geographies of ICTs, which consists of real wires, severs, satellites, towers, etc., and the unequal spread and socio-economic organization of ICTs throughout the world. 3) Theoretically, a weak spot is that they overgeneralize the ‘impact’ of technologies as being the same everywhere. 4) Another theoretical flaw is that over-stretching the binary opposition between ICTs and urban life grants too much power to ICTs for change, and underestimates existing physical practises of co-presence. Ideas about the city influence our perceptions and use of ICTs, just like the inverse. 5) On a political level, utopian visions of the liberating capabilities of ICTs act as a cover-up for neoliberalism and the proliferation of global inequalities. Not everyone benefits from ICTs. Rather than equalizing geography, (corporate) ICTs often exploit differences between places and regions. 6) A further political weakness is that these ideas imply that transformations of urban life are more a technical matter than a political one. The potential for policy innovations at urban, regional or national levels in shaping and harnessing ICT developments is underplayed.

In contrast to these technological determinist visions of technologies as replacing (substituting) urban life, most of the studies collected in this volume show a multitude of ‘remediations’ of ICTs and the city.

Continue Reading »

Mark Shepard is a media architect and researcher. His current research investigates the influence of mobile and pervasive media, communication and information technologies on architecture and urbanism. He is one of the organizers of the 2006 symposium on Architecture and Situated Technologies. This fall, for the Architectural League of New York, he curates the exhibition Toward the Sentient City. He is also one of the editors of The Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series

I have always considered you as one of the pioneers in the field of architecture, urbanism and location based media. How have you seen the discussions in this field develop over the last few years?

The discourse you mention has evolved significantly since I began working in the field in the late 90s, with many people contributing to its development. When Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz and I began planning the Situated Technologies symposium in the fall of 2005, we were initially focused on how Mark Weiser’s vision for ubiquitous computing might apply to cities: what happens when computing leaves the desktop and spills out into the streets and sidewalks of everyday urban space? We speculated that this would likely shape (and in some ways already was shaping) the way we inhabit the city and the choices we make there. Yet if computing was becoming embedded in and distributed throughout the material fabric of contemporary cities, we asked, why weren’t architects more involved in shaping these technologies and their applications for urban architecture? While architects had been exploring the possibilities of, say networked computing or cybernetic systems in the 1960s and 1970s, this interest began to wane in the 1980s. Weiser’s vision for ubicomp, which was formalized as a research agenda in the late 1980s at Xerox PARC in Paolo Alto, California, was one where computing and computers would recede to the background, and physical space and the social interactions that transpire there would come to the foreground. Computing was to become environmental. Computer scientists and media artists–each in different ways–seemed to grasp the implications of this early on. Where were the architects?

During the three months leading up to the symposium, the Institute for Distributed Creativity hosted an email discussion list where people from different fields along with the symposium participants and organizers framed a set of issues for discussion. One discussion thread revolved around the Interactive City exhibition accompanying ISEA 2006 and the Zero One Global Festival of Art on the Edge that was happening at that time in San Jose, California. Organized by Steve Dietz, Joel Slayton and Eric Paulos, Interactive City was an important exhibition that brought together many media artists and creative technologists exploring the intersections of art, technology and urban space. For the Situated Technologies symposium, the idea was to bring together people from a range of different disciplines–architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media study, performance studies, computer science and engineering–and attempt to find a common language by which we might identify and address critical issues concerning the technological mediation of urban life. One aspect of this had to do with avoiding default terms like “users”, “public space” and “technology,” for example. As Usman Haque, one of the symposium participants, proposed: Let’s not think of Users, but rather of People, Participants, Players, P-Individuals, all kinds of things that begin with the letter “P”. Let’s not talk about Technology, let’s talk about Instruments. And let’s not talk about Public Space, but let’s talk about the Commons. This was one of many threads that were explored over those three days in New York.

Now, following the symposium, there was a sense among many participants that Continue Reading »

I attended the Digital Cities 6 Workshop this week in State College Pennsylvania (put together by Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano and Hiromitsu Hattori, thanks for that!).

The workshop started from the notion that with the advent of urban informatics, it is now possible to collect large collections of data about the behaviour of people within the city. However:

… a large quantity of detail does not necessarily result in a great quality (and clarity) of meaning. How do we analyse this data to better understand the ‘city’ as an organism? How do the cells of the city cluster to form tissue and organs, and how do various systems communicate and interact with each other? And, recognising that we ourselves are cells living in cities as active agents, how do we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes we observe in order to plan, design and develop more livable cities?

Although the presentations were varied, many presentations especially addressed the notion of urban public space: How is it characterized? What are the changing dynamics? How do we animate public spaces with new media technologies? These questions were also related to issues of agency and power (who gets access to public spaces on what conditions?). Another issue that came up was a contrast in approaches. On the one hand, some architects and governments apply urban media and ubicomp in a top down manner, designing ubiquitous computing services with predefined capabilities. This was contrasted to an open source approach where users (or participants) could take part in the design of services. Or where they would be provided with tools rather than closed and finished products.

Climate on the Wall & CO2nfesssion/CO2mmitment

Jonas Fritsch (also representing co-author Martin Brynskov) from The Center for Digital Urban Living presented two projects took part in staging in the Danish City Aarhus: Climate on the Wall, an interactive media façade where people could write their climate slogans with speech bubbles on the wall of an exhibition building. And CO2nfesssion/CO2mmitment, a video booth in which people could tell about their bad climate habits and also commit themselves to a more active fight for the climate. These videos were then broadcasted on screens attached to bus stops throughout the city.

I found the Climate on the Wall a really impressive example of an interactive mediafacade, based on the idea of ‘magnetic poetry’ (as found on your fridge door), where you can build sentences by dragging words in a particular order: ‘If a person stopped [somehwere along the projection], the word above the person would grow and turn into a speech bubble. This word could now be dragged to a different part of the facade. In this way, people were able to create and manipulate sentences relating to climate change.’

Both projects were meant as Continue Reading »