The Ideas and Ideals in Urban Media Theory

Over the last decade a new set of media, technologies, software, and cultural practices has emerged that changes how we experience the city and shape our urban culture. They range from the mobile phone to GPS navigation; from iPhone apps to “smart”systems that optimize traffic circulation; from listening to an alternative soundtrack on an mp3 player to using a smart phone to locate friends or nearby sites that matchesone’s interests.

There is no single name or discourse for these technologies. Labels range from“ubiquitous computing” to “locative media,” from “ambient intelligence” to “theInternet of things,” and from “the sentient city” to “urban informatics.”1 Nor do thesetechnologies have a single point of origin or trajectory of deployment—althoughmany do have their genesis in military research programs.2 Some are rolled out bygovernment agencies that want to bring order to and control urban space. Others aremarketed by profit-driven telecommunication companies trying to provide their customerswith personalized services. Sometimes community workers take up the technology,hoping it can enhance mutual understanding between different culturalgroups. There are even artists who work with these very technologies to critique theirrole in promoting a consumer based society or bringing about a “society of control.”And then there are the actual users of the technologies that often appropriate themin slightly different ways than intended by their designers or marketers.

What all these urban media—the catchall term that I will use in this chapter—havein common is that they no longer adhere to the anything-anytime-anywhere-newmediaparadigm of the 1990s.3 Rather, they are centered on location-sensing capacitiesand aim to intervene in or add to a specific here-and-now. Their exact interventionsdiffer, but as the examples given above show, urban media are making deep inroadson a diverse range of activities of place making—be they the top-down deploymentby government agencies or the bottom-up appropriation by urbanites in their everydaylife.4

In relation to the main theme of this book—the opportunity and challenges forsocial participation and engagement—two different ways of theorizing urban mediaurge themselves on us. One would be to focus on the affordances of urban media andwhat these could mean for civic life.5 The main question then would be, How doesthe utilization of these urban media—as the outcome of an intricate process of designand appropriation—reshape our urban society?

In this chapter, however, I would like to turn that question more or less around.Rather than looking at the way technology reshapes urban culture, I want to investigatehow ideas and ideals about the city also reshape technology. What role do ourideas of what a city should be play in the design and appropriation of urban media?Technological and Urban ImaginariesThe shaping and appropriation of technology in relation to society represents acomplex process that involves many different actors—from designers to governmentpolicymakers and investors, as well as users—all of whom have their own preferencesand interests. The material characteristics of the technologies themselves factor intothis relationship as well. Here I want to point to one specific yet important elementin these complex assemblages: the performative role of what I will call the urbantechnologicalimaginary.

As Ann Galloway has convincingly shown in her. “A Brief History of the Future ofUrban Computing and Locative Media” (2008), it is impossible to reduce the introductionof new technologies to a single idea by a single actor or institution that is rationallyrolled out, step by step. Galloway points to different “forums for negotiating”that play a part in deciding “what we want and what we don’t want,” among whichshe numbers open markets, institutional regulation (courts, government agencies,NGOs), special-interest groups, and grassroots activism.In this negotiating process, Galloway explains, expectations play a very importantpart. Differing visions on technology—deliberately utopian or dystopian—are utteredin this process, and these may become performative. These visions, hopes, and fears—rational or irrational, fact based or emotionally appealing—may directly affect governmentpolicy decisions, design criteria, investment by venture capitalists, people’sstances toward a new product, and so on. Similarly, Flichy has called these performativeexpectations the “technological imaginary” (Flichy 1999; Marvin 1988).In the field of urban development we find similar “imaginaries” at work. Is not thewhole history of urban planning—from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities to Disney’sgated community, Celebration, in Florida or Korea’s “smart and sustainable city,”Songdo—a history of (sometimes misguided) attempts to turn imaginary urban utopiasinto forms and volumes, bricks and mortar? “Urban imaginaries,” writes Jude Bloomfield(2006, 46), “focus on sensory and emotional experience and practices, on theimprint of collective memory on imagining how the city could be, on the different,often conflicting social constructions of the city’s future.”

In the development of urban media the technological imaginary and the urbanimaginary come together to form a technourban imaginary. Central issues in thedebates in which the technourban discussions are shaped include: What exactly is acity? How do we expect it to function? Who has which rights? How should we ascitizens—with all our differences—live together in an urban society? How can we usetechnology to realize these ideas? Or how do new technologies jeopardize these ideals?More formally, the technourban imaginary is shaped around both ideas of what acity is (Is a city primarily a bunch of infrastructure or should it be understood essentiallyas a community?) as well as around urban ideals (What kind of community dowe want the city be; how and to whose advantage should the infrastructure bemanaged?). Technourban imaginaries often combine these two framings in a particularapproach of what a city should be.These particular technourban imaginaries play a role in the design of many urbanmedia technologies. Sometimes they are made explicit in the discussion around theirimplementation. At other times they are left implicit. Often they relate to particulardisciplinary framings of technology and society, and they almost always build on (orexplicitly want to counter) historical framings of urban culture. In the rest of thischapter I would like to bring out a few of these technourban imaginaries at work inthe design and appropriation of urban media and investigate how they relate to participationand citizen engagement.

U-City

The first technourban imagination I want to discuss here can be found in a designapproach called “u-City.” This term—short for “ubiquitous city”—has been coined bythe Korean government in an attempt to promote an industry around the design of“smart cities.” The central idea is that urban computing should make urban life morecomfortable, efficient, and easier to manage. The focus is on systems of smart trafficmanagement, or smart objects such as tires that give off warnings when the pressureis too low. Another interest is the development of personalized services like receivinga message when your children have arrived safely at school. Hwang (2009) calls thisidea “The City as a Service.”

We see similar promises in other discourses on ubiquitous computing, uttered atconferences, through advertising, and in professional publications, where new technologiesare brought to the market to either increase efficiency or help personalize thecity through friend finders or recommendation systems. The goal is to put people incontrol of their surroundings. Ubiquitous computing, it is argued, will create “seamlessexperiences” where computers operate calmly in the background.6This particular way of understanding the city can be linked to a historic modernistidea of urban technology in which the city is envisioned as a collection of efficientlymanaged, ever-improving technological infrastructures whose successive rollout willbring us a better life. In their book Splintering Urbanism (2001), Stephen Graham andSimon Marvin trace this idea back to the mid-nineteenth century and connect it withthe scientific positivism of that era. Dazzling new technologies like electricity or moremundane ones such as sewer systems would lead the way to a better life. Ambitiousmunicipalities, they write, wanted their cities to be a “blaze of light,” “rearing out ofthe darkness of the surrounding non-electrified regions” (p.46).7These discussions on the benefits of the new infrastructures were held in concertwith the first debates on the ills of the modern industrial metropolises that gave birthto the discipline of urban planning. This new professional field hoped to solve socialproblems like slumming, bad hygienic conditions, and the threat of social revolt bythe emerging underclass by bringing a new unitary spatial order to the city. Howexactly that was to be carried out varied according to which urban imaginary theseplanners subscribed to. Ebenezer Howard envisioned garden cities with a cooperativepolitical and economic structure, whereas Baron de Haussmann wanted to bring orderto the existing city with his broad boulevards that simultaneously were to increasehygiene as well as the authorities’ ability to assert military control over the masses.At the same time, and on an important point, the u-city discourse of the twentyfirstcentury also differs from the modernist infrastructural movement of the nineteenthcentury. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin point out that in the modernindustrial city, the ideals were universal access to infrastructure networks such as theelectrical grid or the road system. These infrastructure networks integrated all citizensinto the same technological system on the same level. Perhaps the most importantaspect of Haussmann’s urban imaginary, they state, was the idea to use infrastructuralinterventions to create a unitary city.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, utilities and infrastructure are nolonger seen as public services equally accessible by all, or as integrators that hold allthe smaller elements together in a bigger system. Rather they are seen as marketablecommodities sold to specific consumer groups. The modernist unitary ideal has givenway to a post-Fordist and neoliberal one. For instance, a “smart toll road” will adaptits pricing scheme to demand: the busier the traffic, the higher the toll.Such technological systems might make the city more efficient and tailored toindividuals, yet these systems also address their users very differently. Whereas themodern infrastructure addresses its users as equal citizens, these personalized infrastructuralservices address them as “individual customers.” This could create newforms of inequality. Graham (2005) speaks of an emergence of “Software Sorted Geographies”and Lieven De Cauter (2004) warns of the emergence of a “Capsular Society.”Such developments could even create a shift in the relations between citizens and thecity. Do people still see themselves as citizens—with all the rights and duties involved?Or are they starting to think of themselves as customers, which sets up a differentrelationship between the “customer” and the owner of the system as well as betweenusers themselves?8

Although this critique is valuable, driving it to extremes also risks overlookingopportunities that dynamic pricing systems and flexible services may allow for civicengagement. The problem that Graham and Marvin have diagnosed is not so muchthe technology itself, but the urban imaginary of a neoliberal city of services. Yetcouldn’t these same infrastructural technologies also be deployed in the service ofother urban imaginaries—for instance, an environmentally sustainable city?Take for instance the Smart Cities project at the MIT Media Lab. The way the cityis framed is again as a collective of infrastructures: “Buildings and cities can usefullybe compared to living bodies. They have skeleton and skin systems that provide shelterand protection to their inhabitants, metabolic systems that process inputs of materialsand energy to support daily life, and now artificial nervous systems consisting ofsensors, networks, and ubiquitously embedded computational capacity.”9 Yet here theapplication of ubiquitous computing is applied to making the city environmentallysustainable. The project includes a design for a new city car that can be rented througha dynamic pricing system. Popular routes and times of day are more expensive thanother times and routes. The goal here is not to maximize profit or to provide exclusiveservices to the rich, but rather to allocate scarce resources such as natural resourcesand mobility as efficiently as possible.

Urban Flaneurs and Situationists

The second technourban imaginary that I want to discuss here is one often found inthe world of locative media art (Tuters and Varnelis 2006). In this imaginary, two oldurban tropes play an important role: Walter Benjamin’s flaneur and Guy Debord’sSituationist International movement.Over the last decade, many artists and designers have criticized the commercialapplications of urban media, such as those based on the ideal of the u-city. They pointout that the urban-technological imaginary of a personalized city tailored to one’sprivate preferences, while blocking out undesired places or people, endangers some ofthe essences of their own urban ideal: a city in which play, serendipity, and curiosityplay an important role.

On the centennial celebration of the Futurist Manifesto, American researcher EricPaulos published the “Manifesto of Open Disruption and Participation” (2009), whichmade the case for such a conceptualization of urban culture: “We claim that the successfulubiquitous computing tools, the ones we really want to cohabitate with, willbe those that incorporate the full range of life experiences. We want our tools to singof not just productivity but of our love of curiosity, the joy of wonderment, and thefreshness of the unknown.” In the domain of locative media art10 we have seen anumber of experiments that match Paulos’s call and have turned the urban imaginaryof efficiency and personalization inside out. The project You Are Not Here—A DislocativeTourism Agency, for instance, lets its participants experience the city space in anextended way. In this project a map of Baghdad is projected on the city grid of NewYork and participants are invited to make their way to a number of “Baghdad touristspots” through the streets of New York. When they arrive at the corresponding locationin Manhattan, they will find a sticker with a phone number. When dialed, theywill hear a story about Baghdad.

The recent interest in “psychogeographic” artist interventions like this one is alsoapparent in art festivals that have emerged over the last few years, such as the Confluxfestival in New York that wants to investigate “everyday urban life through emergingartistic, technological and social practice. . . . Over the course of the long weekendthe sidewalks are literally transformed into a mobile laboratory for creative action.With tools ranging from traditional paper maps to high-tech mobile devices, artistspresent walking tours, public installations and interactive performance.”11As Dimitris Charitos, Olga Paraskevopoulou, and Charalampos Rizopoulos (2008)have pointed out, projects like “You Are Not Here” clearly reflect the ideals of the1950s–1960s Situationist International. This group of artists, writers, and architectscentered around Guy Debord worked to counter the rationalist city models tailoredto the consumerist logic of the “society of spectacle” with an approach centered onsubjective experiences of the city, including areas and experiences marginalized in thedominant way of thinking about urban culture.12

Williams, Robles, and Dourish (2009) have pointed out that the Parisian poetBaudelaire and the German philosopher Walter Benjamin also form an importantsource of inspiration for many urban media practitioners. Here the image of the“flaneur” is often invoked as the “solitary and thoughtful stroller” that wandersaround the city casting his glance at the turbulence of the crowds, picking up itsidiosyncrasies as seeds for his own thoughts and feelings. Or as Kracauer has put it:“To the flaneur the sight of the city were like dreams to a hashish smoker” (quotedin McQuire 2008, 42). Williams, Robles, and Dourish (2009) note a similarity betweenthis fin de siècle mode of being and a design approach encouraged by Paulos andBeckman, who write: “We marvel at mundane everyday experiences and objects thatevoke mystery, doubt, and uncertainty. . . . How can we design technology to supportsuch wonderment?” (quoted in Williams, Robles, and Dourish 2009, 7)?

Although a design approach based on the principles of wonder, surprise, confusion,or dislocation may indeed enrich the experience of the city, it is not without its critics.Williams and colleagues (2009) find the position of the flaneur too detached. Onewonders from a safe distance about urban phenomena, but the flaneur is never reallyengaged or called into action. Flanerie “privilege[s] passive voyeurism and imaginationtending towards illusion. The alternate mobilities, inhabitations and appropriationsalive in the city (homelessness and immigration, among other things) are left for examinationby someone else” (Williams, Robles, and Dourish 2009, 7). Kazys Varnelis (2009)has attacked the rise of interest in Situationism on similar grounds by suggesting “Situationism’sfatal flaw is that . . . its goal was always to valorize individual experience overthe collective.” There is thus a fine line of which designers working from this approachshould be aware. While indeed locative media could aim to provide alternative experiencesin the city, there is also the issue of how to truly engage the user.

The City as an Operating System

The third technourban imaginary I would like to bring out makes use of a metaphorin which the city is compared with computer systems. Here, the city is understood asan “operating system” or an “information processing system.” This approach to citiesunderstands them as complex systems in which the city mainly functions as a marketplacewhere people exchange goods, information, and cultural practices.13Agency is usually located at the level of the individual who is driven by his or herown goals and desires, yet on an aggregate level particular customs, legal codes, orinstitutions may emerge over time, thus hardening specific practices and power relationsin stone, law, or today, software code. Once emerged, these same customs, codes,or institutions may enable or restrain future actions and goals of urbanites.14 Theyform the kernel of a civil society, so to speak.

Although the metaphor of the operating system itself is new, this way of framingthe city also has its roots in earlier debates on urban culture. It is for instance relatedto the thoughts of Chicago School researcher Louis Wirth. In the late 1930s, in hisinfluential article “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938), he laid out how the density ofthe city leads to cultural specialization, a spatial segregation of lifestyles, and a breakdownof rigid social structures.

Now, critics claim, a new urban operating system is on the rise. Wirth’s OS wasbased on a combination of high density and the spatial proximity of different groupsof urbanites who, for the most part, remain strangers to each other. The “urban OS”of our time is written in software code, can sense individual actions in real time, andcan aggregate these into data that can be used to actuate all sorts of actions. This,Anthony Townsend (2000, p5) claims, changes the metabolism of urban life. Forinstance, through the mobile phone “decision-making and management of everydaylife is increasingly decentralized,” which means that the city system becomes “morecomplex and less predictable.” Townsend call this new complex system the “real-timecity” “in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously[and at a distance].”

This idea of the city lies behind much of the work of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab. Inmany projects, the labs make use of the tracking affordances of urban media, tracingthe whereabouts of people, city buses, or other objects throughout the city. This datais fed into a system that aggregates this information in real time and can be used indifferent contexts. For instance, public transport could be adjusted to real-time movementsof people in the city. Here the city is conceived as an operating system that—through various real-time sensor networks—generates all sorts of (aggregated) datastreams. One of the goals of urban media designers is then to build relevant services—for either consumers or citizens—that make use of and build on these real-time datastreams.

In the future these developments may lead to semantic knowledge bases. In anarticle on the SENSEable City WikiCity project, the researchers project a future inwhich you can ask your urban informatics device questions like “what is the bestplace—with regard to my current location, weather forecast, environmental conditionsand other factors—to fly a kite today” (Calabrese, Kloeckl, and Ratti 2009)?Now that may seem like a somewhat trivial affair, but of course this depends onthe sort of questions you might use to personalize the city. Change the questions, andthis approach may even empower new groups. Over the last few years, reports havesurfaced about African farmers who receive market prices at different locations fortheir produce by SMS and so are able to negotiate better prices. Small shopkeepers—again in Africa—order their supplies by SMS rather than driving to bigger cities, or usethe phone to schedule appointments with clients. People who work in the informalor semiformal economies can organize their life and their use of the city more efficientlyand increase their knowledge of social processes and market conditions.

The City as a Commons

A fourth technourban imaginary frames the city as a commons—a set of resources thatbelong to the collective of citizens. Technology is then brought in to provide tools forcitizens to collectively take care of their city. Examples are the use of wikis to allowfor collective planning exercises (see Schuilenburg and De Jong 2006), or the use ofreputation systems that allow for trust in collective action with unknown others (seeRheingold 2002).

Artist Usman Haque’s installation Natural Fuse is an interesting example that bothillustrates and questions this approach. Participants in Natural Fuse receive a flowerbox equipped with watering equipment as well as with a bottle of vinegar. They alsoreceive an electrical appliance such as a lamp, radio, or fan. The flower boxes andelectrical appliances are linked to each other and (via the Internet) to the similar setsbelonging to other users.

The central idea is that the CO2 digestion of the plants in the network offsets theCO2 emissions caused by the use of the electrical appliances. If all the participants inthe network use less energy than their plants compensate for, the system will waterthe plants and they will grow. However, if all users in the system consume more energythan can be compensated for, the system will start to kill plants by releasing thevinegar in the soil of the plants.This means that if individuals use too much energy, other people’s plants will bekilled. On the other hand, if they choose to conserve energy, that means someoneelse in the system may make use of the CO2-absorption capacities of their plants,allowing others to temporarily use more energy. A switch on the set illustrates thischoice. Users can set their system to “selfish” and thus consume more energy thanthey offset with their plants, or they can set the switch to “selfless.”Natural Fuse thus turns the energy management into a commons—a space andresource shared by and accessible to all participants. The idea of the commons is basedon the old British custom of the communal pasture where all herdsmen in the communitywere allowed to graze their cattle.

However, the collective management of a commons runs at a great risk. It will onlywork if participants are willing to cooperate and allow for mutual accommodation. Ifparticipants only follow their own rational self-interest, the commons risks overgrazing.As Garrett Hardin (1968) has written, “The rational herdsman concludes that theonly sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. Andanother. . . . Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compelshim to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited.”Can we thus conceive of an urban media system that promotes the collective wellbeing?Could we conceive of some sort of peer-to-peer governance model that couldprevent overuse of scarce resources?

This is (as I have demonstrated elsewhere) the question that Natural Fuse addresses;it illustrates the opportunities of an “urban energy commons” as well as the problemof the tragedy that bears the same name. It challenges our thinking about the viabilityof a networked urban commons. Yet it does not provide any definite answers: Wouldcreating awareness through direct feedback mechanisms about the impact of rationalselfish behavior be able to prevent it? Or would we instead need complex reputationsystems? Or perhaps sentient bookkeeping systems in which our allotted ratios arekept or traded? Can we do this through peer-to-peer technologies, or do we needcentral institutions that act as trusted third parties (De Waal 2009a)?

The City as a Community of Strangers

The next technourban imaginary that I would like to bring out is the idea of the cityas a community of strangers. Since the rise of the modern industrial metropolis, theoristssuch as Simmel, Sennett, Jacobs, and Lofland have pointed out that the maincharacteristic of urban life is to be surrounded by strangers who will remain strangers.Yet at the same time, one has to share resources and live together with these strangersand relate to their differences in some way or other (Simmel 1969; Sennett 1969;Lofland 1973; Jacobs [1961] 2000; McQuire 2008).Both Jacobs and Lofland have demonstrated how the working of the city streetscan build trust between strangers. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobsdescribes how out of the many trivial repeated interactions of everyday life, a senseof trust between strangers is built up over time. Waiting together at the bus stop,exchanging small talk in the corner store, it is these kinds of interactions throughwhich people become “familiar strangers” to each other. Jacobs states that “the sumof such casual, public contact at a local level . . . is a feeling for the public identity ofpeople, a web of public respect and trust and a resource in time of personal or neighborhoodneed” (p. 67).

Jacobs has been critiqued for a nostalgic take on her cozy West Village city life,whereas such mechanisms in the city at large were thought to be impossible to maintain.Social geographers and urban sociologists such as Blokland and Ray (2008) haveconvincingly shown that such public familiarity is indeed a lot harder to find todaythan a few decades ago (also see Blokland 2005). Urbanites have become more mobileand their patterns of daily life are less synchronous, decreasing their opportunities forrepeated interaction.

In the domain of urban media there is, however, a large interest in remediating ortranslating the idea of public familiarity with the help of digital media. In a way socialnetworks like Twitter and MySpace do allow a sense of public familiarity even thoughone is not in the same place or same time. On the other hand, it could be argued thatsuch networks are mainly made up of people who already know each other and thusdoes not do much for the building up of public familiarity—even though it is technicallypossible to “follow” or “befriend” strangers based on a geographic location.Perhaps one of the best-known examples that builds on this idea of public familiarityis the project “Familiar Strangers” and the Jabberwocky application that came outof it. Jabberwocky is a mobile phone application that allows users to see if any familiarstrangers are around—people that one has encountered before at other times andplaces. The authors of the paper hope that in this way a sense of feeling at home oreven trust and solidarity can be promoted: “We believe that the extensions to thisrelationship using small personal wireless objects and applications on existing mobilephones can allow individuals to more acutely gauge their social relationship to people,places and the crowds around them over time. We also believe that such tools arecapable of encouraging community solidarity, even transitory solidarity” (Paulos andGoodman 2004, 3).

The City as a Public Sphere

The last technourban imaginary I would like to discuss is the idea of the city as anactive public sphere. This imaginary too departs from the notion that the city consistsof strangers who must live together: the focus is now on how the city allows them tobe confronted with each other, to exchange ideas, and to debate the future of the city.Often this ideal is juxtaposed with the suburban ideal of homogeneity. Urban citizensamong others, Richard Sennett claims, should not retreat to their comfort zones, butinstead should embrace the complexities, differences, and conflicts that urban lifebrings about (Sennett 1970, 1977, 1990, 2001).

Over the last decade we have seen many urban media projects that in one way oranother seem to answer Sennett’s call (albeit sometimes indirectly). There is forinstance a whole range of geoannotation projects that allow citizens to mark up urbanspace with their own ideas, histories, or thoughts. Often the hope is expressed thatthese projects will lead to an exchange of insights.In an article in the 2006 Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Lily Shirvanee expects that thesharing of experiences through locative media could lead to what she has called “socialviscosity.” The stories collected could work as crystallization points for (imagined) communitiesor starting points for processes of exchange, deliberation, or contestation.Shirvanee suggests that “this viscosity of space is perceived as a bond that may exist notonly between people with established relationships who can find each other ‘on thestreet’ in a mobile context, but also between strangers, thereby inspiring a new communityand, possibly, creating the potential for a more democratized public space.”An example is the project Textales that uses an urban screen to bring about a sitefor contestation in the city. The initiators organized workshops in which participantswere asked to make pictures of political issues that affected life in their neighborhood—such as housing inequity. These pictures were shown on an urban screen inthe neighborhood and passersby could comment on the pictures by sending a textmessage that would be displayed on the screen. In an article on the project Annayand Strohecker (2009) directly refer to theories on democracy and deliberation andhope that a project like Textales can help to form “issue publics” around particularconcerns in which a “collective epistemology” might arise “that helps us to considerour own viewpoints and those of our fellow citizens.”

Conclusion

I have now shown six technourban imaginaries at work in both the design and appropriationof urban media. This list is not meant to exhaustive. Rather I wanted to bringout a number of different and sometimes conflicting perspectives on what the cityshould be and how technology is thought to bring that ideal about. I wanted to showthat whereas we often focus on the impact of technology on urban culture, the reverseis also true. Many urban media are purposely designed to remediate traditional ideasabout urban culture.

Also, the neat categorization I have made here serves an analytic purpose only.Several of these technourban imaginaries could be combined. In fact, it could beargued that projects whose main focus can be reduced to a single framing of what acity is are often problematic. For instance, advocates of the city as a set of personalizedinfrastructures might miss important points about the fact that a city is also a communityand thus contributes to the balkanization of urban culture.

Similarly, many art projects that do address the city as a (political) community havetheir own critics. Many of these projects are noncommittal. Their duration is oftenshort, their audience is a small self-selected crowd, and only seldom is there follow-upthat might turn these art projects into a more sustainable addition to the experienceof the city. Could they be integrated in the infrastructure of the city in a more durableway? In short, designers of urban media would do best to address several framings ofthe city at once. This criticism—although important—does not mean that these artprojects are meaningless. What many of them at least do well is tease out the technourbanimaginaries at work in the shaping of urban media. These can be valuablecontributions to the general debate.

Only by bringing out these often-implicit urban ideals can we engage in the discussionof how these urban media can best serve society. That is what I have tried to dohere. By highlighting the urban ideas and ideals at work in discussions on urbanmedia, I hope to show that the process in which these technologies are designed andappropriated is an open one. And even though one or two of these urban-technologicalimaginaries may dominate the debate and design of new services, there are alsoalternatives.

NotesThis contribution builds on and elaborates some of my earlier work on this theme, especially De Waal 2009b. I also build on the notion of latent ideals in urban media as described in Williams, Robles, and Dourish 2009.1. See for instance Galloway 2008 for an extensive list of different labels.

2. An important impetus for the development of urban media was the decision of the U.S. militaryin 2000 to make an unscrambled version of the GPS system available to the general public.From then on, the signal has been accurate enough to pinpoint users of GPS devices on streetlevel rather than somewhere in a neighborhood. Many Location Based Media now make use ofthis location-sensing technology.

3. This shift from “placelessness” to “situatedness” has been theorized by Tuters and Varnelis2006, Varnelis 2008, as well as Shepard and Greenfield 2007. On a formal level, Mark Tuters andKazys Varnelis (2006, http://networkedpublics.org/locative_media/beyond_locative_media) havepointed out two main characteristic affordances of what they call “locative media” that enablethis shift from “placelessness” to “situatedness.” One is the capacity to annotate places, “virtuallytagging the world.” The other affordance has a phenomenological quality that enables “tracingthe action of the subject in the world.”

4. As Lefebvre has shown, the experience of place is always a negotiation between the physicaltop-down design and ordering of space by governments, architects and developers, and thepersonal trajectory of its inhabitants—their history, memories, and symbolic interpretations ofthe space. Urban media can thus be understood as an extra layer somewhere between Lefebvre’stop-down representation of space and his bottom-up representational space.

5. Hutchby (2001) has defined affordances as the “functional and relational aspects which framewhile not determining the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object. In this waytechnologies can be understood as artefacts which may be both shaped by and shaping of thepractices humans use in interaction with, around and through them.” The term affordances“stress[es] that the range of possibilities for interpretation and action is nowhere near as openfor either ‘writers’ or ‘readers’ as the technology as text metaphor implies. . . . We have to acceptthat technological artefacts do not amount simply to what their users make of them; what ismade of them is accomplished in the interface between human aims and the artefact’s affordances”(p. 450).

6. Mark Weiser’s influential article “The Computer of the 21st Century” (1991) and his publicationco-authored with Seely Brown, Designing Calm Technology (1995), are often referred to inthis debate. See also Anne Galloway’s (2008, 113) take on the history of ubicomp, in which sheexplains how “the desire to have computing so seamlessly and efficiently embedded in our dailylives is grounded in a profoundly utopian vision connected to cultural and historical notions oftechnological ‘progress.’” At the same time she argues that Weiser’s claim has often been misunderstood.Although he argues for an “invisible” technology, he also stresses the importance ofseamful experiences.

7. Graham and Marvin (2001) connect this positivist outlook on urban infrastructures withbroader social developments. For instance, the urban reform movement inspired by this idea“was led by sanitarians, engineers, urban planners, and the growing middle class” and they“equated the efficiency of infrastructural systems with the quality of the entire civilization”(p. 44). The regulation of water for instance played an important part. The scientific discoveryof bacteria and the privatization of bodily hygiene played was important for the ideas about thesanitized, hygienic city, and the emergence of underground waterducts.

8. See also my earlier contribution about this debate (De Waal 2009b).

9. William Mitchell, Welcome!, http://cities.media.mit.edu/.

10. The term “locative media” started to surface around 2003 as a label for art projects that usedlocation-based technologies such as GPS receivers. Genealogies of locative media often trace theterm to an artistic workshop organized in 2003 by Marc Tuters and Karlis Kalnins together withthe RICX Media Centre in Latvia (see http://locative.x-i.net for a description of the workshop).The phrase “locative media” was initially invoked to demarcate this technological art practicefrom two other fields. The first was the artistic practice of “net.art” that focused on the placelessexperience of cyberspace through the computer terminal. Locative media art was to break downthe barrier between the physical world and a virtual world. It aimed to use technology to connectthe database world of the Internet with the experience of real places. Second, the term “locativemedia” claimed the use of these technologies for art practice rather than for commercial servicesthat had started to develop under the name of “location-based services.”

11. See the Conflux website, “About,” http://confluxfestival.org/2009/about/.

12. Others also point out links with Constant’s infrastructural urban utopia New Babylon orArchigram’s advocacy for using technology to empower people to shape their own urban infrastructure(McQuire 2008). Similarly, the experimental interest of locative media art can also belinked to the vocabulary of 1960s architects such as Team Ten, who “were the first to seek a kindof town planning and architecture that could bring about pleasure, uncertainty, relaxation . . .and even disorder” (Rouillard 2007, 17).

13. See for example Anthony Townsend (2009, xxiii): “In the pre-electronic era, face-to-faceproximity and the clustering of functions was the most efficient means of replicating, transmittingand searching for information in social and economic networks. Over time, new toolsaugmented this function, but in a sense the city itself is our original greatest informationtechnology.”

14. This vision is brought forward in De Landa 2006.

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More about the Book:

From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen

Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement

Order the book: Amazon

Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs

Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites, have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is available for mobile phones, where it can be integrated with such device-specific features as sensors and GPS. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen examines how this increasingly open, collaborative, and personalizable technology is shaping not just our social interactions but new kinds of civic engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. It offers analyses and studies from around the world that explore how the power of social technologies can be harnessed for social engagement in urban areas.

Chapters by leading researchers in the emerging field of urban informatics outline the theoretical context of their inquiries, describing a new view of the city as a hybrid that merges digital and physical worlds; examine technology-aided engagement involving issues of food, the environment, and sustainability; explore the creative use of location-based mobile technology in cities from Melbourne, Australia, to Dhaka, Bangladesh; study technological innovations for improving civic engagement; and discuss design research approaches for understanding the development of sentient real-time cities, including interaction portals and robots.

About the Authors

Marcus Foth, Founder and Director of the Urban Informatics Research Lab, is Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology.

Laura Forlano is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University.

Christine Satchell is Senior Research Fellow at the Urban Informatics Research Lab.

Martin Gibbs is a Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.

Starting point for our conversation was a theme that was very familiar for us at The Mobile City:

Our cities are increasingly becoming data-rich environments. The ecology of apps, visualizations and location-based or context-aware media and information systems generated around urban data environments, have the potential to radically transform the way we understand, inhabit and build our cities.

In addressing this theme, the EJC posed a crucial question, that is also one of our main research questions: ‘How do we design infrastructures that help support active citizen engagement?’ Or in other words: how do we engage new media technologies in urban design in such a way that they make our cities more social rather than just more hi-tech?

I was particularly impressed by the way Eymund Diegel of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science addressed this question during his talk. The Public Laboratory is an initiative that is inspired by the citizen science movement, and they develop open-source tools and practices that allow communities to ‘identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns.What is further important is that these tools are inexpensive and accessible, and have a high hands-on “Do-It-Yourself”-ethics.

One of these accesible technologies Diegel showed us was a methodology for balloon and kite mapping. It’s a very basic approach: connect a cheap digital camera to a kite or a balloon and you are able to do your own aerial photography. Why you want to do that? Google maps is great if you live in the US or Europe, Diegel explained. But in countries like Peru there are no street-level maps. And besides, these Google maps do not allow you to collect information on issues that you yourself find important. For instance, the balloon and kite mapping technology was used to map oil spills on the Us Gulf Coast, and in Lima Peru to to measure the health of vegetated areas. The data thus assembled can be used in two ways.

First, it gives activists access to data they have assembled themselves, so they no longer have to rely on the willingness of governments to publish data. Especially when they want to put pressure on other parties to act (improve the climate of the vegetated areas, stop or clean up oil spils) it is important to have such data to support their demands.

Second, the pictures (which can be beautiful and even poetic) can also be used as tools to engage a wider audience, to convince people in a neighborhood that the issue at stake is also theirs, in other ways to forge a sense of ‘ownership’ of the issue in a wider community.

Diegel himself used the kite mapping technology in a conservation project set up for the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. The Canal is an old system of tidal creeks in Brooklyn that during the industrial revolution grew into a maritime and commercial shipping hub. By the beginning of the 21st Century, the canal had grown into a heavily polluted and almost lifeless pool of water.

Several community organizations have engaged themselves with the canal, and the kite and balloon photography has helped them in the clean-up and restoration of the Canal, as well as bringing about a wider awareness of the enviromental problems. For instance, the kite photography was used to detect illegal oil spills. The photo’s were also be used in an attempt to trace the historical paths of the creeks – parts of which had been turned into landfills. By overlapping balloon-photo’s of the area with historic maps, hints were found as to where the original sources of the creek could be found. On the very same places where they were found on the original map, on the balloon made maps weeds showed up that had started to grow between cracks in the concrete that is now covering parts of the area: a possible proof that underneath the concrete there might still be a water source. Finally the photo’s themselves have become poetic statements that can be used in awareness campaigns. They have for instance photographed the canal in various seasons, and some of the pictures are quite beautiful.

What I found interesting about Diegels presentation was that he showed how a cheap mapping technology such as kite photography can be used to gather information, not as an end in itself, but as a starting point for further action and wider engagement. For instance, in Brooklyn Diegel works together with the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. When they were hypothesizing about the sources of the creek – with the help of the balloon map – they went out with their canoes to take samples of the water close by. The canoe club is also part of a broader awareness campaign, in which they take high school students on trips to show them ‘the dirtiest canal in New York’. And perhaps that is the most important lesson: in projects like this, it is not so much about the technological design, but also about the much wider social design: how do you build communities around the technologies, and enable a network of various groups to participate.

Making public space with urban objects

Caro van Dijk is one of the co-organizers (together with Archis and Vurb) of an upcoming workshop on the internet of things and architecture. She introduced the design-approach that they would like to use as a point of departure for the workshop (presumably to take place during picnic 2011, here in Amsterdam in september.

This approach is based upon Yiri Engestroms notion that:

people don’t just connect to each other,

they connect through a shared object

Whereas Engestroms is concerned with the role of social objects that can be shared through social networks, Van Dijk looked back into the history of architecture and found inspiration in Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds. After the second world war this Dutch Archtiect designed more than 700 playgrounds for the city of Amsterdam which transformed numerous open and often derelict city spaces. These playground consisted of bare, geometrcial shapes functioning as sandpits and climbing frames.

These interventions did two important things, Van Dijk Explained. First, because of the use-value of those objects for kids, they turned underused spaces into public spaces, where people started to hang-out, take notice of each other, interact, meet up. In other words: these objects brought about an urban public sphere. Perhaps as important is that they were able to do this because of the bare structure of these objects. The use of these objects wasn’t prescripted, but afforded an open sense of play. Kids could use their own imagination and use the tools as props in their own stories or events. (A similar claim for the design of open ended play was made earlier that evening by Kars Alfrink of Hubbub, see also here)

Van Dijk compared this approach with Primal Source, a project by Usman Haque, that was carried out at the Glow-festival in Santa Monica in 2008. This installation consisted out of colorful projections on a waterscreen. The shapes, colors, rhythms and intenstiy of these pojections were determined by software analyses of the reactions of the public picked up by 8 microphones. This provoked the audience to start singing, yelling, and clapping, sometimes individually, sometimes in concert. Thus, a public that shared a communal experience emerged out of the collective, interactive use of the art-installation.

Primal Source (video documentation) from haque d+r on Vimeo.

Can we now make use of new media technologies to design urban interventions that do something similar? That work as virtual/physical/hybrid objects around which (temporarily) urban publics can form, thus calling an urban public sphere into being? That is indeed an interesting starting point for a workshop.

The Algorithmic City – a techno-utopian scenario

A second presentation that I wanted to highlight here was held by Edwin Gardner who presented his ongoing research work on the algorithmic city.

Gardner asks the question what happens to urban planning when we add algorithms to the urban planning process? How can we use algorithms to make planning and urban design a more generative, adaptive process, that works in the interest of citizens rather than that of project developers or investors?

So far algorhithms have shown up in ‘parametric design’ where all kinds of parameters can be tweeked that the computer will then turn into a design for a building or even a complete city. Gardner is not so much interested in this approach. The problem is that there is no relation between the paramaters, the shapes generated and the society that is going to make use of these shapes. Social or ecnomic data are hardly used as parameters and the result is ‘a fetishism of easthetics’, at best beautiful to look at, but completely meaningless.

Gardner instead takes inspiration from Christophers Alexander‘s A Pattern Lanugage, a book that was based upon:

… the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea… comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people”

A Pattern Language therefor gave an overview of various planning ‘problems’ and provided patterns that could be used as a solution, it was a catalogue of planning tools, that could be used to structure the city. These patterns or design-objects could be used to draw-up a city, the indiviudal elements combined into a ‘language’. Later, Alexander would say the pattern language had three essential features:

First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole.

Although A pattern language was first aimed at both architects as well as ordinary people who wanted to prove upon their enviromnent, in the 1990s Alexander turned to computer scientists. Could they design software algorithms that would help generate cities based on patterns that were livable and adjusted to a human scale?

Gardner picks up this question and looks at three levels in which algorithms could play a role:

1. Building Code
Building codes (code as in law) can be understood as the program that currently generates the city. Its restrictions and prescriptions determine the parameters that planners and architects must design within. Now, Gardner asks: what if we turn building code as in law into a building code as in computer software: ‘How can we turn building code around from a bureaucratic obstacle, to an open standards object-oriented programing platform with an ecosystem of API’s and apps empowering civlilans and city authorities, both amateurs and professionals?’ Can we use models of the city such that are currently used in BIM-software as living models, in which all sorts of sensor-assembled data about the city is constantly fed back into the model, and that can be used to develop the city further?

2. Algorithmic Masterplanning
Building upon that, can such a system be used to plan a city more organically? Now master-planning is mostly a ‘shock-and-awe’-discipline, especially in countries like China where complete cities are drawn from scratch. But what if we can make use of a living city model that anyone could add upon, that would enable incremental urban growth initiated by smaller parties?

3. Algorithmic zoning
Can we design systems that can temporarily adjust the use of existing urban spaces to human needs, rather than to the logic of investors? For instance, could we think of an algorithm that detects long-term vacancy of office buildings and comes up with alternative uses?

I found all three provocative ideas to think about, even though, as Gardner himself admitted in the subtitle of his talk, they are still very much techno-utopian.

At the same time, a presentation of James Burke showed that such a future might be not that far off. He is currently working on an app that would make use of social networking to address the problem of empty office space and the resuse of such urban places. Can a system be designed that allows citizens to temporarily make use of such places? The discussion learned that perhaps the sofware code is the easiest part of this problem (bringing people, ideas and empty spaces together). The harder part will be dealing with legal codes such as contractual regulations, and zoning uses that are related to tax-regimes that may prevent owners from participating in such a system.

As you may have noticed, over here at the Mobile City we have recently shifted the focus of our program somewhat. Rather than addressing the role of digital media in cities in general, we decided to focus on a number of issues that we feel are particularly urgent in urban design. One of them we have labeled ‘ownership’. For us ‘ownership’ is about bringing about a sense of engagement with urban life and providing citizens with opportunities to (collaboratively) act. How can we design or employ digital media in such a way that they may contribute to such a sense of ‘ownership’?

We are very happy to address this question in a partnership with Virtueel Platform who has asked us to conduct a study on this issue (to be published at some point later this year). Last friday Virtueel Platform also organized an expert meeting that addressed the theme of ‘ownership’, and here I’d like to share my thoughts.

The City as a Platform
The meeting started with a presentation by Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand who are working on an idea they call ‘The City as Platform’. The central idea is that the city is generating all sorts of data. Now how can we tap into this wealth of data in a meaningful way? How do we create an API for the city that allows us to make use of the city in a better way? Currently we are seeing a lot of projects that have started to visuzalize these data, sometimes in impressive ways. But, Coleman and Goldkrand ask: So what? These mappings may create beautiful pictures and perhaps allow us to grasp some processes in the city that may have been invisible. Yet,
how do we move beyond ‘mapping’, beyond pretty pictures and allow for data uses that allow us to act?

Design Approaches

Coleman and Goldkrand presented a number of design approaches, as counter strategies to the dominant design paradigm in urban media. Most of the innovation in this field comes from commercial companies who either offer you personalized services and / or try to monetize the use of digital media. For instance, Goldkran pointed to a recent deal between Foursquare and Groupon. We risk that are cities are turned into open air versions of the Mall of America: sanitized and commercial spaces, he claimed. Yet are cities could be so much more than providing citizens with digital coupons on mobile media, based on their location and individual preferences. Therefor, he suggested, designers should depart from three design-approaches (that can be used in combination), he and Coleman call:

• Public Space For Coleman and Goldkrand, Public space is (in my own words) about creating places of contact or zones of friction. How can we design for a co-presence of people, enabled through digital media?
• The Civic: whereas public space is just about bringing people together, The civic dimension is about designing tools for people to act and participate in affairs with regard to local communities
• The Poetic is about bringing a poetic dimension to urban media design that enchants, engages, and carries the interaction experience beyond the merely functional. How can we design ‘Rabit Holes’ in the urban world that allow us to temporarily disappear in magic worlds with different logic and stories?

In addition when designing for one or more of these domains, they encourage to take an approach to participatory culture that comes down to ‘activate-particiapte-celebrate’. For instance: how can we design social media where status-updates go beyond a mere: I am here, but ask the question: what can we do together? How do we inspire people and make room for cultural experiences?

Their presenation included numerous examples that have departed from these criteria. Varying from ‘unwired’ examples such as graffiti-art to ‘cross-reality’ approaches such as Tidystreet.org, interventions by the Jejune Institute as well as transmedia-storytelling projects as the ARG Goldkran co-designed for the American television series Dexter.

Loosing Ground

In her presentation, Ekim Tan stated that architects (‘the proud makers of the city form the last century’) are starting to admit that they are ‘loosing ground’. They used to see themselves as the main designers of urban environments, but now see their position challenged by designers working in other disciplines such as mobile apps. The way people experience and make use of urban space, as well as the way they organize themselves socially and spatially now partially takes place through the interfaces of digital media.

Facing this new condition, she took inspiration from Manuel de Landa. When designing cities, designers should first investigate the relation between stakeholders and try to translate those into urban patterns, rather than the other way around. To do this (and thus trying to give several stake holders a sense of ‘ownership’ in the design process), Tan has designed a number of city games. Currently she is running World of City Craft in Amsterdam Noord.

World of Citycraft is an interactive real-time real-agent city generation game. World of Citycraft is the medium to craft a city besides decision making and designing. Citycraft is dependent on the individual agents and evolving local decisions based on real urgencies and needs more than the artificial and stylistic obsession of designers and/or planners.

The goal is to use an intricate game structure to “introduce a participatory urban planning and create a transparent planning process that enables citizens to react on early initiatives instead of leaving them to protest at ‘inspraakavonden’”.

Gamify, bleh …

Another interesting presentation was given by Alper Çugun, of Hubbub and Monsterswell. He gave a short version of Kars Alfrinks wonderful talk at Futureverything in which he addressed the issue of ‘gamifcation’. There is this idea circulating around that urban life can be made more interesting by turning mundane tasks into games. For many things you do you can now earn points, badges, and rewards.Perhaps, is the idea, this can even enable a sense of ownership in particular issues, such as the virtual plants that grow on the Hybrid Ford Fusion dashboard, indicating your contribution to ‘saving the environment’.

While some of these playful designs may be able to create poetic experiences of the everyday and mundane, Çugun and Alfrink do takes issue with this development:

One, gamification forces people to play. And two: it indiscriminately slaps reward systems on tasks both shallow and deep. It risks hollowing out intrinsically rewarding activities. It’s also the case that whereas true play is always engaged in voluntarily, many gamification designs leave you with no choice. You are confronted with a system you must use for utilitarian reasons, and now you are asked to jump through additional hoops so that you will be more “engaged”. You do not play a gamified system, this system is playing you.

They propose an alternative approach. Urban games should be designed for open ended play rather than for pre-scripted ones, and allow for emergence, like lego-blocks that allow players to make their own creations. Games should give humans agency rather than merely trying to force them to do things. Çugun gives two examples he likes: Chromaroma and Fitibit. Chromaroma is a game than can be played with your Oyster Card in the London subway. Fitibit is a small device that measures the calories you burn on a day. It doesn’t give you any points per se or encourage any particular behaviour, but the data it generates can become part of a game between friends or the starting point for discussions.

[Note: If you would like to read more on some of these issues, see also an earlier post on The City as an Interaction Platform, as well as my contribution to the Sentient City book, that builds upon the issue brought about by Benjamin Bratton and Nathalie Jeremijenko: how to move beyond mapping and design 'interfaces'?, as well as this article Cisco’s Urban Ecomaps and Medialab-Prado’s In the Air: How to move from awareness about environmental problems to action? For more on designing Urban games, see: Some notes on the design of pervasive games]

Recently I contributed a chapter to the book Sentient City
Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space edited by Mark Shepard. On May 14 2011 we will also take part in the book launch event in Rotterdam.

At certain points in the history of architecture and urban plan­ning, the disciplinary debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the boundaries of the professions involved. 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 or improve a construction method with the help of a new technology. Rather, the debate revolves 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 surface, Dutch philosopher René Boomkens argues, the professional debate has turned ‘philosophical’. [1]

The discourse on ‘Sentient Cities’, that has arisen over the last few years can be understood as such a philosophical enter­prise. [2] What is at stake in the debate is not so much the issue of how to engineer smarter buildings that sense — and adapt to — our daily routines or idiosyncratic preferences. Rather, our in-car navigators, friend finding ‘solutions’, location based information systems and other urban sensing technologies may very well force us to rethink some of the core concepts through which we understand and value urban life.

Here I will show that the debate about the Sentient City can be understood as a dispute concerning the urban public sphere. On the one hand, the rise of sentient technologies is said to contribute to the (already on-going) demise of urban public spaces such as town squares, multifunctional streets and public parks. On the other hand, there is a hope that those same sentient technologies could enable new forms of publicness and exchange. These are no longer based on bringing people with different backgrounds and opinions spatially together (as in cof­feehouses or town squares), but on the organization of publics around particular issues of concern.

The Sentient City

Before I delve into the debate on the relation between sentient technologies and the urban public sphere, I first want to spend a few lines on the term ‘Sentient City’ itself. What exactly do we mean when we invoke the emergence of a ‘Sentient City’? The artist and architect Mark Shepard puts it this way. He states that increasingly, it is the ‘dataclouds of 21st century urban space’ [3] that shape our experience of the city. All over the city, ‘intel­ligent’ applications have started sensing what is happening around them and reacting to it – be it smart traffic lights or cctv camera’s whose images are computer analyzed for suspicious behavior. Add to this the increase of tracking devices such as cell phones that most urbanites carry, and as a result the city has become ‘sentient’.

Now of course it is not the city itself that perceives or even is sentient, but rather the combined apparatus of tracking and sensing devices – operated by different actors – that note what is going on in the city and output their impressions in all sorts of data streams. Neither is this emergence of the sentient city a singular movement driven by a centralized bureaucracy or company, established at a single address to which one could send a letter of complaint or e-mail a feature request. The Sentient City should be understood as a collection of plural research traditions, performed and commissioned by divergent actors all with their own motivation and implicit understand­ing of what a city is or should be. They vary from government agencies that want to bring order to city space, politicians that would like to promote citizenship, companies that want to offer personalized services, community workers that hope to promote solidarity or mutual understanding, artists that want to criticize consumer culture and urbanites who may embrace, adapt or reject some or other of these offerings.

The concept of the Sentient City is not an arbitrarily chosen stock term for these developments. In a definition drawn up by Mark Shepard, he explicitly refers to the Latin roots of this term to explain what he means with that term: ‘Sentience refers to the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, and does not neces­sarily include the faculty of self-awareness.’ [4] This emphasis on subjectivity foregrounds the fact that the data streams gener­ated by the Sentient City may seem like instances of objective fact gathering, whereas in reality they are far from it. For start­ers, the decision regarding which data to collect and which to ignore and how to classify it, is already a highly political choice. Next, the data generated by the Sentient City is interpreted by software algorithms and actuation devices, and there is noth­ing objective about that either: it is a highly normative process, where subjective values, legal codes and power relations are turned into software code on the base of which sentient technol­ogy decides, acts and discriminates. [5]

This foregrounding of the normative side of the Sentient City goes against the grain of the discourses of ‘ubiquitous comput­ing’ (or ubicomp) and ‘urban computing’ that play a dominant role in the debate on the Sentient City. In ubicomp, an appli­cation is usually thought successful if it makes the computer disappear. While we carry on our daily routines, computation technology – calmly operating in the background – will make our live more easy, efficient or exciting – whatever way we would want it. Not only does it do away with the need to interact with those beige boxes on our desktops (which of course is not a bad thing per se), it also renders invisible and presents as natural the visions of what a city should be and for whom these social interventions are enabled. The conceptualization of the Sentient City can thus be understood as a deliberate move in the debate on the role of computers in urban society.

The Sentient City, Urban Culture and the Public Sphere

In many of the debates that foreground the possible impact of sentient technology on urban culture, sentient technologies are linked up to the role of the public sphere in urban society. The quintessential characteristic of urban life, as urban theory since Simmel has pointed out, is that urbanites are to live together with strangers who not only will remain strangers, but may also have a completely different outlook on life. Yet somehow, all citizens have to find a way to work things out. The public sphere plays an important role in this. It is here that strangers are confronted with each other, become aware of one another and have to come to terms with each other. [6]

The most famous proponents of this notion of the pub­lic sphere are Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett and Jürgen Habermas. Although their exact positions differ, the central idea is that a society needs a place in which these differences are brought together. The notion of a public sphere is contrasted to the private sphere. In an ideal public sphere, participants are able to distance themselves from their private identities and focus on a common interest. [7] As Frei and Böhlen have pointed out in, the public sphere in an Arendtian sense is ‘the site of col­lective performance that brings together those who are different from one another precisely because they are different. …. The collective that acts in the public realm is not a uniform entity such as a class, a nation, or a mass. What brings people together here is exactly what separates them from each other; in other words, according to Arendt, the public realm is like parentheses that hold together the differences between people.’ [8] Most theories describe the urban public sphere as a physical site, it consists of actual, physical places where people are confronted with one another. Although Habermas interestingly notes that already in the 17th Century media did play an important role as well. In the Coffee Houses that for him were the quintessential example of the emerging public sphere of that time, newspapers played an important role. They were sometimes read aloud and discussants would often send letters to the editor after they had discussed the articles over a cup of coffee, or in real life as we would say today. This way the discussion could be continued in other coffee houses, with the newspaper forging the link between the instances in which a public sphere came into being during the conversations in the coffee houses. [9]

This ideal of the public sphere has been said to lie under attack ever since it has been conceived. Privatization, paro­chialization and intimization are the main culprits, or more concretely: the suburb, the automobile, the television and – in more recent years – the mobile phone. Both Sennett and Arendt have argued that the new wealth of the middle class has enabled them to segregate themselves socially, to physically surround themselves with people of their own liking, and thus retract from public life into their own parochial domains. This may in due time erode the capacity to empathize with others and the soli­darity necessary to upkeep an inclusive urban society. [10]

The Sentient City as Threat or Saviour of the Public Sphere

Some theorists fear that the affordances of sentient technolo­gies reinforce this demise of this public sphere. Many sentient applications that are currently in development are based on the implicit idea of the city as a collection of services and infrastruc­tures to be managed as efficiently as possible. Alternatively they offer personalized versions of the city through search and ‘dis­covery devices’. These latter services follow users’ whereabouts through the city and use that information to draw up a profile of every user. These profiles are compared to each other and used to make recommendations to visit a restaurant or a bar. The goal is to have the user ‘discover’ places in the city that are both new to him, and where he can immediately feel at home at the same time. Other initiatives depart from control and security-issues: they use sentient technology to prevent potential unrest or to allow or deny access to certain users.

Sensing technologies thus have the affordance to sense who or what is near them and filter this data according to the preferences of its users. For them the city may turn into a patch network of parochial spaces. If they live up to their promises, these technologies promise that urbanites never have to leave the comfort of being surrounded by like minded people. The other way around: access to certain urban places might only be given to authorized people recognized by embedded sensors.

Combined, in a dystopian scenario, these appropriations of the technology might contribute to what Belgium Philosopher Lieven de Cauter has called a ‘capsular society’ – a city of priva­tized capsules with different functions – dwelling, shopping, consuming accessible only to those with the right RFID-chip in their wallet. [11]

There are also more optimistic accounts. As Stephen Graham and Mike Crang amongst others have pointed out, many artists have embraced locative media to re-activate the urban public sphere. For instance geoannotation (software through which people can mark-up particular urban places with stories, photo’s or video) makes it possible for passers-by to ‘sense’ alternative stories, points of view or issues related to the places they visit. The idea behind many of these projects is to have urban space function once more as a site of exchange and com­munication between citizens. Only this time, they don’t have to be there physically present at the same time. They can learn about the visions and stories of other citizens who have passed by earlier through locative media annotation services. [12]

Toward a different public sphere?

What both critical and optimistic scenarios mentioned above have in common is that they still depart from the idea of the urban public sphere as a physical site in which differences are to be brought together. There is also a number of theories and art projects that point to an alternative and new conceptualiza­tion of the public sphere. In this vision, the public does not come together in a physical site, but rallies around an issue of con­cern, that is raised through sentient technologies.

One of the clearest descriptions of this shift from public spheres to publics can be found in Frei and Böhlen’s previously mentioned pamphlet. They draw on Latour’s Parliament of Things, a theory that in turn builds upon Dewey’s notion of issue publics: publics that (temporarily) form around specific issues in which they have taken a certain ownership. This public assem­bles – as in Arendt’s notion of the public sphere – not because everyone agrees but because they disagree and need to come to terms in some way or another. [13]

Publics can form around shared issues of concern for which people feel some form of ownership. The infrastructure of the sentient city itself can form such a shared issue of concern. Frei and Böhlen describe a number of ways in which ‘micro­publics’ might form around communal urban infrastructures or institutions such as schools, parks, water plants. Whereas these are all conceptual blueprints, Laura Forlano points out that such publics did emerge around a number of wireless networks she has studied in several cities around the world. They succeeded – at least temporarily – in bringing people with different identities and backgrounds together. [14]

Publics may also gather in a different way. One of the promises of the rise of sentient technologies is that things, objects and issues can record their own ‘biographies.’ [15] The project Trash Track by MIT’s Senseable City Lab demonstrates this affordance. For this exhibit, trash items such as paper cups are tagged with a GPS-device and mobile phone modem. After it has been disposed of, the item sends text messages with its location, so we can follow its track from recipient to waste disposal site. The hope expressed through this project is that knowing will lead to a change in doing: the fact that we know where our trash ends up should make us more aware of the problem we create by throwing things away.

In a published conversation Bratton and Jeremijenko point out that there is a lot of hope that the data gathered by the sentient city will lead to engagement with important issues of our times. The collection and visualization of data about environmental pollution might become a ‘thing’ – an issue of concern – around which a public might assemble. [16] Similarly, Laura Forlano points out that with new sensing technologies, it becomes possible to point your mobile phone (for instance) at a product in the supermarket and immediately learn whether it has been manufactured in a sweat-shop or in an environmen­tally unfriendly way. [17]

It is, however, not as simple as that. A beautiful visualization of data gathered by sentient technologies might be just that – an aesthetically pleasing work of art decorating a museum wall. Bratton and Jeremijenko point out that many of such mappings do not really lead to the formation of active publics. They don’t change who is asking what kind of questions, they do not show alternatives, or give anyone a sense of agency.

“And so, do these projects change who is asking the ques­tions? Are these designers now asking the question of how this pollutant is made, who made it, where is it coming from, where is it going, what do we do about it, or not? … Who collected [the data] and under what conditions. That is, what does the data actually represent?” [18]

It makes a difference whether the information received about issues is collected by marketing agencies or institutions that are by law obliged to register and publish such data, or whether a group of local activists who have a completely different inter­est in the issue of concern has programmed the sensors and algorithms involved. In short, Bratton and Jeremijenko argue, we do not need mere mappings, we need interfaces that allow the public not just to take note of a dataset, but that also provide it with an agency to actually get involved.

As Bratton has observed, our urban societies are no lon­ger restricted to their administrative territory, bounded by the dashed lines on the map. Instead, we live in cities ‘where flows move in and out of geographies, where territories are occupied by multiple collectives at once, and where the procedures, networks, and assemblages of objects and things are vastly distanced from our own capacities to perceive them.’ [19] It is exactly for that reason that bringing people together spatially may no longer be a viable idea for maintaining a public sphere. Rather, we should start thinking about how we can move from an ‘Internet of things’ to a public sphere centered around things.

That is not just a philosophical shift. It is also a practical matter. How to design interfaces that go beyond mere mapping of things could become one of the most important design chal­lenges of our times for everyone concerned with the role of the public sphere in a democratic society.

Notes

1. R. Boomkens, Een Drempelwereld: Moderne Ervaring En Stedelijke Openbaarheid (Rotterdam: NAi Uitgevers, 1998).

2. Over the last few years, the term ‘sentient city’ has come up in a number of publications, exhibitions and events. For instance Stephen Graham and Mike Crang wrote an article in 2007 in which they speak of ‘environments that learn and possess anticipation and memory’ and relate this vision to three different takes on the city, varying from ‘market-led visions of customized consumer worlds’, ‘military plans for profiling and targeting’ and ‘artistic endeavours to re-enchant and contest the urban informational landscape of urban sentience’. The term is also used in the title of the exhibition Toward the Sentient City, organized by the Architecture League in New York in the fall of 2009 and curated by Mark Shepard. Here the theme and framing of the exhibition are related to a series of publications called the ‘Situated Technologies Pamhplets’, published by the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), and the Architectural League of New York. In another example the term ‘Sentient City’ is sometimes also used by the Senseable City Lab from MIT, a research institution that ‘explores the “real-time city” by studying how distributed technologies can be used to improve our understanding of cities and create a more sustainable ways of interacting in urban environments.’ The term is related to similar labels that also describe the increasing role of computing technologies in the con­stitution of everyday urban life, such as The Real Time City, Urban Informatics, Urban Computing and others. Each stems from its own disciplinary modus operandi and brings a different approach to computing and urban society to the table.

3. Mark Shepard, “Curatorial Statement,” The Architectural League NY, http://www.sentientcity.net/exhibit/?p=3.
4. Ibid.
5. See for instance Stephen Graham, “Software-Sorted Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 5 (2005)., Steven Graham and Mike Crang, “Sentient Cities : Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space.,” Information, communication & society 10, no. 6 (2007)., Nigel Thrift and Shaun French, “The Automatic Production of Space,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27, no. 3 (2002).
6. Amanda Williams, Erica Robles, and Paul Dourish, “Urbane-Ing the City: Examining and Refining the Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics,” in Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, ed. Marcus Foth (Hershey, New York, London: Information Science Reference, 2008)., Boomkens, Een Drempelwereld : Moderne Ervaring En Stedelijke Openbaarheid.
6. Boomkens, Een Drempelwereld : Moderne Ervaring En Stedelijke Openbaarheid.,
7. Hans Frei and Marc Böhlen, Situated Technologies Pamphlet 6: Micropublicplaces, ed. Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, Situated Technologies Pamphlets (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2010)., Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)., Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1958)., Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Norton, 1970); ———, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopff, 1977).

8. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.

9. Sennett, The Uses of Disorder : Personal Identity and City Life , Frei and Böhlen, Situated Technologies Pamphlet 6: Micropublicplaces.

10. Lieven De Cauter, De Capsulaire Beschaving. Over De Stad in Het Tijdperk Van De Angst (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004). see also Marc Schuilenburg and Alex De Jong, Mediapolis (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006).

11. Graham and Crang, “Sentient Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space..”, see also Lily Shirvanee, “Locative Viscosity: Traces of Social Histories in Public Space,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 14, no. 3 (2006), http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n03-04/toc.asp., Ann Galloway, “A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing” (Carleton University, 2008)., Williams, Robles, and Dourish, “Urbane-Ing the City: Examining and Refining the Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics.”

12. Frei and Böhlen, Situated Technologies Pamphlet 6: Micropublicplaces., Noortje Marres, “Zonder Kwesties Geen Publiek,” Krisis, no. 2 (2006)., Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: An Introduction,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and P Weibel (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005).

13. Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey, “Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy,” in Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy, ed. Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, Situated Technologies Pamphlets (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2008).

14. Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

15. Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko, “Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces,” in Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy, ed. Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, Situated Technologies Pamphlets (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2008).

16. Forlano and Dailey, “Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy.”

17. Bratton and Jeremijenko, “Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces.”

18. Ibid.

The first one is the design process itself. Architects can make use of software to design in new ways (e.g. cad/cam and parametric design). They can also make use of new digital tools such as social networks to change their relationship with their prospective clients, and use these tools to gather data about or input from their target groups.

Second, digital media are changing spatial practices. Mobile phones, locative media and GPS-navigation have changed the ways people make use of urban spaces. Can (and should?) spaces be designed differently to accomodate these changes? And how can digital media be included in the design of physical spaces to actively change the way people experience that place?

Third, I looked at the field of urban experience. Urban design is not just a matter of shaping buildings and spaces, but perhaps increasingly also includes the design of apps and interfaces that allow people to personalize spaces, find people and places in the city, change their experience of a certain place, share those experiences, connect and collaborate with others etc. This is a domain that is beyond the scope of traditional visions on architecture, planning and urban design but is increasingly important for the experience of cities.

The full article is posted below, alas, it is written in Dutch. 

De rol van digitale media in het stedelijk ontwerp

In de stad van de toekomst, zo dacht een avant garde van architecten in de jaren zestig, zou de computer een belangrijke rol gaan spelen. Interactiviteit, was daarbij het modewoord. Architecten als Constant Nieuwenhuys, Cedric Price en de leden van Archigram filosofeerden breeduit over steden die door haar gebruikers (al dan niet automatisch) aangepast konden worden aan hun tijdelijke behoeftes.[1]

Een spraakmakend installatie – getiteld Seek en in 1970 tentoongesteld in het Jewish Museum in New York – maakte die aspiraties tastbaar: In een glazen bak krioelden woestijnratten door paden die waren afgebakend met zilveren bouwstenen. Hijskranen met grijperarmen pakten die blokken zo nu en dan op, om ze elders weer neer te leggen. De instructies daarvoor kwamen van een computerprogramma dat het gedrag van de beestjes analyseerde en de plattegrond van de tijdelijke knaagdierstad daaraan aan wilde passen.

In de jaren tachtig ebde de belangstelling van ruimtelijk ontwerpers in interactieve systemen weer weg. De feitelijke ontwikkeling van nieuwe technologieën bleef ver achter bij de hooggespannen en utopische verwachtingen. Om dit opnieuw –ietwat luguber – te illustreren aan de hand van Seek: een aantal van de woestijnratten sneuvelde nadat de interactieve bouwstenen boven op de beestjes terecht waren gekomen. Het zou nog zeker drie decennia duren voordat digitale technologieën een groot publiek zouden bereiken.

Inmiddels spelen mobiele telefoons, GPS-navigatie, mobiel internet en allerhande sensortechnologieën een belangrijke rol in het alledaagse leven. Er is zelfs een nieuwe discipline in opkomst –Urban Informatics – die zich met de wisselwerking tussen stad, software en digitale netwerken bezig houdt.[2] Grote technologiebedrijven als IBM en Cisco hebben onderzoeks- en consultancyafdelingen op dit gebied opgezet. Ook bij interactie-ontwerpers, interface designers en telecommaatschappijen zijn erbij betrokken. Opmerkelijk genoeg blijft de belangstelling van ruimtelijk vormgevers nu achter. Architecten en planners tonen vooralsnog mondjesmaat interesse.

Sterker nog: de consensus onder een grote groep architecten – al verandert dit langzaam– luidt dat digitale media en ruimtelijk ontwerp weinig met elkaar te maken hebben. Architecten gaan over de stenen en het cement, andere disciplines over de software en informatiestromen. Dat is logisch, redeneren ze, want het duurt vaak jaren voor een ontwerp is gerealiseerd. Een architect kan in zijn ontwerp wel rekening houden met bijvoorbeeld de manier waarop stedelingen Twitter gebruiken, tegen de tijd dat een gebouw of plein in gebruik genomen wordt, bestaat Twitter misschien wel niet meer. Een plein moet zo niet eeuwig dan toch wel enkele decennia mee, de ontwikkeling van digitale technologieën heeft een geheel andere omloopsnelheid.

Daarvoor valt iets te zeggen. Tegelijkertijd is het ontegenzeggelijk dat digitale technologieën een blijvende rol spelen in het alledaagse stedelijke leven. En dat is een ontwikkeling die voor alle disciplines die zich met stedelijk ontwerp bezig houden interessant kan zijn. Stedelijk ontwerp en de opmars van digitale media raken elkaar dan op drie verschillende manieren die hieronder verder zullen worden toegelicht. In de eerste plaats verandert het ontwerpproces zelf. In de tweede plaats kunnen nieuwe mediatechnologieën geïntegreerd worden in het fysieke ontwerp. Tot slot veranderen nieuwe mediatoepassingen ook het gebruik van stedelijke ruitmes.

Digitale technologieën in het ontwerpproces

Ik begin met de rol van digitale mediatechnologie in het (stedelijk) ontwerpproces. Al geruime tijd maken architecten gebruik van ontwerpsoftware die bekend staat als Computer Aided Design & Manufactering, kortweg CAD/CAM. De introductie daarvan leidde tot een nieuwe manier van werken– de tekentafel werd ingeruild voor het beeldscherm – maar ook tot een nieuwe architecturale grammatica. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan de glooiende lijnen en afwisselende geometrische vormen in de gebouwen van Frank Gehry. De laatste jaren maakt ook ‘parametrisch design’ een opmars door, een manier van ontwerpen waarbij computeralgoritmes onderdelen van het ontwerp ‘uitrekenen’.[3]

Digitale media spelen daarnaast ook een toenemende rol bij het verzamelen van gegevens die in het ontwerpproces gebruikt kunnen worden. Mobiele telefoons en GPS-ontvangers maken het gemakkelijk om het gedrag van mensen in de stad te registreren. Iedereen met een mobiele telefoon laat bij zijn provider een spoor achter van de plekken waar hij (of in ieder geval zijn telefoon) is geweest. Tel die gegevens van alle gebruikers bij elkaar op, en planners krijgen – een voor hun revolutionair – inzicht in hoe mensen zich door de stad bewegen. Verschillende onderzoekscentra houden zich hier inmiddels mee bezig.[4] In Nederland liet bijvoorbeeld het project CurrentCity zien – met behulp van data van het KPN-netwerk – hoe verschillende plekken in Amsterdam op verschillende tijdstippen werden gebruikt.[5]

Verder zien we de laatste tijd ook een aantal projecten waarin digitale media worden ingezet om het publiek te betrekken bij het ontwerpproces, zoals bijvoorbeeld in het werk van het Nederlandse architectenbureau space&matter.[6] Zij deden in Eindhoven en München via onder meer Facebook onderzoek naar lokale groepen met specifieke interesses. In München ontdekten ze een publiek van ongeveer 2000 skaters die internet gebruikten om zich in te zetten voor de bouw van een skatehall. Voor een studie naar het hergebruik van een oude energiecentrale in het Eindhovense Strijp-gebied, gebruikten ze sociale netwerken om verschillende doelgroepen te identificeren (varierend van skaters tot klimmers) en erachter te komen welke behoeftes deze groepen precies hadden.

In weer een ander project combineren de architecten van space&matter sociale netwerken met nieuwbouwprojecten. Potentiële kopers kunnen elkaar via sociale netwerken vast leren kennen of ook het ontwerp van hun huis aanpassen. Een dergelijke tool maakt het ook mogelijk voor groepen met bepaalde voorkeuren (bijvoorbeeld liefhebbers van muziek, of mensen met een ecologische interesse) om gezamenlijk een opdracht te verlenen aan een architect. Zo’n ‘collectief particulier opdrachtgeversschap’ (CPO) kan de traditionele ontwerpketen veranderen. Doorgaans doen projectontwikkelaars onderzoek naar woonwensen en levensstijlen, en laten vervolgens ‘producten’ ontwikkelen die daarop aansluiten. Via speciale software kunnen groepen zichzelf – al dan niet met behulp van de architect – bottom-up organiseren en hun woonwensen kenbaar maken, een subtiel maar belangrijk verschil.

Digitale technologieën en het ontwerp van de stad

Hoe kunnen ruimtelijke professionals in het stedelijk ontwerp zélf inspelen op de opmars van digitale media? Hierbij zien we twee verschillende benaderingen. In de eerste spelen ontwerpers in op nieuwe ruimtelijke praktijken – door de opkomst van wifi, mobiele telefoons en GPS gaan stedelingen anders om met de ruimte om hen heen dan voorheen. In de tweede plaats kunnen architecten digitale technologieën integreren in het te ontwerpen object. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan het gebruik van sensors die al dan niet toegang geven tot een gebouw of aan het gebruik van digitale schermen of mediafacades.

Hoe kunnen ruimtelijk ontwerpers inspelen op veranderend ruimtegebruik? Die vraag is in een meer abstracte en meer concrete manier te beantwoorden. In abstracte zin is er in de architectuur een benadering die flexibiliteit voorstaat. Architecten en planners moeten ruimtes niet ‘overdetermineren’, maar juist zo ontwerpen dat ze op verschillende manieren gebruikt kunnen worden. Een voorbeeld is het ontwerp van Japanse. Waar in Europa in de afgelopen drie eeuwen het huis steeds meer gespecialiseerde ruimtes kreeg (de slaapkamer, de salon, etc.), hebben de meeste moderne Japanse huizen nog altijd minstens één ‘tatami’-kamer. Die is ingericht met meubelstukken die op verschillende manieren gebruikt kunnen worden. Dezelfde kamer kan worden benut als sociale ontmoetingsruimte, of juist als privéplek om je even terug te trekken.[7] Een dergelijke benadering brengt wel een specifieke uitdaging met zich mee. Een openbare ruimte die zo is ontworpen dat alles mogelijk is, kan juist daardoor ook angstvallig leeg blijven.

Een voorbeeld van deze benadering is het Stata Center, een door Frank Gehry ontworpen universiteitsgebouw op de campus van MIT in Cambridge. Overal in het gebouw is wifi aanwezig. Daarbij zijn de gangen van het gebouw bewust breed gemaakt en uitgerust met stoelen en tafels. Daardoor zijn de gangen niet alleen een doorgangsroute naar de lokalen, maar ze zijn ook een ontmoetingsplek. Sommige studenten werken er op hun laptop, anderen maken er een praatje, terwijl verderop studentenorganisaties passerende studenten van hun nobele doelen proberen te overtuigen. Het precieze gebruik van de ruimte is niet voorgeschreven, maar de aanwezigheid van wifi, samen met de tafels en stoelen, de brede ruimte, en de context van de universiteit maakt het mogelijk dat die ruimtes op verschillende manieren benut worden.

Het is ook mogelijk meer concreet in te spelen op stedelijk mediagebruik. Het voert te ver om hier uitgebreid op in te gaan, maar het volgende voorbeeld zullen velen inmiddels herkennen. Uit onderzoek van Mimi Ito blijkt dat informatiewerkers – vaak werkzaam in de creatieve industrie – vaker buitenshuis (of buiten het kantoor) zijn gaan werken. Ze vinden het prettig om in een (semi-)openbare gelegenheid zoals een café of bibliotheek te werken. Ito noemt deze praktijk ‘camping’. Net als kampeerders zoeken informatiewerkers een prettige plek op een mooie plaats om tijdelijk hun tentje op te zetten. [8]

Deze nieuwe praktijk is om te zetten in een ruimtelijk ontwerp. Een pragmatisch voorbeeld: een bibliotheek zou minder oppervlaktes aan boekenkasten kunnen besteden en meer aan prettige, uitnodigende werkplekken. Andersom gaat het ook wel eens mis. Dan wordt er wel een technische infrastructuur opgezet. Maar men vergeet te bedenken hoe mensen die infrastructuur gaan gebruiken, en wat dat betekent voor de manier waarop ze met de ruimte omgaan. Bijvoorbeeld: een gemeente wil mee in de vaart der volkeren en besluit gratis wifi in de hele stad aan te bieden. Maar vaak blijft het dan bij een technologische voorziening, terwijl ook een ruimtelijke inbedding (bijvoorbeeld door een aantal ruimtes in openbare gelegenheden zo te ontwerpen dat ze ook als ‘campsite’ gebruikt kunnen worden) handig zou zijn.

Interactieve architectuur en Media-architectuur

In de voorbeelden hierboven gaat het steeds om aanpassingen in de gebouwde omgeving die beter aansluiten op nieuwe vormen van ruimtegebruik die zijn ontstaan door de opkomst van digitale media. Die aanpassingen zelf zijn grotendeels analoge, fysieke interventies. Het is uiteraard ook mogelijk om het ruimtelijk ontwerp zelf te verrijken met digitale media.  De meest voor de hand liggende toepassingen op dat gebied zijn ‘urban screens’ of ‘mediafacades’.[9] Schermen of lichtinstallaties maken dan deel uit van het gebouw of de omgeving. Deze medialagen liggen in het verlengde van een decennia – of zelf eeuwenoude trend – waarbij architectuur verrijkt wordt met inscripties, of dat nu de beelden op tempels, fresco’s en glas-in-lood in kathedralen zijn, of de knipperende lichtreclames van Tokyo’s Shibuya of New Yorks Time Square.

Sommigen van deze schermen of façades tonen bewegende beelden die weinig of niets met de omgeving zelf te maken hebben. Ze veranderen door hun aanwezigheid weliswaar de ervaring van een plek, maar gaan verder geen directe relatie aan met hun omgeving. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan schermen waarop reclamefilmpjes te zien zijn.

Andere installaties spelen juist wel in op de specifieke omgeving waarin ze worden getoond. De Nederlandse kunstenaar Simon Heijdens maakt zo installaties die reageren op de plaatselijke omstandigheden. Zijn Tree is een projectie van een boom op de façade van een gebouw. De projectie van de boom beweegt mee met de wind die op die plek daadwerkelijk waait. ’s Ochtends hangt de boom vol blaadjes, maar telkens als iemand voorbijloopt, dwarrelt er een blad van de boom af. Zo verbeeldt de projectie zowel de weersomstandigheden – het natuurlijke klimaat – als ook het ritme van de stad.[10]

Architectuur wordt zo, in de woorden van Kas Oosterhuis, een ‘time based discipline’, en de architect een ‘animator of constructed experiences’[11]. Een gebouw is niet meer een statisch gegeven, een vaste vorm in de stad, maar kan van vorm of in ieder geval van atmosfeer veranderen. De Allianz Arena – het voetbalstadion in München van Herzog en De Meuron – is hier een tekenend voorbeeld van. Het stadion zelf is uitgevoerd in onopvallende witte kleuren, maar de architecten hebben een uitgekiende lichtinstallatie in het gebouw verwerkt. Daardoor kan het al naar gelang de ploeg die het bespeelt – Bayern München (die in rode shirts speelt) of TSV München (blauwe clubkleuren) van kleur veranderen.

Oosterhuis was zelf een van de eerste architecten die dergelijke mogelijkheden van digitale media verkende, bijvoorbeeld  in zijn Zoutwater Paviljoen op Neeltje Jans in Zeeland. Oosterhuis heeft dit paviljoen zo ontwerpen dat bezoekers er een gevoel moeten krijgen van de omstandigheden buiten op zee. Dat gebeurt doordat een boei die ergens op zee drijft, radiosignalen doorstuurt aan de installatie in het paviljoen. Zowel het licht (de kleur en intensiteit) als het geluid dat in het paviljoen te horen is, worden vervolgens beïnvloed door de gegevens die de boei doorstuurt. ‘Being inside these architectural bodies feels like experiencing changes in the weather’, schrijft Oosterhuis. ‘It is all over you.’[12]

Gebouwen of installaties zijn daarbij niet alleen time-based structuren geworden, maar in sommige gevallen ook ‘mood-based’ – ze kunnen een bepaalde stemming weerspiegelen. De Nederlandse architect Lars Spuybroek heeft een aantal installaties gemaakt die uitgaan van dat gegeven. Een van de bekendste is de D-Tower in Doetinchem. Deze sculptuur weerspiegelt de stemming van de inwoners van de stad, zo is het idee. Een aantal inwoners is uitgenodigd om op internet een vragenlijst over hun gemoedstoestand in te vullen, en de uitkomst daarvan wordt weerspiegeld in het lichtprogramma van de D-Tower.

Interactieve architectuur

En zo zijn we op het gebied van de interactieve architectuur gekomen. Met interactieve architectuur wordt wel een architectuur bedoeld die direct reageert op haar omgeving. De opkomst van digitale media maakt het mogelijk om de fysieke omgeving uit te rusten met allerlei sensoren, en die via netwerken met elkaar te verbinden. Gebouwen kunnen vervolgens reageren op de input die de sensoren meten. Dat klinkt ingewikkelder en revolutionairder dan het is: denk aan de manier waarop een simpele thermostaat werkt. Grotere gebouwen hebben inmiddels zeer ingewikkelde klimaatsbeheersingsinstallaties die op soortgelijke principes werken. Inmiddels werkt een aantal bedrijven aan ‘smart homes’, waarbij technologie wordt ingezet om in te spelen op de activiteiten in een huis om het comfort te verhogen of het energieverbruik te verminderen.[13]

Nog een stap verder gaat Arch-OS[14], een operating system voor gebouwen. Dit systeem verzamelt allerlei informatie over een specifiek gebouw, variërend van de temperatuur en het aantal aanwezige mensen (bijvoorbeeld via camera-detectie) tot de hoeveelheid data die in het gebouw via het internet wordt gedownload. Die data kan verbonden worden met verschillende output-mechanismes. Een ontwerper die in Australië een installatie voor een unviersiteitscampus ontwierp, koppelde de data van Arch-Os aan een projectie van abstracte kleurenpatronen op het plafond van een universiteitsgebouw. Door de tijd heen zouden de gebruikers de patronen leren herkennen, en zo vertrouwd raken met het ritme van het gebouw.

In een ander experiment met Arch-OS werd het systeem gekoppeld aan een beweegbare muur die de grootte van de ruimte automatisch aanpaste aan de hoeveelheid gebruikers. Daarbij maakte de software ook voorspellingen: op basis van eerder gemeten data kon het systeem voorspellen dat het op een bepaald moment weer druk zou worden in de gemeenschappelijke ruimte en deze daar vast op aan passen.

Daarmee zijn we voor een deel weer terug bij de experimenten in de architectuur uit de jaren zestig. Ook daar was het idee ‘slimme’ systemen te ontwikkelen die in zouden kunnen spelen op de behoeftes van de gebruiker. Binnen deze benadering zijn twee verschillende scholen. De eerste probeert door middel van het verzamelen van allerlei gegevens het gedrag van gebruikers in kaart te brengen, te voorspellen en diensten te ontwikkelen die daar – al dan niet  automatisch – op in te spelen. Dit is de filosofie achter veel ontwikkelingen op het gebied van ‘smart’ technologies en ‘ubiqutious computing’.

De tweede school benadrukt de actieve rol van gebruikers. Zo geeft Usman Haque aan dat ontwerpers zich niet te veel moeten beschouwen als ‘probleemoplossers’ die door onderzoek (of data-analyse) een of ander probleem identificeren, en er vervolgens een kant en klare oplossing voor verzinnen. Die strategie ontneemt gebruikers de mogelijkheid om zelf oplossingen te verzinnen. Beter dan in kant –en-klare producten zouden ontwerpers na moeten denken over platfora die gebruikers ook zelf aan kunnen passen.[15]

Haque maakt zo onderscheid gemaakt tussen ‘responsieve’ systemen en ‘interactieve’ systemen. Responsief houdt in dat een installatie volgens een bepaald, vaststaand programma reageert op de omstandigheden. Interactief gaat een stap verder en maakt het voor gebruikers ook mogelijk om invloed uit te oefenen op de programma’s die bepalen hoe de data worden geïnterpreteerd, en aan welke vormen van output ze precies worden gekoppeld.[16]

Een interessant Nederlands experiment op dit gebied is het Urban Node-project van Vurb.[17] Urban Node is een installatie die ontwikkeld wordt in het Trouw Gebouw in Amsterdam. Met Urban Node kunnen bezoekers via hun smart phones toegang krijgen tot verschillende apparaten en installaties zoals de  verlichting op de dansvloer of de speakers. Tegelijkertijd ontwikkelt Vurb ook een toolkit waarmee de manier waarop de gebruikers invloed uit kunnen oefenen beïnvloed kan worden. Het interactiepatroon staat dus niet van te voren vast, maar kan door de tijd heen veranderen. Doel van het project daarbij is ook een onderzoek naar de sociale kanten van de manier waarop bezoekers zich gezamenlijk kunnen ontfermen over de aanwezige ‘resources’.

Het ontwerp van stedelijke ervaringen

En zo komen we langzamerhand op het derde domein van stedelijk ontwerp waarin digitale media een rol spelen. Nu gaat het niet langer om het ontwerpen van de fysieke omgeving als zodanig, maar om de (sociale) processen die zich er afspelen. Hier verlaten we voor een deel ook het terrein van de traditionele architecten – het gaat nu over ruimtegebruik, niet over ruimtelijke vormgeving – en betreden we dat van de software-ontwikkelaars, interface-ontwerpers. Zij ontwerpen toepassingen waardoor niet zo zeer de stedelijke omgeving zelf verandert als wel de manier waarop we die gebruiken.

Het duidelijkst is deze opmars van digitale technologiën zichtbaar in het verkeer. Van sensoren in het wegdek, die verbonden zijn met stoplichten kijken we al niet meer op. Camera’s die boven de snelweg hangen en aan de hand van verkeersanalys reisadvies geven via matrixborden boven de weg zijn ook al gewoon. Een stap verder gaan navigatiesystemen als de TomTom die niet alleen de weg wijzen, maar ook de positie en snelheid van automobilisten meten en doorgeven aan een centrale computer.[18] Bij elkaar opgeteld laten die gegevens zien waar het verkeer lekker doorrijdt en waar de files staan. Deze informatie kan weer gekoppeld worden aan een gepersonaliseerd reisadvies. Bedrijven als IBM en Cisco hebben zich inmiddels op deze ontwikkelingen gestort. Zij bieden ‘smart city’ toepassingen aan.[19] Met behulp van digitale technologieën kan het leven in de stad efficiënter of duurzamer worden gemaakt, beloven zij.

Maar ook op allerlei andere vlakken zien we ontwikkelingen op dit gebied. De smartphone-versie van Google Maps toont ons bijvoorbeeld dat er net om de hoek van waar wij zijn een broodjeszaak zit, en de mobiele app van Iens.nl geeft er de recensies bij. Met behulp van locatiediensten als Foursquare of Feest.je kunnen we onze vrienden laten zien dat we daar inderdaad een broodje gaan eten. Wie in de buurt is, kan langskomen. Nog een stap verder gaan diensten als CitySense[20]. CitySense is een app voor de mobiele telefoon die je bewegingen door de stad registreert en analyseert en aan de hand daarvan nieuwe plekken aan kan raden, op een manier die vergelijkbaar is met de manier waarop Amazon.com ons boeken aanraadt. Zo vinden we langzaam aan op een andere manier de weg door de stad.

Anderen zetten weer vraagtekens bij deze ontwikkelingen. Is het een goede ontwikkeling dat digitale media vooral worden ingezet om ons gebruik van de stad zoveel mogelijk te personaliseren, dat wil zeggen af te stemmen op onze persoonlijke voorkeuren? En efficiëntie in het verkeer is natuurlijk mooi, maar behelst het stedelijk leven niet meer dan enkel zo snel mogelijk van A naar B te komen? Ligt de aantrekkingskracht van het stedelijke leven er niet juist in dat we voortdurend worden verrast door dat wat we nog niet kenden? En moeten we juist niet ook diensten ontwikkelen die invulling geven aan die kant van het stedelijk leven?

Om deze vragen op te werpen ontwikkelde kunstenaar en architect Mark Shepard tijdens een residency bij V2_ in Rotterdam zo de GPS Serendipitor. Dat is een navigatieprogramma voor de iPhone die niet het doel heeft je zo efficiënt mogelijk van A naar B te leiden. In plaats daarvan verleidt het programma je om de route onderweg goed in je op te nemen. In plaats van ‘sla links af’ geeft deze navigatietool opdrachten als: ‘vraag een voorbijganger de weg naar de dichtsbijzijnde bloemenstal’, of ‘loop aan de zonkant van de straat. Als er geen zon is, denk die er dan zelf bij.’[21]

Alhoewel architecten zich tot nog toe mondjesmaat op dit terrein begeven, geeft het laatste voorbeeld wel aan dat hun expertise hier een rol zou kunnen spelen. Architecten koppelen van oudsher hun expertise op het gebied van ruimtelijke vormgeving aan kritische reflectie. Juist bij de ontwikkeling van diensten die ruimtegebruik mede beïnvloeden kan die combinatie van belang zijn.

Conclusie: naar een nieuwe manier van nadenken over stedelijk ontwerp

Nemen we bovenstaande voorbeelden bij elkaar, dan luidt de conclusie dat het stedelijk ontwerpproces een transitie doormaakt. De ruimtelijk ontwerpers die zich traditioneel met de vormgeving van onze steden bezig hielden – architecten en planners – hebben gezelschap gekregen van een hele reeks nieuwe disciplines: software-ontwikkelaars, interface ontwerpers, user experience experts, enzovoorts.

Digitale media beginnen daarbij op drie verschillende niveaus een rol te spelen in het stedelijk ontwerp: het ontwerpproces zelf, het vormgeven van fysieke ruimtes, en het vormgeven aan stedelijke ervaring. Die drie niveaus lopen ook in elkaar over en het valt dan ook te verwachten dat de verschillende partijen betrokken bij de verschillende aspecten van het stedelijk ontwerp steeds meer zullen gaan samenwerken in multi-disciplinaire teams.

Om een voorbeeld te geven: in de jaren zestig schreef Kevin Lynch in zijn beroemde boek The Image of the City over het belang van een aansprekend en iconisch stedelijk ontwerp.[22] Dat diende niet alleen om een plek een identiteit te verlenen waarmee mensen zich zouden kunnen identificeren, of om gemakkelijk de weg te kunnen vinden. Een ruimtelijk ontwerp moest ook uitnodigen tot verkenning van nieuwe plekken en maatschappelijke verbanden. Een sterk ‘visual framework’ zou dat bewerkstellingen. Ruimtelijk ontwerpers die dergelijke idealen onderschrijven, zouden nu niet alleen een sterk fysiek visueel ontwerp na moeten streven maar ook nadenken hoe ze digitale media in kunnen zetten om hun plek een identiteit te verlenen, of het publiek te verleiden hun ontwerp te bezoeken of op een bepaalde manier te ervaren. Dat betekent dat stedelijk ontwerp een complexe discipline aan het worden is. Of beter: een inter-discipline. De centrale vraag zal steeds zijn: hoe kunnen ruimtelijk ontwerp en media-ontwerp elkaar versterken?

What struck me most after a day’s worth of presentations of new media interventions – varying from a moodwall to complex multinlineair location based storytelling projects  - was that the talks articulated both a sense of optimism as well as a sense of doubt.

There was a lot of optimism that new media would make urban public spaces more interesting,  layering them with depth, connecting people, spark democratic debates, turn them into playgrounds and empower citizens.

Yet at the same time there were some doubts. Although the opportunities are there, many of the speakers were still not sure how exactly they are to be effectuated. How do we indeed engage people in public spaces with the help of these new technologies?

Optimism: enhancing public space with locative and wireless media

Let’s start with the optimist visions. During the day several visions of what public space is, which functions it fulfills, and what is problematic about it were  addressed.

1. Public Space as a place for deliberate democracy

This is of course a vision that builds upon theories by the likes of Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas, who have theorized public space as a meeting ground for citizens where they come together to discuss their common future.

At the conference Tobias Ebsen presented Climate on the Wall, an interactive mediafacade by the Digital Urban Living Lab (we have written about this project before) at Aarhus University. Climate on the Wall is based on the concept of ‘magnetic poetry’: text balloons with words are projected on a facade, and passers-by can drag the words in any order, forming poetic sentences, political statements or just nonsense.

The hope expressed in the project was that people would use the installation to make statements about the environment. However, that didnot always happen. People just started playing with it, or even using the installation in a subversive way. What the creators didnot forsee though is that debate did take place: not on the wall itself, but rather amongst the bystanders/ audience. The playful and sometimes subversive uses had turned their installation into a conversation piece.

2. Public Space as a theatre, as a stage for the representation of cultural identities and political movements

Various speakers at the conference alluded to the current events in Tunesia and Egypt, reflecting on the role of public space as a place for the representation of political movements. These physical and bodily mass events are now partially coordinated by the use of digital media in the form of social networks ans sms messages. Although in my opinion claims of a ‘Twitter revolution’, where the technology causes the revolts should be distrusted, there is no doubt an interesting dynamic going on between these media and the way collective political imaginations are shaped as well as the (organization of) physical movements through which these imaginations are articulated.

On a different but somewhat comparable plane, public space can also be understood as a site for cultural representation, where (sub)cultures proudly display themselves, (temporarily) claim a part of public space to assert their right to exist, or just to make it their own. At the conference the dance film Diamond Dancers bu Quirine Racke and Helena Muskens made me think of this particular approach of public space. The film is a flash mob performance of provincial line dancers who travel to amsterdam to stage a surprise performance on one of the main public squares.

3 Public space as a site for cultural experiences and exchanges

A number of speakers approached public space as a stage for cultural experiences. In these examples, wireless media are to enhance the experience of a particular place, for instance by showing historic layers, or connect places to personal stories, to make people aware of alternative points of view or just to tell an exciting story or engage people in a game.

Dick van Dijk of Waag Society showed their 7scenes platform – a tool for the annotation of maps and the authoring of location based stories and games. They are using this tool to develop an app for the Amsterdam museum – as part of an international trend sometimes called ‘museums without walls’. Earlier they also authored other locative experiences. For instance Madretsma.net is a route through Amsterdam commemorating the slavery trade. Here, the interface was much more low tech: at particular points in the city users could call a phone number and listen to a particular story connected to that place.

Michael Epstein of Untravel Media also showed a number of what he had called ‘terratives’ – narrative that are told on location. (see an earlier Mobile City report for a more in depth analysis of the genre).  For instance, in Boston they created a project named Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill. This project took the form of a walk along a number of locations in Boston, where scenes (movie clips) from a 19th century murder mystery were played out on a smart phone.

These are not just geo-annotated movie clips. To draw the user in, some dramaturgic elements were added. First there was a narrator, that invited participants to follow in her footsteps, also turning the player into a character. Second, actual physical props played an important role and third, players / viewers also had to interact with real people in the actual surroundings. For instance one of the scenes took place in the lobby of a luxurious hotel and some employees there were involved in the story.

Martin Rieser showed The third woman a project that was even more complex in its story telling. Where Walking Cinema was a more or less lineair narrative that played out on location, the Third Woman added interactive elements, where participants could influence the mood of particular filmclips they were shown.

4 Feeling at home in Public Space

A fourth approach of wireless media I encountered was not so much connected to a particular understanding of public space, but rather trying to deal with one of its inherent problems. If public space is a place where we encounter strangers, who might also be different from ourselves, than for many this can also lead to a somewhat uncanny feeling. Especially at certain locations that are not lively public spaces but somewhat neglected passage ways, people can easily feel unsafe.

Can designers intervene with digital or wireless media to make citizens feel more at home in public space? For instance by using visualizations of harvested mobile phone or social network data that show collective rhythms of citizens?

In this category, Matthijs ten Berge showed his Moodwall – a beautiful light installation in a dark tunnel in de Bijlmer area of Amsterdam. Its interactive light patterns are to make passers-by feel more at home in these surroundings.

The doubts

I was (although not necessarily unpleasantly) surprised by all these optimist visions , since often in the general debate about the affordances of digital media in relation to public space dystopian scenario’s are evoked. Digital and locative media are after all not only media of connection, providing added layers of experience. They also have the affordance to turn the city into a panopticon and allow their users to retract in their safe, personal communication bubbles – turning public spaces into private experiences. These more critical points of view were sometimes mentioned, but not really addressed during the conference.

That is not to say that there were no doubts expressed. On the contrary, although speakers were overall enthusiastic about the opportunities of digital media, they also found that the actual implementation, scalability and engagement of users is hard to accomplish.

The technology is here: we can now tweet, geotag, program urban screens or use the private screens of the mobile phone. Yet the question remains: how to actually engineer an interesting experience, how to seduce people to actually interact with the content? This question is all the more relevant, since one of the characteristics of wireless media is that they often are invisible. So it is not only a matter of engaging people but also make them aware of the added layers etc. All of the projects shown at the conference had somehow struggled with these issues, and it is fair to say that this will also remain one of the most important questions in wireless storytelling in the near future.

Lessons Learned

With regard to the design of locative experiences, I took two important lessons from these examples. The first is – as Michael Epstein put it strikingly – ‘Matter is a test for our curiosity’, meaning that material artefacts in real space can draw people into the story. The tension in locative storytelling projects comes from actually drawing in objects, locations and people, making it tactical and physical. Especially the use of people can really make the experience much more appealing. Although this is also very hard to arrange, but it is worth to try to draw in local shopkeepers, hotel lobby attendants or others into the scenario. In effect, as a narrative discipline locative storytelling is probably closest to theatre – you need a strong dramaturgy, script, actors and perhaps a gameplay. This also can make it hard to scale locative productions or reenact them at other locations. (see our earlier article Some notes on the design of pervasive games for more thoughts about this)

A second lesson, with regard to locative projects that try to engage people into discussions or exchange is to not overdetermine the design. Make it a playful design to draw people in, but also leave some room for people to appropriate it, to play with the rules of the game. Sometimes its more useful to design a conversation piece than wanting to direct the conversation itself.

I particularly liked the presentation of Dutch artist Sander Veenhof. Over the last few years Veenhof has grown into one of the more interesting practitioners that explore the possibilities of mobile media technologies from a fresh and sometimes somewhat estranging perspective.

Or as he describes his approach himself:

Exploring the ‘new’ in new media, in terms of new possibilities, practical advancements in dimension, scale, materialisation, hybridity and interactive opportunities. Bringing new concepts to the surface by means of carefully shaped apparent disbalances between minimalistic contra contemporary creations having nevertheless a maximum impact, at this point of time exactly.

In the past he has used Augmented Reality to stage a guerilla exhibition at the MOMA (as part of the Conflux Festival). He has also designed a dispensing unit (Mobile Thrill) to distribute mobile content (for instance at festivals). Rather than downloading a short clip, users had to entrust their mobile device to a vending machine and wait until the machine returned the unit, now with the clip loaded in its memory).

NBeep6

Yesterday he shared his experiences as an artist in residence in Cameroon. As a mobile media and AR-artist at first he found himself somewhat lost in a community where smart phones were close to non-existent and  internet connections unreliable at best.  But he did gain a fascination for the local communication culture of which the ‘beep‘ is a constitutive  element.

‘Beeping’ is a widely used practice in Africa (and elsewhere), that is based on people calling other people without making a connection. (For instance by disconnecting after letting the other phone ring only once). This way a very brief message is sent (‘call me’ or ‘thinking about you’ or ‘on my way’) without incurring any costs.

Beeping thus provides a free channel of communication. And when done from one mobile call box – the ubiquitous stands in Cameroon where people are renting out their mobile phones – to another  it can also be done anonymously. There is only one problem: for the receiver the content of the message is hard to decode.

To overcome that problem, Veenhof started to interpret a ‘beep’ as a ‘bit’ that can be send, it can be either on or off. Now, a communication channel that can only send one bit is of course very limited, it can only contain two messages. But what if it was possible to expand the bandwith? When several mobile phones are combined on each end of the communication channel, more complex messages can be send for free.

As an experiment, Veenhof set up a situation in which two groups of people, each with six phones would communicate with each other. In theory, this would thus enable them to send 128 (precoded) message to each other.

Veenhof also included a coding table so participants could translate their message into a sequence of beeps made with the help of the six telephones.

A test run (two groups of people with six mobile phones on two sides of the road)
did point out the difficulties of the system: it was time consuming to translate the messages into a sequence of beeps, especially if each letter of a message means calling up to six different phone numbers. Also, some bits got lost underway: one of the participants had lent his sim card to someone else, and also other everyday anomalies appeared.

It would however be thinkable to build an interface (for instance using an arduino) to take most of the effort out of the process.That way perhaps one could indeed set up a number of calling stations (perhaps reminiscent of  the Telegraph officies of yore) to provide anonymous communications. All one needs is a table, a few low end mobile phones and a parasol.

The overall point is perhaps not so much its direct practical implementation, but the creative way of thinking that has gone into it. It neatly illustrates that people often take up technology in completely different fashions than imagined by their creators to adopt them to their particular needs. Free and anonymous communication being two of them.

In the meanwhile, here is an overview of our best read articles since we started our research project in 2007:

1. review: Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City (book review)
2. Picnic 09 Report 2: The City as an Interaction Platform (conference report)
3. Towards a Myspace urbanism? (The Mobile City Essay)
4. Interview with Mark Shepard: ‘critical design’, architecture, urbanism and location based media (interview)
5. Storytelling with Locative Media: Michael Epstein’s take on ‘terratives’ (conference report)
6. Semantic Wayfinding, mental maps and the keyhole problem of GPS-navigation (lecture report)
7. Digital Cities 6: urban media / urban informatics and different notions of public space (conference report)
8. Urban Play: designing the urban landscape (exhibition review)
9. Augmented reality on the mobile: MoMo Amsterdam #11 (lecture report)
10. Scott McQuire’s The Media City (bookreview)
11. Review: “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities” by Mimi Ito et al. (book review)
12. review: Stephen Graham – The Cybercities Reader (2004) (book review)
13. Augmented Reality: its promises and shortcomings for architects (lecture report)
14. Design Approaches for the 21st Century City (The Mobile City Essay)
15. ISEA 2008: Visualizing the Real Time City (Conference Report)

And in addition some personal favourites that didn’t make it into this list:

• Cartography: the old versus the new? an evening in De Balie (lecture report)
• “How can architects relate to digital media?” TMC keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’ (The Mobile City Essay)
• Interview with Adam Greenfield on designing for urban computing (interview)
• Three philosophical questions about the ’sentient city’ – a response to the exhibition Towards the Sentient City (The Mobile City Essay)
• ISEA 2008: Locative Media Core Works & Classifications (Conference Report)

Enjoy!

New Use of Cellular Networks
The Necessity of Recognizing the Nuances of Privacy

According to media researcher Martijn de Waal, it is time to rethink our ideas of privacy. The growing use of cellular networks is generating data that plays an important role in civil society projects. To be able to continue using such data in a meaningful and fair way, people must become aware of the fact that privacy is not only a question of either private or public, but includes many gradations in between.

During the Notte Bianca 2007 (an event in Rome comparable with the Museum Night in the Netherlands), researchers from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab set up at different urban locations a number of big screens upon which they projected dynamic maps of the city. Light blue spots indicated large numbers of people, thus enabling visitors to the event to immediately see which museum was crowded and plan their route accordingly. Making the task even easier, yellow stripes representing Rome’s municipal buses could be followed live on the same map. This project – ‘WikiCity Rome’ – sounds like a nice gimmick. The researchers gained access to the location data of mobile phone users through a telecom company. The anonymized coordinates of individual phones were combined to compile an algorithm of a – handsomely designed – real-time map of nighttime Rome.1

But ‘WikiCity Rome’ was more than just a gimmick. The project made use of an important shift in the functionality of the mobile phone (or ‘cellphone’, as it is called in parts of the English-speaking world). It is no longer simply a means of communication. Increasingly, the mobile phone is also being used as a sensor that gathers information about us and our surroundings.2 Location coordinates, images and sounds can be recorded and shared with friends, colleagues, social institutes or even with others who are unknown to us. This new use of mobile phones can have great social consequences, but it also raises questions about privacy. Who has access to all of this data we are gathering? To whom does this information actually belong? To us? The telephone company? Or should it – in anonymous form of course – be considered common property? Ought the government be allowed to monitor our movements in times of emergency? And if so, precisely what constitutes an emergency?

For the American civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), these developments are sufficient reason to introduce a new category of privacy: ‘locational privacy’. Will we still be able to move through a city in the near future without the places we go to being systematically recorded in all sorts of databases?3 The new developments are so far-reaching that we must ask ourselves whether our traditional idea of privacy is still tenable. The discussion is no longer only about the right to be able to act anonymously in our private lives without the government or our employers looking over our shoulders. In many instances, people will actually want to voluntarily make information about their private lives public. For the fact of the matter is that this can also have certain advantages, both for individuals and for society as a whole. But precisely what are the conditions under which this occurs? What possibilities does technology offer for sharing or protecting information? In this essay, I would first like to give a number of examples of how the use of the mobile phone as a sensor encroaches upon our lives in today’s society. Then I will go into the consequences of this for the debate on privacy and technology.

Scientific Research: A New Form of Demography?

Researchers in various disciplines are extremely enthusiastic about the mobile phone as a means of collecting data. Finally, they sigh, we can chart the behaviour of an entire population in real time instead of taking a few random samples afterwards. ‘Reality Mining’ is the name of the new discipline in which different streams of data are combined to get a handle on complex social processes. Social scientists often speak in slightly euphoric terms about these new possibilities. For instance, take Alex Pentland of the MIT Medialab: ‘By using data from mobile phones . . . we can create a “god’s eye” view of how the people in organizations interact, and even “see” the rhythms of interaction for everyone in a city.’4 This new method of measuring not only gives better insight into social processes, claims Pentland, it also has greater predictive value. Traditional demography, he states, is a bad predictor of behaviour. How old someone is, where they live and even their income is interesting information, but says little about how that person will behave in the future. Only when you can actually analyse their behaviour, can you – within certain margins – start predicting. Says Pentland: ‘The fact that mobile phones have GPS means that we can leap beyond demographics directly to measuring behaviour. Where do people eat? Work? Hang out? How does word of mouth spread? Analysis of travel patterns using mobile phone GPS data, for instance, allows discovery of the independent subgroups within a city.’5

At present, the mobile phone is already being used in this manner for health care research. In Kenya, for example, mobile phone data is being used to localize breeding grounds of infection for malaria. Other scientists have developed algorithms with which – again through data generated by mobile phone use – behavioural patterns that indicate the outbreak of a cholera epidemic can be identified. In the Dominican Republic, research into the spread of HIV is being conducted in a similar fashion.6

Urban planners are also enthusiastic about this new way of collecting information. The British ‘Cityware’ project tracked visitors to inner cities with the help of the Bluetooth technology on their phones.7 Here too, expectations are often high. Anthony Townsend, for instance, a researcher specialized in technology, sees the rise of networked sensors as a development comparable to the rise of aerial photography. For urban planners, that was a revolutionary media technology: for the first time, they could see the city from above, as a whole. And if aerial photography reveals the city’s skeleton, we now have a view of its nervous system. For the first time in history, people often optimistically say, we can observe all sorts of social interactions in the city in real time.

A little perspective is not out of place here, however. Although these methods of gathering data certainly can lead to new insights, the debate still does not address the question of exactly what kind of knowledge they actually produce. Data is not the same as knowledge, and so far the nature of the data is primarily quantitative. Researchers now know how many people are at certain places at certain times, where they have come from and where they are going. But more qualitative aspects – why do people move as they do, and what is their experience of that? – still remain out of the picture as a rule.

Citizen Science

In the above instances, scientists work from the top down in collecting great amounts of data in order to analyse social processes. But the mobile phone can also be used to collect data from the bottom up, at the initiative of users themselves. ‘Biketastic’, a project aimed at bicyclists in the notoriously car-oriented city of Los Angeles that has been set up by the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, is one such example. This research centre from the University of California Los Angeles has developed a mobile phone app that bicyclists can use to collect data on their trips through the city and share it with one another. The app measures the location, distance and speed of the bicycle route, but also its comfort. The microphone measures the noise of the other traffic, while the accelerometer indicates whether the cyclist can smoothly cruise along or has to keep stopping and starting. The geographical data can later be linked with external databases: How much air pollution is there throughout the route? And what about traffic safety? By combining the data from different cyclists with external databases, after a while you also get a bicycle map of Los Angeles with which you can plan the most pleasant, safest, cleanest or fastest route.8

This is similar to a number of ‘Citizen Science’ projects, in which citizens use the mobile phone’s sensor capacity in order to work together for a specific purpose. Eric Paulos conducted research on campaigns in which neighbourhood residents charted the quality of the air with the help of mobile sensors. Such campaigns had many positive effects. The participants gained an increased awareness of the problem of air quality and their involvement in local politics improved.9 But there are also negative aspects: Just how trustworthy is the data that is collected? Can the results be influenced, for example by holding a sensor next to a car muffler?10

Personalized Locational Services

Finally, the use of the mobile phone as a sensor can also have advantages for individual users. The mobile phone makes it possible to register information about your life automatically. Services like Google Latitude or Bliin plot your movements through the city on a map. You yourself are always at the centre, surrounded by those of your friends who have the service turned on and voluntarily share their data with you. Other services, like Yelp in the USA, also centre the map on the user’s position and then place balloon markers for the nearest pizzeria, optician, cash dispenser, taxi or other search command. Companies like Sensenetworks can also make analyses of your spatial behaviour and use that to recommend all sorts of services to you.

Christophe Aguiton, Dominique Cardon and Zbigniew Smoreda – researchers at Orange Labs, the R&D department of France Telecom – call this phenomenon ‘Living Maps’. A map is no longer a static representation of a geographical reality but a dynamic reflection of social activities. In the long run, the advent of such maps can lead to a cultural shift. Right now, our social lives still largely consist of making appointments that we write down in our agendas. But after a while, a ‘map of opportunities’ might very well seem like a much more attractive idea. If you momentarily have nothing to do, simply take a look at your personalized map. Who is in the immediate vicinity right now to meet up with? What is there to do at a reasonable distance from where I am?11

Critics point out that this can have huge consequences for life in the city. Does it still leave any room for chance encounters with the unknown? Will we become ‘people without characteristic traits’ who slavishly follow the recommendations of our ‘clever’ systems? These are relevant and meaningful discussions, which I do not wish to go into further right now. In the second part of this essay, I prefer to examine the notion of privacy that is at stake with these new technologies.12

Who Is the Owner?

How does the advent of the mobile phone as a sensor relate to our thinking about privacy? In academic circles, a cautious consensus is becoming apparent: users should be the owners of their own data. No matter how you generate data – for example, through the sensors in your mobile phone – you must be able to access that data, wipe it out yourself, keep it saved securely, and decide what is going to happen with it. Only in very exceptional circumstances should the government be able to have access to such databases.13 A view like this could very well lead to new forms of inequality. Personal particulars are very attractive data for commercial parties, and some critics suspect that the selling of your personal data will be made attractive. People who don’t want to share their personal details with commercial parties will, for example, have to pay more for a mobile phone subscription.14

Precisely what does ‘data ownership’ mean for the analysis of information on an aggregated scale? Are researchers only allowed to collect data if phone users give them permission to do so? And is that permission also necessary if the data is only used for mapping group behaviour? After all, in such cases the individual information is swallowed up in the group profile and a link with individual behaviour can no longer be made. But then, who is allowed to collect this sort of information, and under what conditions? Should telephone companies collaborate on this, for example?

Erin Keneally and Kimberly Claffy – researchers at UC San Diego – argue in favour of regulation that takes into account the positive aspects of sharing data. At present, the rules are not always so clear about what is allowed and what is not. As a result, many parties react defensively to requests for sharing data. They prefer not to take risks, seeing as the debate on privacy escalates quickly. The idea of privacy as the absolute right to protection of personal particulars soon loses out to the possible social benefits of sharing data – such as in the above-mentioned instances in the area of health care, for example. Keneally and Claffy call upon researchers and the telecom industry to develop a new protocol that makes the sharing of data possible and at the same time limits the risks of improper use of sensitive information.

Nathan Eagle compares ‘reality mining’ with large-scale medical research projects. There too, extremely sensitive personal information is stored in databases, which is why there are strict rules for their use: only professionals have access to the information and they must sign in when they want to use the databases. Eagle therefore proposes that such protocols also be quickly set up for the use of sensor data from mobile phones.

Organizations like the Dutch ‘Bits of Freedom’ are concerned about these new developments. Information that is stored anonymously, warns this organization, does not always remain that way. ‘Better technologies are always being developed to strip anonymous data of their anonymity. What might not be a “personal detail” now can soon turn into one.’15 Researchers Aguiton, Cardon and Smoreda concur. More than once in the past, new technologies have made it possible to trace anonymous data to specific users.16

The EFF therefore proposes using cryptography to design systems such that sensor information can be used without having to store it. Technologically, this is a rather roundabout way, although possible: ‘But we need to ensure that systems aren’t being built right at the zero-privacy, everything-is-recorded end of that spectrum, simply because that’s the path of easiest implementation.’17

The Desire to Share Data

The EFF’s idea of using strong cryptography can protect personal sensor data. That might come in handy with a system like pay-as-you-drive, for example. But there are also situations in which users do want to share their data, albeit not necessarily always or with everyone.

In daily life, privacy is a complex and above all dynamic negotiation between various parties, argue researchers Paul Dourish and Leysia Palen. In social situations, what plays a role is not so much the fear of the state’s misusing information but is much more likely to be ordinary worries. People do not want to be embarrassed. They want to assert their authority or voice in a certain area. And they like to have control over their own lives. Because of this, we make different demands of privacy at different moments.

In social situations it is often more important to make yourself known than to protect your privacy. If you want to capitalize on your authority in a certain area, you have to be able to show the corresponding badges. With the help of all sorts of signs – varying from word choice to greeting rituals – we send out signals through which others can deduce our social status or background. Sometimes we want to give our opinion, or we benefit from letting others know who we are. Just how much we wish to reveal depends upon what estimate we make of a situation. Who exactly is the audience? What do we expect, hope or fear in regard to the situation? Privacy, in other words, is a question of ‘identity management’, in which we show or conceal different aspects of ourselves to different audiences in different situations.

Palen and Dourish’s most important point is that the use of the mobile phone as a sensor, combined with the storage of information in databases, changes the parameters of this privacy negotiation. The situations in which we find ourselves are originally spatial and temporal. They are physically limited, for instance by the four walls of a room, and have a certain duration. Both factors play an important role in the estimates we make. We can see who is present and who is not – and therefore who could call us to account for an eventual faux pas.

When we use automatic sensors to register our behaviour in all sorts of situations and share it with others – for instance through social networks – the nature of the situation changes. Suddenly, space, time and audience are no longer limited, and instead the registration of the situation can also be called up at other times and places. But can another audience actually interpret the original context of the situation properly? And maybe you would have acted very differently if you knew that the audience was going to be wider.

Researcher Danah Boyd has written about how this development can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. As an expert on social networking, Boyd was approached by the admissions committee of a leading university. They had received an application from a student from South Central LA. In a letter describing his motivation, he wrote that he wanted to break away from the gang life there. But when the committee looked at his page on a social network, Myspace, they saw all sorts of symbols glorifying gang life. Was he making a fool of them? Boyd pointed out to the committee that there was also another possibility. The applicant’s Myspace page was intended for his classmates and neighbours, not the admissions committee. And in his neighbourhood the social pressure to be part of something is so high that the young man probably could do nothing else but post the gang’s insignia on his Myspace page.18

Similarly, a commotion arose over the Facebook website. There too, users can voluntarily keep a log of their activities, hobbies and other titbits of information. At first this was only possible on the person’s own page. But one day Facebook changed the setup of its site. All of the messages that users placed on their own page were now automatically published on the pages of all their ‘friends’. Facebook’s reasoning was that this way, friends would be better able to keep abreast of each other’s activities. Besides, hadn’t the information already been made public by users on their own page?

Facebook didn’t do much more than publishing what was already public. But many Facebook users thought otherwise. They saw a subtle difference between making something public on one’s own page, which others must make an effort to access, and automatically distributing that data.19 Once again, this was about the assessment that users make of their audience in determining what information they do or do not wish to make public. To be sure, the information was now being distributed among friends, but there were also subtle differences within that. Some friends might very well be difficult co-workers that a person would not want to offend by rejecting their ‘friendship request’. And people show different things to members of their family than they do to old school friends. Facebook does not make it possible to make that distinction.

Privacy as Design Criterion

At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS, the research lab behind the earlier-mentioned bicycle project in LA) they therefore believe that privacy is an important responsibility for designers. There should be a system that gives users the possibility to decide for themselves what information they want to share with whom, under what conditions, and for what length of time.20 This is why it is important that designers develop systems that visualize information in an understandable way and that immediately make it clear
what sort of consequences certain settings can have.

CENS itself uses such an application in its Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) project, in which data is again collected with the help of mobile phones. This information is then converted into a carbon footprint and simultaneously combined with databases on local air pollution. In this way, users not only learn how much they themselves contribute to air pollution but also how much pollution they are being exposed to. In a log file, users can see precisely how the system uses their data: what information is registered when, and uploaded and shared with whom. Eric Paulos argues that interfaces like this should also make clear how reliable such (collectively gathered) data are. It is important that users do not trust all flows of data blindly, but that they always remain aware that data can be manipulated, or even simply not collected accurately.21

Aguiton et al go one step further. Not only should users be able to have insight into the manner in which information about them is collected, they should also be able to manipulate that information. Users have the right to lie to the system about their actual whereabouts in order to protect their privacy, they claim.22

The above-mentioned examples show that our thinking about privacy has to be reconsidered. The sensor data collected by mobile phones can play an important social role, for example in the area of public health. Such data can – as in the ‘citizen science’ instances – play a role in civil society projects. And some people will experience sharing data with others as an enrichment of their lives.

Involved parties point out that many of the present regulations are inadequate. On the one hand, the positive aspects of sharing data anonymously should be given more attention. At the same time, the awareness must also grow that privacy is not a binary affair in which something is either completely public or completely private. Between the two extremes lie many gradations that by no means are always taken into consideration in the design of new technologies. And providers of location services and social networks, for example, should also be stimulated to give the many nuances of privacy in everyday life a place in their services.

1. See senseable.mit.edu/wikicity/rome/ for a summary of the project and, for an extensive analysis of the project, Francesco Calabrese, Kristian Kloeckl and Carlo Ratti, ‘WikiCity: Real-Time Location-Sensitive Tools for the City’, in: Marcus Foth (ed.), Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City (London/Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2009).

2. For example, see Eric Paulos, who maintains that there is an ‘important new shift in mobile phone usage – from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument”’. Eric Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt: Citizen Science and the Challenge of Change’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009.
senseable.mit.edu/engagingdata/program.html

3. www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy.

4. web.media.mit.edu/~sandy/.

5. Alex Pentland, ‘Reality Mining of Mobile Communications’, The Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009. World Economic Forum, 2009.

6. See Nathan Eagle, ‘Engineering a Common Good: Fair Use of Aggregated, Anonymized Behavioral Data’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009.

7. www.cityware.org.uk.

8. See research.cens.ucla.edu and biketastic.com/.

9. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2). Also see Jason Corburn, Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

10. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2).

11. Christophe Aguiton, Dominique Cardon and Zbigniew Smoreda, ‘Living Maps: New Data, New Uses, New Problems’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009. Also see recent lectures by Antoine Picon and Nanna Verhoeff, in which they respectively describe how digital maps can be understood as ‘media events’ or ‘performance of space’ instead of only a ‘systematic geographic representation’. www.themobilecity.nl/2008/01/22/mediacity-conference-weimar-the-design-of-urban-situations/ and networkcultures.org/wpmu/urbanscreens/2009/12/05/nanna-verhoeff-mobile-digital-cartography-from-representation-to-performance-of-space/.

12. See, among others, Marc Shepard and Adam Greenfield, Urban Computing and Its Discontents (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2007); Jerome E. Dobson and Peter Fischer, ‘Geoslavery’, in: IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Spring 2003.

13. Pentland, op. cit. (note 4).

14. Eagle, ‘Engineering a Common Good’, op. cit. (note 5).

15. www.bof.nl/2009/12/18/hoe-anoniem-zijn-anonieme-gegevens-eigenlijk/.

16. Aguiton et al, ‘Living Maps’, op. cit. (note 11).

17. www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy.

18. Danah Boyd, ‘Do you See What I See? Visibility of Practices through Social Media’, LeWeb, Paris, 2009.

19. Danah Boyd, ‘Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence’, in: Convergence, vol.14 (2008) no. 1, 13-20.

20. Katie Shilton, ‘Four Billion Little Brothers? Privacy, Mobile Phones, and Ubiquitous Data Collection’, in: Queue, vol. 7 (2009) no. 7.

21. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2).

22. Aguiton et al, ‘Living Maps’, op. cit. (note 11).

—
Open #19 Privacy, the main theme of Open #19, is a right that protects one’s private life, a right that is not only established by law but also has political and social significance. It can be experienced and observed differently by individuals and groups, depending upon their position in society and the desires and interests involved.
In this issue, the concept of privacy is examined and reconsidered from legal, sociological, media-theoretical and activist perspectives. The focus is not so much on deploring the loss of privacy but on taking the present situation of ‘post-privacy’ for what it is and trying to gain insight into what is on the horizon in terms of new subjectivities and power constructions.

This issue of OPEN will be launched during he opening weekend of the Berlin Biennial on Saturday June 12th. Philosopher and theorist Gerald Raunig will give his lecture ‘Beyond Privacy: Desiring DIVIDUALITY’, followed by an informal reception in the charming Villa Elisabeth.

(For the record, these were the two events: I was one of the co-hosts of the ‘Best Scene in Town‘ workshop organized by Waag Society. In this workshop participants were challenged to design an urban game with the help of the 7scenes locative platform. Kars Alfrink of Hubbub (a design studio specialized in physical social games for public space) and I were asked to give a brief introduction. Incidentally, one week earlier Kars Alfrink and The Mobile City’s Michiel de Lange as well as James Burke of Vurb were part of a panel on Visual Cities #03, that took place in De Verdieping.)

Pervasive Games as Games
The first and most apparent approach of pervasive games is to use traditional games as a metaphor. This means to think of the city as a playing board, and to translate or vary upon the gameplay and rules of existing games, be they traditional urban games (treasure hunt, tag), traditional games (trading games, strategy games, role playing games, rock-paper-scissors etc.) or console games (e.g. pacman). This approach fits in a broader development in which gaming is becoming a more physical activity, for instance through new interfaces such as the Wii. As Kars Alfring said:

Games are about doing stuff. You don’t read a game, you don’t listen to a game, you don’t watch a game (although you can do all of these), you DO a game (you play it). So at the core of any good game is an interesting activity.

Many now classic examples or urban gaming fall (partly) in this category, examples are Geogcaching, Botfighters, Pacmanhattan, Can you see me now?

Kars Alfrink talked about a street game he designed in Rotterdam called Changed your World.  Participants had to run around the city with giant flags. Alfrink said that the use of physical artifacts is good idea in the design of urban games. First of all they make clear to passers-by and regular urbanites that something special is going on. Moreover:

We had a lot of benefit from the flags we employed. Being physical artifacts, they had a lot of affordances that were readily available to us. This you don’t get in software, where you need to build every property of an object yourself.

Change Your World from Hubbub on Vimeo.

Pervasive Games as Performative Arts

Another  - and perhaps counterintuitive – metaphor to approach pervasive games is as theater, rather than as games. Many pervasive games are event based, staged performances and often include actors. The main difference between these game performances and more traditional theater is that the public has an active role in the performances, and that instead of a script or screen play, there is a set of rules that actors and audience have to follow. These rule sets make up a story engine, that drives the performance. This can be an exploratory event, or it may be incorporated in narrative structures. (For instance, last year we wrote about Michael Epstein’s (Founder of Untravel Media) take on ‘storytelling with  locative media‘, in which he discussed the role of gameplay in location based storytelling.)

Much of the work of Blast Theory (who produced classics such as Can You See Me Know,  Uncle Roy All Around You and Rider Spoke) falls into this category. While they presented earlier work as ‘games that happen simultaneously online and on the streets’, they have included direct references to theater in some of their more recent projects. Rider Spoke for instance is framed as a ‘work for cyclists combining theatre with game play and state of the art technology. The project continues Blast Theory’s enquiry into performance in the age of personal communication.’

Alfrink’s company Hubbub was involved in designing an opera staged in a Dutch town called Monster. The goal was to involve the audience as players,

One of the biggest challenges was to come up with a concept that would accommodate both a compelling story and a game-like participatory aspect. For this we sought inspiration in martial arts movies and ultimately arrived at an Enter the Dragon-like setup, which features a storyline mixed with fighting set pieces. The fights would be improvised on the basis of game rules. (We also took cues from games like Street Fighter and Pokémon for both story and character design.)

Much of the subsequent work for us went into prototyping and playtesting the ruleset. For each session we brought in a ruleset and played several matches, figuring out a balance between fun-to-play and fun-to-watch. All the matches were recorded and analyzed afterwards for improvements.

Pervasive Games as an extension of Urban Culture

In my own presentation at the 7scenes workshop I urged designers to approach pervasive games from the perspective of urban culture, rather than from the perspective of games. How can we add a certain playfullness to everyday urban situations, in order to enhance urban culture? I gave three examples of elements of urban culture that perhaps could be made more interesting by adding some playful touches to them.

• The city as a public space for deliberation, and democratic debate, as examplified by the Acropolis. I presented the example of the Climate on the Wall-project (see here for a more extensive description) designed  by the Danish Center for Digital Urban Living. This project is an interactive mediafacade where passers-by can arrange words in a certain order. This project was made playful by its allusion to  ‘magnetic poetry’ – the little magnets with single words that you can rearrange on your fridge door to create ‘poetry’.
• The City as a stage on which we ‘perform’ our identities. This is an idea that builds upon symbolic interactionism as well as on theories of ‘performativity’ by people like Erving Goffman and Jane Jacobs. These theories conceive of our daily lives as performances in which we continuously act out different social roles (we shift from being an office worker, a dad, a manager, a friend, a museum visitor, etc.). At the same time through the numerous small interactions in the city streets, over time trust is build between citizens. We could argue that social networks and especially location based ones (Foursquare, Gowalla) are stages on which we perform our identities in our times, and some of these have indeed added gameplay elements (For instance the  badges one  can earn through Forusquare).
• The City as an operating system. This approach departs from the idea that our cities of today generate numerous datastreams. We can aggregate these datastreams and build services on top of them. Think for instance of the ‘cabsense‘ app for the iPhone that collects gps-data generated by cabs, and uses that data to recommend the best corner nearby the user’s current locations to catch a cab. Can we now use these datastreams as input for playful interactions in the city? At the Visual Cities-event James Burke of Vurb presented their new Urbannode project that is partially based on this premise:The Urbanode Project from VURB on Vimeo.
  

  We are now entering an era where technology begins to weave together the desires of citizens and the services available to them in their environment in realtime. But what does the use of these new systems look like? It is quite clear that the first step to unlocking these possibilities is the mobile terminal, or ‘smartphone’. Users of such mobile devices have already become accustomed to the access to information that urban-oriented webservices available in the mobile browser provide: maps, transit times, weather information, etc. Even tasks like calling a cab or reserving a table at a restaurant have become like buttons on a remote control for the city. But what about more active uses of service made available in the environment? Applications, supported by new network hardware, more like airTunes, where anyone running iTunes can ‘discover’ nearby speakers and stream music to them wirelessly.

• The City as a community. This approach came up in Alfrinks talk, when he discussed Koppelkiek – a social photo collecting game he designed for a neighborhood in Utrecht. The goal was to ‘create a meeting place for diverse individuals in a troubled neighborhood. The game provided an excuse and a framework for strangers to have brief interactions with each other.’ In this game, the designers game up with changing ‘assignments’ for the players such as “Take a photo of yourself with someone else in front of his or her front door.” The game was a success because the designers took an effort to engage citizens in the game. They approached key figures in the neighborhood and set up a small shop as well. They also thought of a way to make a pervasive game as this physically visible in the neighborhood. This was done by exhibiting the photo’s in an old shop window.

Pervasive Games as Applied ‘Game Theory’ (Political & economic game theory that is, not a ludic one)

Although the idea of enhancing urban culture by adding game play elements to all sorts of urban situations can be an interesting one, there is also the risk (or opportunity, depending on whose perspective you take) of turning everyday life in a series of disciplining events or strategy games (hence the reference to game theory). Government agencies or insurance companies might want to promote certain behaviors and discourage others and hope to seduce citizens to comply with their wishes by adding gameplay elements and awarding points for all sorts of situations. A dystopian scenario that builds on this trend was recently described by Jessie Schell, who imagined a future in which amongst others your wifi enabled toothbrush would award you a number of points each time you brush your teeth. These points can then be redeemed at your insurance company to get a discount on your dental insurance. Schell calls this scenario the Gamepocalypse.

Urban Games and Architecture and Planning

During these sessions The Mobile City’s Michiel de Lange also addressed the relation between architecture and urban games. He discerned five 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. His presentation was based on an a (highly recommended) article he wrote in Second Nature.

Both projects build partly upon the idea of ‘the city as an operating system’ , by which we usually mean that our cities generate more and more data streams on top of which we can build interesting services for either consumers or citizens.

Main question in both projects is: how can we collect and visualize data about environmental pollution to actually change our behaviors? How can we make citizens not only aware of the problem (by visualization of data), but also give them a sense of ‘ownership’ of the problem (it’s not just society’s problem but you are part of it) while at  the same time give them an incentive to act (this is what you can do about it)?

Connected Urban Development / Urban Ecomap

With Connected Urban Development Cisco aims to …

… demonstrate how to reduce carbon emissions by introducing fundamental improvements in the efficiency of the urban infrastructure through information and communications technology (ICT).

Boorsma showed two concrete projects Cisco has been taking part in in the Netherlands. One of them was the Urban EcoMap. ‘The important shift for us’, Boorsma explained, ‘is not the shift from atoms to bits, but the shift from bits to decision making’ How can we deploy the use of datastreams to improve our decisions? Or in the words of Cisco:

Urban EcoMap is an interactive decision space that empowers individual citizens to make informed decisions about their daily lives, along with how to participate in the vitality of their communities. We aim to build awareness, fostering a sense of community, and provide actions for citizens to take to enable the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in cities.

On the ecomap visitors find a per-neighborhood mapping of important environmental statistics, such as CO2 emissions per household, broken down in categories such as transportation, energy and waste.

The central idea is that behavioral change starts with knowledge and insight in the actual consequences of one’s actions. The urban ecomap could be an interesting contribution to this process.

At the same time, the data of the map is currently quite crude: I can look up what the average CO2-emission per household is in my neighborhood and compare that to other neighborhoods. But I cannot zoom into more detailed levels such as the block where I live.

Nor does Urban Ecomap provide me with insights in what I could contribute to improve the environment. It gives some very general tips like ‘Car Share to work 2-3 times a week’ or ‘Turn off electronic devices’, but there is no way for me to find out exactly how much emissions I will save if I indeed would car share or ride my bike to work. The site does allow me to make up a list of general resolutions to live a more environmental friendly live (and publish those on Facebook), but I never learn what my actual contribution to the problem of urban pollution is, and what I can contribute in alleviating it.

Although I really appreciate Cisco’s central idea, I think there are stil some improvements to make in the execution of the project. Urban Ecomap does give me a general sense of the problem, but as of yet it doesnot really give me a sense of ‘ownership’ of the problem. It would be great if in the future a system like Urban Ecomap would be outfitted with some of the features promised in the PERSONAL TRAVEL ASSISTANT, which is also part of the Connected Urban Development program and that does make a link between personal itinerary and social and environmental impact.

In the Air

In the Air addresses similar issues as the Urban Ecomap, but it has a different origin. It was developped in the Visualizar workshop organized by the Medialab Prado:

In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the of the city.

The project proposes a platform for individual and collective awareness and decision making, where the interpretation of results can be used for real time navigation through the city, opportunistic selection of locations according to their air conditions and a base for political action.

Just like the Ecomap, In the Air visualizes data on a map to inform citizens about pollution in the city. In the air is using real time data provided by the Government of Madrid.

What I found interesting about In the Air is that the designers have been thinking about different interfaces to communicate the datasets. Whereas the Urban Ecomap uses effective but rather boring generic cartesian maps, In the Air shows a set of alternatives. The web interface is a quite beautiful piece of datavis and they are also thinking of bringing the data back into the city. For instance by way of using facades of buildings to reflect a color scheme depending on the levels of pollution or about home units that people can attach to their balconies.

In the air – Physical Prototype from susanna tesconi on Vimeo.

The data collected by In the air can also be linked to individual experiences. They are developing a portable visualization gadget that allows users to see pollution levels nearby. It also shows the impact of taking a bike rather than a car on a certain trip. And it includes a ‘contamination compass’ that directs users away from polluted zones and toward cleaner places in the city. In addition, they are also thinking of creating a bottom-up sensor network, where individuals can also contribute to the data collection process by adopting a sensor and hooking it up to the network.

Although I really liked this presentation, it has its own problem is: In the Air is still a prototpye, all the ideas are there, but I imagine it would be quite a leap to scale this prototype to a full fledged application working city- nation- or worldwide, while making use of data sets that are detailed enough to give actual localized information.

Perhaps then, we would need more cooperation between projects like this. Organizations like Cisco could bring the technological and infrastructural clout to realize projects like this. Initiatives like In the Air are perhaps better suited to initiate original ideas and cultural innovative design that could make them successful.

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 this negotiation is becoming more complicated. It is not just the architect or planner that sets the stage for our urban experiences. Digital media, software and embedded technologies  – varying from location based services to ‘smart’ sensors – play a co-constituting role in setting and sorting the stage as well as in both enabling and regulating public interaction.

While trying to get a grasp on the different ways that digital media technologies are shaping our cities and could be incorporated in the design process, we came up with a number of possible ‘design approaches’. They form a somewhat ad lib constituted list of categories, each made up of different elements that together set the boundaries for the design process. These design approaches combine certain design tools, a methodology, a particular way of understanding what a city is (often embedded in one or another discipline) and/ or particular urban ideals. A design approach thus consists of a particular way of understanding the world, and / or a particular methodology, tools and objectives to intervene in that world.

These design approaches are not neatly comparable variables: in one approach the tools might be decisive, another departs from social processes, a third from technologies and a fourth stresses a particular urban ideal. Some operate at the scale of urban planning, others mostly focus at hyperlocal interventions. Some of these approaches are overlapping, others might be combined.

This list is also not exhaustive – please feel free to add any approaches that we might have overlooked. Yet we do think that it gives a sense of all the different concurrent and sometimes competing approaches at work in the 21^st century hybrid city.

· The Wiki-City - Designing with new media – How can the design process itself be restructured through the use of (social) digital media? How can one allow for more participation, bottom-up input, and engagement in a productive way? How does this change the relation between client, architects and other performers, and the audience?

· The Real Time City – Data-aggregation in the Design Process With the rise of digital and mobile media and gps receivers, urbanites have started leaving numerous digital traces behind that when aggregated reveal their usage patterns of the city. What exactly do we learn from these datasets, and how can they be incorporated in the design process?

· The Living City – Urban experience, narratives and design Digital media can be used to annotate urban spaces with people’s everyday stories and lived experiences. How does this temporal inscription of place change they way we see and interact with the urban environment?

· The Multimedia City  – The design of urban screens and media facades Architecture is increasingly using multimedia components as part of their elementary set of building blocks. How can you incorporate these into urban design?

· The Augmented City – The design of informational services in a physical context In augmented reality, additional layers of information are projected on or over physical environments. Thus the domain of digital information is embedded in the physical domain. What is the potential for urban design?

· The Sentient City – Designing Responsive Architecture Various sensors can register real-time information about the environment, and movements, (social) processes and identities of people and objects. Technical systems may also respond to changing conditions. How can this be employed to adapt the shape, function, usage of or access to buildings and infrastructures?

· The Smart City – Using artificial intelligence to design urban systems that respond or anticipate what is happening Can AI be integrated in urban design to anticipate and respond to urban patterns?

· The Hybrid City – Designing for hybrid practices. Digital and mobile media have led to changing urban behaviors and the rise of new cultural practices. For instance, the advent of WiFi has increased ‘mobile work’ from (semi-)public spaces. How can these changes in cultural practices be translated back into design, either by physically accommodating them or by design interventions that discourage them?

· The Layered City –Integrated design of the parallel experiences of physical places and mediascapes If the experience of the city is shaped by both the shape of the physical city as well as through exchanges in the media landscape, can we design both layers (or ‘channels’) of an urban project in concordance with each other?

· The Plugin City – using digital media to optimize, personalize or extend the experience of the city Can digital media be designed as ‘plug ins’ to the existing city, make the usage of existing urban structures more efficient and personalized or extend and deepen their experience?

· The Tactical City – using digital media to design alternative usage of the city Can digital media be designed to open up the design of physical spaces to other users or practices than initially intended?

· The Critical City – using design to foreground and discuss the dominant discours on urban culture Can design be employed as a means to a debate on urban culture, rather than shaping urban culture itself?

· The Interface City – designing urban ‘interfaces’. Some urban theories understand the city itself as an information platform where goods, opinions and ideas are constantly exchanged. Can new services be designed that optimize or extend this function of the city as a platform of exchange into the digital domain?

· The Informational City – The design of information spaces In our understanding of the media world spatial metaphors play an important role. Some architects have made the leap from designing physical structures to using their spatial expertise in ‘information architecture’.

In our upcoming event in Shanghai this August we want to focus on the role of digital media in the urban design process. How can digital media be employed in the design process of cities and urban culture? There we would like to showcase and discuss varying desing approaches and investigate whether different disciplines involved can learn from each other. A call for participation will be released shortly.

Last week our friends & collegues at Vurb and Non-Fiction organized an evening about the opportunities of Augmented Reality for architects. Layer-developer Johannes la Poutre presented some of his recent projects, and Ole Bouman – director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute - was interviewed about SARA – an AR-app developped by the NAi.

It was an interesting evening, that showed us the opportunities of AR. Yet at the sametime the conclusion was drawn that this new medium is still very much in an experimental stage. There are still quite a few issues to be solved as well as open ends to what exactly this new medium is and who it belongs to.

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 messier than ever. It’s even doubtful whether we can truly get a grasp on these processes. What we can do is try to increase our sensitivity of the complexity of different logics at work. It was this issue that most of the presentations in this session addressed.

Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob

The work of sound artist Duncan Speakman, who discussed his subtlemob-project, addressed several aspects of the hybridization of space through the advent of digital media technologies.

A Subtlemob is a collective urban audio-experience set in urban space. Participants download an mp-3 file, head to a location in the city, and at a particular time they all press play at the same time, thereby collectively experiencing the same soundtrack. The soundtrack does not only consist of music but also of spoken instructions that the participants have to carry out (And sometimes there is different instructions for different groups of participants). It is like a flash-mob, yet more subtle. That is: flash mobs are often staged experiences that gain most of their audience and impact not at the moment itself, but because the event is taped on video and broadcasted on Youtube. A subtlemob is only to be experienced live, there are no recordings, it is all about the experience you have when you are there. You just have to be there to get it.

One of the starting points of this project is the work of audio culture researcher Michael Bull (I happend to do a podcast interview with him a few years ago, just in case you’d care). Bull studied the experience of the city of first walkman and later iPod users and came up with a few conclusions.

First of all, a lot of people used music to augment their experience of the city, they purposely add a soundtrack to extend or alter their mood. This is not something most composers take into account, Speakman realized. Usually music is not composed with a particular spatiality in mind. One composes for an abstract listening experience, not for the person that listens to an iPod in the back of the bus. But how can you compose for those specific experiences? Speakman therefore decided to change this around, so when composing he often goes to the location his music is intended for to check out if the match is right.

The second theme that has come up in the work of Michael Bull is the idea of the bubble-experience. Digital media have the affordance to make personal spaces warmer, but at the same time they make public spaces cooler. With an iPod one constructs one’s own intense experience in urban space, but it also privatizes this experience. Similarly many critics have argues that also mobile phones play a similar role. They create a ‘full time intimate community’ in which throughout the day a network of friends keeps continuously in touch with each other, even if friends are not physically present. Again this can be understood as a privatization (or parochialization) of public space.

Speakman:Digital media make personal space warmer, public space cooler

The idea of the subtlemob is to ‘hack’ these devices to turn their logic around. Can mp3-players also be used to construct collective experiences that heighten the experience of being in public? That encourages people to observe one another rather than retracting in their mediated bubbles of private space.

Teletrust

The other three presentations, including work of Peter Westenberg and Elizabeth Sikiaridi, addressed related issues.

Karen Lancel en Hermen Maat showed their Teletrust-installation, which consists of a full body veil that on the one hand extends the idea of a personal bubble-space. Yet at the same time it enables the wearer – by touching oneself and activating the sensors in the veil – to get in touch with stories told by other people. Is it possible to use networked media to create intimate spaces within public space?

In TELE_TRUST [we] explore how in our changing social eco-system we increasingly demand transparency; while at the same time we increasingly cover our vulnerable bodies with personal communication-technology. For TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat designed a hybrid play zone for a vulnerable process, of balancing between fear AND desire for the other. In a visual, poetic way they explore the emotional and social tension between visibility and invisibility; privacy and trust.

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.

Ignore

Why wouldn’t architects and planners simply ignore developments in the field of new media? Arguably, new media developments and architecture operate at very different speeds. It often takes many years for an architect or planner to negotiate, design, and build, whereas the design of new media technologies is calculated in months rather than years. Further, the lifecycle of media technologies is often updated every few months, whereas an architect or planner traditionally designs for at least a few decades ahead, if not ‘for eternity’. Why think about how people use Twitter to organize their daily life and meet people, when the services may have ceased to exist or evolved into something completely different by the time the design for an urban square or university campus is finished? Architects, some argue, deal with volumes in space, and should leave digital media out of the equation.

They are wrong, we think. The merging of digital and physical spaces leads to new social and spatial practices. This has a huge impact on spatial practices and spheres such as dwelling and inhabiting, meeting and public space, traveling and mobility, work and provisioning, and leisure. The design of these spatial domains has traditionally been the core business of architects and planners. Any changes in these fields therefore directly affect their work and cannot be ignored.

Embrace

Perhaps then, architects and planners should embrace new media and try to integrate the digital domain seamlessly into the design of physical space? Architects build for people, and if people want to use new media technologies, the architect should try to optimize their personalized media-experience of urban space. Architects should use the latest technologies to shape their designs. Spaces can be stuffed with sensors that make ‘smart’ analyses of the environment so that they can respond to changing circumstances. Surfaces can be conceived of as potential pixel space for interactivity, so that surroundings can be personalized and adapted by their users. This is the ‘information age’ and architecture should express that in any possible form. Architects should not only build for the streets, but also for the screen. This response is the exact opposite of ignoring. But isn’t this over-enthusiastic stance ignoring the fact that media practices are profoundly influencing social behavior in physical space, yet not necessarily always for the better? And what remains of the valuable differences between spatial design and media design?

Critical engagement

Or can spatial design professionals relate in a third way to the ubiquity of new media in the (urban) landscape? Can they find a space of their own which neither rejects nor fully embraces these developments? We propose they can, and should, by taking a stance of ‘critical engagement’. This proposition does not just mean taking a reconciliatory position somewhere in the middle of this – admittedly somewhat caricatural – spectrum between ignoring and embracing.

The attitude of ‘critical engagement’ implies a self-reflective take on the profession of spatial design itself. For us – as relative outsiders with an interest in new media, urban culture and identity – architecture is foremost a discipline that provides spatial structures for social processes. It is a profession that literally sets the stage for the social interactions of everyday life.

The main question architects should ask themselves is how new media technologies alter the social processes behind spatial interventions? For example, is housing still the same when the home is no longer a retreat with four walls and a roof, but penetrated by all sorts of media which bring in formerly separated domains like work, leisure, meeting, and even (virtual) travel? And inversely, to what extent does ‘habitation’ become mobile, invading other domains as people increasingly dwell in the familiarity of their mobile media devices and networks which they take anywhere they go? Media-technologies form a third leg in the traditional expertise of architecture: to shape social processes by means of physical interventions.

Media practices turn this dyad into a triangular relationship: man + environment + media. Position 1 (ignore) emphasizes the relation between man + environment but ignores the fact that social processes in physical space are increasingly mediated by technologies. Position 2 (embrace) emphasizes the relation between man + media, yet loses sight of the importance of physical context for media use. Position 3 takes this triangular relationship as its point of departure. On the one hand architects have to come up with new design solutions for these changing social practices. On the other hand they can also influence these mediated social practices through physical design interventions: directing, discouraging, stimulating alternatives, commenting on them, and so on.

Challenge 1: Who sets the normative framework?

This makes architecture a highly normative discipline. Although architects cannot determine what happens in the spaces they design (and few if any still care to do so), they do set up a prescriptive environment that might invoke, encourage or prohibit particular interactions, experiences or moods. In our view this is no longer possible without at least some basic insights in the way digital media have made their way into the urban fabric and the practices of daily life.

We realize that this design practice always has to carefully maneuver between multiple and often conflicting stakeholders and interests, intended activities and events, and the character of specific sites and contexts. Architects face difficult questions about their position in relation to clients and the people they design for, the proposed uses and activities of places, and the quality of space and environment. New media practices make this process of defining stakeholders, activities, and spatial context far more complicated. Why? More often than before new media practices involve stakeholders who are not physically present. Unforeseen uses and events may arise from new developments in media, like for instance ‘smart mobs’: gatherings of people coordinated by mobile media. And the definition of context and spatial quality is challenged by new media practices like ‘geotagging’ whereby people can inscribe places with digital representations and are able to do realtime database queries for related places.

This is all quite abstract so let’s look at an example. Suppose an architect or planner is involved in designing some public space, say a park. Who are the stakeholders involved and what are their interests? What activities might take place there? What qualities should that public place have? The client, a local municipality, will want to combine a pleasant public service with some level of institutional control to prevent loitering, pollution, etc. The public may want a place were they can relax, but some also want a place to work and meet. The planner must find a position vis-a-vis the public’s wish for leisure and connectivity (e.g. by installing benches, free wireless internet, and electricity), institutional control (e.g. by somehow limiting access to wireless infrastructure, installing CCTV cameras, or uncomfortable benches that cannot be used long), and stimulating the public character of the park (e.g. by discouraging individual media consumption altogether).

Moreover, the stakeholders do not solely consist of the municipality and a heterogeneous public, but also of the wireless internet provider, the technical repair staff, the security agency monitoring the park behind screens, and even theaters, cafés and shops in the vicinity that might be affected by the media-consumption and online buying habits of the now-connected public. Similarly, free wireless internet may shift the intended activities of the park from being a local public meeting place for co-existence towards a place for individualized networking on a potentially global scale. This in turn influences the quality of a park as a specific public setting. If people use Twitter and Facebook to post that they are in the park, will they be more likely to meet acquaintances or strangers there? Moreover, the representation and quality of the park may be largely outside of the planner’s hands when people upload and share their experiences of that place online.

So, who exactly sets the design criteria, and the values they imply? Are architects to carry out the wishes of their clients? Do they play a part in shaping them in concordance with their clients? What role do external parties play, such as regulatory bodies? Should architects raise their voice in the broader public debate about the values they play a part in shaping or enforcing?

A further challenge is the relation of the architect with the client. We are well aware that the design profession is to a large extent a ‘messy’ business, where ideals and actual practice more often than not diverge rather than run in parallel. How can an architect sell these stories about new media to a client who just wants a house, or a park? We realize that our argument is not just about convincing the architect of the necessity for ‘critical engagement’ with new media, but also about educating the client. This is an important issue for the future as well, not just for the architect but also for The Mobile City.

Challenge 2: Control or open up?

Another challenge that looms is simply not to get carried away by all the new possibilities and rhetoric of smart technologies. So far we have been talking about the design of social processes, yet one could argue that this is also a dangerous path. To what extent do architects really want to direct these social processes? What level of control does one strive for? Should architects – with the help of for environmental psychologists and security experts – design for a precisely prescribed specific effect? Or should the outcome left open? Should architects design open systems that can be adopted to multiple uses? We’d argue for the latter. The city should not be turned into a collection of friction-free non-places but rather continue to allow for what Mark Weiser has called ‘seamful’ experiences.

We agree with Adam Greenfield’s suggestion (in an interview with The Mobile City) that it would be much better to merely provide ‘a service framework that is subtle and unobtrusive, yet robust and open enough so that people can reach in, grab it and use it’. Of course it can be an interesting proposal to try to ‘nudge’ behavior in a certain direction. Yet systems should be open enough to allow for unforeseen uses and adaptation by the public.

This issue is particular important with regard to new media design in a spatial context. In many instances of urban computing, unspoken cultural codes or legal codes are hardened into software code. And where the soft systems of culture and even the code of law are somewhat malleable (officer, can you please make an exception?), if a particular protocol on for instance who is allowed access or not is established in the soft- or hardware, one has to be (or hire) a hacker to get a temporary exception.

These are also questions we will continue to pose to ourselves. One of the future aims of The Mobile City is to look for ‘best practices’ (or total failures) within the field of architecture itself, in order to learn from them, and be able to provide clearer answers.

New directions and chances

One of the things we noticed during this ‘Day of the Young Architect’ is that many architects appear to feel threatened by the new media realm which is encroaching upon their profession. New media which increasingly operate in physical contexts challenge architecture’s traditional monopoly in shaping social processes through the design of physical spaces. Yet we believe there are also new chances and opportunities for architects and planners.

First, we already witness that the profession is flexibly adapting itself to new circumstances. Architecture is moving in the direction of what has been called ‘service design’. This means that a client hires a ‘designer’ not to just build him a beautiful building, but to shape a particular process or ‘customer (or ‘citizen’) experience’ from start to end. The question is how can these two structures – physical situations and media practices – be combined to design for urban experiences in meaningful ways? Surely this question cannot be solved by architects alone. Architects are increasingly working together with other professional disciplines, such as software engineers, sociologists, structural engineers, media theorists and philosophers. (See for instance Dan Hill’s talk with Carlo Ratti for an elaboration of this theme, and his recent response to the exhibition Toward the Sentient City). Depending on the assignment architects sometimes are but one of the players in such multidisciplinary teams, while sometimes they can take the lead.

Second, architects harness spatial expertise that can steer future directions of new media. Digital media developments are increasingly being integrated with geographical space, physical context, and the material world (labelled geo-spatial web, locative media, the internet of things, and so on). We think it is important that architects play a role in the debate about the values that are implied in such media designs. As experts in what Dan Hill calls ‘spatial intelligence’, architects can contribute important insights to the discussions what directions new media developments should head.

Architects might engage in methods of ‘critical design’, where the main aim of a project is to tease out the tensions, power relations and other issues at play in particular constellations of architecture, digital media and urbanism. So instead of feeling threatened by new media, why shouldn’t architecture boldly enter this field and enrich it with its own expertise? One example is ‘information architecture’ as a way to spatially represent complex information. The large majority of people think spatially. As datasets are growing in size and complexity there is a great opportunity for spatial professionals to manage and visualize digital information.

Conclusion

Spatial design starts from particular goals and seeks different channels to engage stakeholders – ranging from interventions in space to the design of information services and the structuring of organizational processes. ‘Critical engagement’ with digital media, we feel, not necessarily translates into interventions in the physical city. Rather it should involve thinking about the city as a complex of social processes that are partly brought about by new media practices and partly by physical processes.

This hybridization of the city – and its consequences for urban professionals – is something The Mobile City will continue to research and address. We believe this opens new opportunities for architects. Some may choose to pursue what they do best: the design of physical volumes and spaces –albeit as part of multidisciplinary teams perhaps led by ‘Master Designers’. Others might try to shape the design process at large themselves, a new incarnation of the idea of the ‘master builder’, and direct the process in which multiple disciplines come together. Whatever they choose, we are convinced that future architecture is at its best when it critically engages with digital media developments.

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.

Proposal: Goeie Reis (‘Enjoy your trip’)
Group leader: Stefan van der Spek
Other members: Tina Bastajian, Lotte Meijer, Simona Sofronie

The project “Goede Reis” took the OV-chipkaart system (a public transport card based on RFID recently introduced in the Netherlands) as their starting point. The team had three interrelated goals with this project: to raise awareness about OV chip card data collection and privacy issues, to improve social interaction between disparate groups (location/culture), and to increase serendipity. The medium and location for the proposed intervention are the turnstiles/ticket control machines in the public transport system.

The idea of the project is that when you scan your OV chip card, the machine – via the built in screen and/or sound -  broadcasts information about the traveler. This is both based on his/her actual travel behavior but also on imagined personal characteristics which are made up. For instance, the machine may say “she is late today!” or “he is always home by 6!”. Through this semi-public exposure of some private information (which is not necessarily true), a conversation may start between bystanders. The project further proposes a game-like element, in which people can get higher scores by going to areas in the city they haven’t been to before. The OV card keeps a record of the urban areas that are familiar and unfamiliar to the individual. It recommends exploring unknown areas and awards points if the person goes there.

Proposal: What clicks on the street
Group leader: James Burke
Other members: Kristina Andersen, Niels Hendriks, Liesbeth Huybrechts

This intervention takes the notion of the Dutch “probleembuurt” (‘problematic neighborhood’) as the point of departure, and rephrases it into a “space of negotiation”.

These neighbourhoods are thus perceived by government and citizens as a problem. Since we found it a bit of a strange definition, we started to think about what could be defined as a ‘problem’. We realized that finding something to be a problem is often a result of not knowing the cause of for example loud noise, disturbing behaviour and so on. When there is a lot of noise in a square, people might find it irritating. But if they would know that this noise is produced by two love birds kissing for the first time, this would maybe perceived as less of problem and rather cute.

We therefore thought that we should design a system that could ‘leak’ this kind of intimate information into the neighbourhood. We made a choice for the term leakage, because this answers to an important principle of critical design, namely that the design artefact or experience enters your familiar world as a strange element, to grasp your attention. Via this leakage qualitative information about neighbourhood events can be provided. Just like a company does not receive any qualitative information about his website by measuring clicks, ‘clicks in the street’ can’t be measured by just registering noise, complaints,… So our question is: ‘what are clicks in the street?’ Our designed leakage system would want to do more than measure clicks in the street via detector systems. It would collect intimate stories via central figures in the neighbourhood, like shop owners or kids, and spread/leak this via unexpected media.

Take the example of the shop owners. They could collect personal stories in their shop – since they do this daily anyway – and leak them randomly via their printed receipts to the visitors of the shop. Receipts always contain a little note about the shopowner (contact information, a logo,…). This note could be replaced by some intimate information about people in the neighbourhood. Clients in the shop could accidentally read the anonymous story of a person in his/her neighbourhood, like “yesterday my boyfriend organized a surprise party for my birthday. It was amazing, we danced until the morning”.

Via a game (in a newspaper for example) we would stimulate neighbourhoods to invent new unexpected ways via which people can leak their intimate information. This to engage people in the neighbourhood, to create an increased local awareness about the personal stories of people and maybe to increase tolerance.

Proposal: Landmarks
Group leader: Levien Nordeman
Other members: Arthur Clemens, Ohyoon Kwon, Davide Dulcetti

The “Landmarks” team wanted to enrich events taking place in Rotterdam. ‘Landmarks’ are immaterial bits of information about events created by organizers. These landmarks can be revealed at physical locations in the city with the use of augmented reality software on mobile phones. Landmarks thus augment events by disseminating information via mobile devices as a way to elicit experiences. Such landmarks should become mandatory for biennales and festivals.

The timeline for a landmark is as follows: first, there is the initial idea for an event; second, organizers go to the local government to get the event permit, and are required to add landmarks; third, the event organizers make an augmented reality landmark. Participants themselves can add information and experiences to these landmarks in pictures, sounds and texts capturing the experience in pictures, memories, text and sound in order to make the event visible after it has finished, as a kind of ‘living monument’.

Proposal: Nuggit
Group leader: Klaas Kuitenbrouwer.
Other members: Monika Codourey, Edward van der Veen, Juan Esteban Rios

In this project called “Nuggit” people can share something they have to offer without a monetary exchange involved. This can be some free time, a certain skill, a situation, and so on. One can become a ‘nuggeteer’ by offering a ‘nuggit’, whatever it is one is offering to someone else. A nuggit can be walking someone’s dog for twenty minutes while waiting for the bus. The supply and demand of nuggits are managed through a mobile phone platform. Proximity of nuggeteers is indicated on a radar-like interface. A rating system is used to separate the good nuggeteers from the bad ones, and establish one’s ‘nuggitude’.

Nuggit thus addresses issues with regard to social networking in urban space and the idea of reciprocity and reputation systems in urban culture vis-a-vis the advent of exchange systems like eBay that are based on commercial transactions.

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 not a peek into a future that is ‘just around the corner’. The exhibits should rather be understood as ‘conversation pieces’ that expose some of the hidden assumptions of a new engineering discipline and the way it is appropriated in social-technical situations. And rather than performing ivory tower criticism, the exhibition also lays bare alternative trajectories.

So if this indeed is a philosophical exhibition, let’s have a look at how some of the basic questions of that discipline are addressed. These being of course – to put it somewhat bluntly – : ‘who are we?’, ‘what can we know?’ and ‘what is the good life?’ – or in the context of urban culture ‘how are we to live together in the city’.

About sentient technology and Urban computing

Before we start answering those questions, I will have a closer look at the technology that is the centre piece of the exhibition. Increasingly, Shepard states in his interesting curatorial statement, it is the ‘dataclouds of 21st century urban space’ that shape our experience of the city. All over the city, ‘intelligent’ applications have started sensing what is happening around them and reacting to it – be it smart traffic lights or cctv camera’s whose images are computer analyzed for suspicious behavior.

Add to this the increase of tracking devices such as cell phones that most urbanites carry, and as a result the city has become ‘sentient’. Shepard explicitly refers to the Latin roots of this term to explain what he means with that term: ‘Sentience refers to the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, and does not necessarily include the faculty of self-awareness.’

Now of course it is not the city itself that perceives or even is sentient, but rather the combined apparatus of tracking and sensing devices – operated by different actors – that note what is going on in the city and output their impressions in all sorts of data streams. Neither is this emergence of the sentient city a singular movement driven by a centralized bureaucracy or company, established at a single address to which one could send a letter of complaint or e-mail a feature request.

The field of what could be called ‘urban computing’ consists of plural research traditions, performed and commissioned by divergent actors all with their own motivation and implicit understanding of what a city is or should be. They vary from government agencies that want to bring order to city space, politicians that would like to promote citizenship, companies that want to offer personalized services, community workers that hope to promote solidarity or mutual understanding, artists that want to criticize consumer culture and urbanites who may embrace, adapt or reject some or other of these offerings. (1)

The sentient city thus should be understood as an ‘assemblage’ of all those different actors that all employ their own logic. (2)

The subjective feelings of the sentient city

What then should we make of Shepard’s notion of ‘subjective’ perception? It is my guess that he has chosen this term to foreground that the data streams generated by the Sentient City may seem like an example of objective fact gathering, whereas in reality it is far from it.

For starters, the decision of which data to collect and which to ignore and how to classify it, is already a highly political choice. Next, the data generated by the Sentient City is interpreted by software algorithms and actuation devices, and there is nothing objective about that either. It is a highly normative process, where subjective values, legal codes and power relations are turned into software code on the base of which sentient technology decides, acts and discriminates.

This foregrounding of the normative side of the sentient city goes against the grain of the discourse of ‘ubiquitous computing’ that plays a dominant role in the debate on the sentient city. In ubicomp, an application is usually thought successful if it makes the computer disappear. While we carry on our daily routines, computation technology – calmly operating in the background – will make our live more easy, efficient or exciting – whatever way we would want it. Not only does it do away with the need to interact with those beige boxes on our desktops (which of course is not a bad thing per se), it also renders the subjective decisions at the heart of its social interventions invisible and presents them as natural.

Question 1: Who are we and who is acting?

Now, this brings up issues of agency, and thus leads to the first of our three philosophical questions: the ontological ‘who are we’. Does the way we employ new technologies alter the way we think of ourselves? Does it alter our relationship with the world around us and the objects in it? Does it create a shift in how we think about ‘agency’?

On a side note, a lot of interesting things could be said about the relation between sentient technology and identity. Anecdotical accounts of for instance Esther Polak’s installation Amsterdam RealTime (in which people are traced through the city with GPS-device) show that the collection of data could lead to a new type of reflexivity: the ostensible objective data about participants trajectories through the city at times clashes with their cultivated self-images (one might think of oneself as a urban flaneur, whereas the data now ‘proves’ that one has only travelled between the couch at home and the cubicle at the office).

Or what to think of services that based on their analysis of your urban trajectories assign you to a lifestyle profile that from then on is used to recommend places to go, activities to undertake and people to meet. Would you eventually subscribe to such a continuous lifestyle address made to you by your mobile phone? (see also my article on Sensenetworks)

Interesting as those questions might be, they are beyond the scope of Toward the Sentient City. This exhibition mainly brings up issues of agency, as well as our relation to the (natural) world around us.

For instance the exhibit Amphibious Architecture makes us aware of the invisible underwater world of the Bronx and East Rivers. When fish swim by, a floating collection of leds in the river emanates an undulating purple shine on the water surface. One can also inquire the fish by means of a text message about the quality of the water. Poetic and playful as it might be, as Shepard writes, this exhibit ‘encourages us to expand our view of what constitutes the city and its citizens.’

Not only does sentient technology may ask us to redefine our ontological categories, it also addresses the issue of agency within the category. Do sentient objects, like those in the project Too smart city have an agency of their own? Are they truly ‘intelligent’ as is sometimes claimed in the ‘smart city’ rhetoric that is part of the ubicomp discourse?

In this exhibit a moving city bench ruthlessly kicks off its users after its built in sensors and algorithms have determined the allotted quota of leisure time has expired. Now who exactly evicts the unsuspecting stroller from his lunch spot? The bench? Its programmer? The larger assemblages and discourses in which norms about appropriated city behavior are determined and encoded into the software? Is the bench – in the words of Bruno Latour – a mere intermediary that passes on rules and information that are shaped elsewhere? Or is it a mediator, an element that plays an active role in the constitution of those norms and values?

Question 2: What can we know?

A second and related philosophical field that Toward the Sentient City addresses is that of epistemology. Does the information gathered by the sensors in the sentient city lead to new ways of gathering knowledge and new insights?

The exhibit Trash Track by MIT’s Senseable City Lab actively addresses this question. For this exhibit, trash items such as paper cups are tagged with a gps-device and mobile phone chip.

After it has been disposed of, the item sends text messages with its location, so we can follow its track from recipient to waste disposal site. The hope expressed through this project is that knowing will lead to a change in doing: the fact that we know where our trash ends up should make us more aware of the problem we create by throwing things away.

Now, what is at stake epistemologically is not just a newly gained knowledge on the whereabouts of our lost keys, runaway dog or thrown away coffee cup that will make life somewhat more (dis)comfortable and may lead us to behave differently.

What indeed is new is the fact that data from many different sentient sources can be aggregated in real time and give us a grasp of what is happening in the city that we never have had before. Elsewhere Anthony Townsend (who has contributed to this exhibition with the project Breakout!) has argued that this shift in perception is comparable to the introduction of aerial photography. I quote at length:

‘if aerial photography showed us the muscular and skeletal structure of the city, the revolution in urban informatics is likely to reveal it’s circulatory and nervous systems. I like to call this vision the “real-time-city” because for the first time we’ll see cities as a whole the way biologists see a cell – instantaneously and in excruciating detail but also alive. … and as these capabilities become more widespread, the real-time city could become a place where everyone is an amateur urban planner, using urban informatics to understand the larger impacts of their everyday decisions. That, so fundamental a shift in our perception of our civilization seems to be something worth working towards’

This new ways of gaining knowledge about the city may have huge consequences for the way we perceive and act in the city, and Townsend even sees opportunities for democratization.

Yet could it also lead – if you will allow me another detour, this time through the work of Jane Jacobs – to a new form of architectural hubris? In the early 1960s Jacobs pronounced the ideology of modernist architecture dead on the ground that they had reduced urban life to too simple a formula. From their Olympian vantage point modernist planners had thought that they could calculate the exact needs of a population based on a handful of variables. Take the population number, divide it by a health rate and you get the number of hospitals needed per square mile.

The problem, Jacobs argues, is that modernists understood cities as problems in disorganized complexity, whereas they are problems in organized complexity – meaning that every change in a single variable doesn’t only change the outcome, but also directly influences the other variables at work.

The ‘health rate’ in this example is not a static given but dependent on many other variables: the number of parks, the means of transport, diet, etc. And all those variables are intricately related tot the value of other variables. Ville Radieuse, Jacobs claimed, was the ‘triumph of mathematical average’. Instead she argued we should think of the city as a ‘process’, and to understand the processes at work urbanists should look for the catalysts that speed-up or slow down social processes in the city. Their tool being the microscope rather than the telescope.

Now, I wonder what would Jacobs make of the urban information systems that for instance have come out of the Senseable City Lab? Would she embrace them as illustrations of the organized complexity of the city? Can we now finally take in all the variables at work? And if so, can we base our planning practices on this new found knowledge – also by reacting in real time to changing conditions? Or would she still be suspicious of the data, finding it too abstract to act upon? After all the many data streams we now have may reveal quantitative aspects of urban conditions, but what do they teach us about the qualitative experience people have of them? (see also Michiel’s report on a presentation by the Senseable City Lab at Picnic 08)

Question 3: How should we live together in the City?

Let us now leave the d-tour and turn back to the main path: the third and last stage of our philosophical quest. If indeed the sentient city produces new ways of thinking about ourselves and a new type of knowledge, the question that remains is an ethical one: to what aim do we apply these new found insights? What is our definition of ‘the good life’ that we hope to lead through the use of these technologies?

Again, Toward the Sentient City proposes alternative trajectories to some of the dominant developments in this domain. Many sentient city applications that are currently in development have an implicit idea of the city as a collection of services and infrastructures to be managed as efficiently as possible.

Alternatively they offer personalized versions of the city through search and discovery devices. Other initiatives depart from control and security-issues: they use sentient technology to prevent potential unrest or allow or deny access to certain users.

Combined, in a dystopian scenario, these appropriations of the technology might contribute to what Belgium Philosopher Lieven de Cauter has called a ‘capsular society’ – a city of privatized capsules with different functions – dwelling, shopping, consuming accessible only to those with the right rfid-chip in their wallet.

Are alternative trajectories thinkable? Yes, Toward the Sentient City states. The projects Breakout! and Natural Fuse propose alternative ways of thinking about urban culture.

Breakout! addresses the issue of the urban public sphere. The project problematizes the public sphere as a sphere that only comes into being if urbanites actively engage with the space and with each other. It is not just a space that is pronounced as such by a city government. So how can the urban public sphere be animated in an interesting way? And by whom?

How can we as urbanites take responsibility for it? How can we turn public spaces in the city in an inspiring meeting place, by means of grassroots organizational tactics? Break Out provides urbanites a toolset that addresses this question from the perspective of organized work. The project wants to promote exchange and cooperation between workers in the city by claiming public spaces in the city as an office and by providing structures to organize meet-ups and brain storming sessions for urban creatives.

Natural Fuse addresses the idea of the city as a commons – a space and resource shared by and accessible to all its citizens. The idea of the commons is based on the old British custom of the communal pasture where all herdsmen in the community were allowed to graze their cattle. The drawback of such a system is that it is prone to self-destruction, a process that Garett Hardin has labeled The Tragedy of the Commons. As he writes …

… the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited.

When every herdsman keeps on adding cattle, the commons soon will be overgrazed, and no one will be able to benefit from it any longer. Close personal social ties or traditions could perhaps keep the rational herdsman from prioritizing the appraisal of his individual benefit and from adding too many cattle. However in a modern society that has done away with traditional role-patterns and depends on more abstract interdependencies, such social restrictions seem much harder to enforce.

The concept of a commons thus assumes cooperation and mutual accommodation. Could sentient technology play a role in the allocation of limited resources between citizens? Could it lead to the emergence of some sort of peer-to-peer governance model, that could prevent overusage of scarce resources? (3)

This is the question that Natural Fuse addresses. This project consists of a city wide network of plants that are linked to electric devices. The central idea is that the CO2-digestion of the plants in the network offsets the CO2 emissions caused by the use of the electric appliances. Each individual chooses whether he wants to be selfless (conserve electricity) or greedy (use electricity). However, when the total consumption of electricity in the system surpasses its CO2-absorption capacity, the system will actively start to kill the plants.

Natural Fuse thus beautifully illustrates the opportunities of an ‘urban energy commons’ as well as the problem of the tragedy that bears the same name. It challenges our thinking about the viability of a networked urban commons.

Yet it does not provide any definite answers: Would creating awareness through direct feedback mechanisms about the impact of rational selfish behavior be able to prevent it? Or would we rather need complex reputation systems? Or perhaps sentient bookkeeping systems in which our allotted ratios are kept or traded? Can we do this through peer-to-peer technologies, or do we need central institutions that act as trusted third parties?

Toward the Sentient City thus doesn’t give us any emphatic leads about which way the technology will take us. It succeeds in bringing up many important questions and diverting the discussion on the sentient city from a path of technological determinism to an open ended affair, a concern not just for engineers, planners and architects but for all of us.

Toward the Sentient City is curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York. The exhibition is on display at the Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, New York, NY from September 17 to November 7, 2009.

(1) Ann Galloways PhD thesis A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media is highly informative in giving insight in different discourses around urban computing
(2) See Manuel de Landa A new Philosophy of Society for a theory of assemblage.
(3) In Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold has also written about technology and the organization of a commons

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 an information system: it is a place where people come together, interact and exchange information, culture and goods. This process lies at the heart of both urban society as well as the market economy and leads to both (cultural) innovation as well as the continuation of urban society. This is not a process that is somewhere up in the air: over the centuries it has led to certain institutionalized practices. For instance in the seventeenth century Amsterdam was the birth place of the Broadsheet newspaper – an institution that started as an information tool on stock prices and shipping information (a ‘dashboard device’ in contemporary business terms) for business men and grew into an important pillar of the public sphere in democratic societies.

Similarly one can think of urban society as an ‘operating system’: specific practices and power relations have over the centuries been institutionalized in the laws that regulate how people are to interact and who has what rights in the city. They form the kernel of a civil society, so to speak.

At the same time, in the 20th Century cities had grown into sites of spectacle and consumption, epitomized by the skylines of New York – or even better: Las Vegas. The beginning of the 21st century however has shown a whole new dynamic: the informatization of urban culture, related to a number of developments:

• The rise of sensor networks that sense and track objects, people, institutional output and other sources (climate, energy use, etc.)
• The availability of this data in real time aggregated data flows
• The rise of actuation devices that can operate on either individual or aggregated data.
• Participatory affordances of digital media and its peer-to-peer distribution model that allow citizens to not just consume data streams, but produce and redistribute them themselves as well.

These combined phenomena lead to the rise of what Cerveny has coined ‘cloud city’: ‘The geometry of the city is no longer just the skyline. It now also includes the graph of its social networks.’ This new situation offers a range of new opportunities for civil society. (VURB’s website lists some of these in more detail).

• Responsive Environments – the environment starts to know what is going on. “What are the mechanisms by which these services are provisioned by the tasks that citizens utilize them for?”
• Urban Systems Literacy & Civic Information Systems – can data visualization of complex interactions in the city lead citizens to get a better grasp of what is happening around them (Like the newspaper did in the 17th century)?
• Collaborative Redevelopment- multiparticipant social models (analogue to for instance World of Warcraft) that allows people to interact socially on common goals.

Taken together, this leads to the formation of a new Urban Operating System, one that is not just written in the code of law but also in software code. This means that Urban Interface Policy becomes an important aspect:

In the smart city, what is written as programmatic software ‘code’ can easily become defacto ‘law’ as it imposes permissioning schemes and identity regimes on it’s participants. So far, the internet, and the open source software that powers much of it, has remained remarkably adaptable to the ideals of democratic and egalitarian societies. Every infrastructural advance, however, goes through a watershed moment where the governing design principles of the technology itself begin to influence the types of societal experiences they might produce.

Greg Skibiski / Sensenetworks.com

Greg Skibiski’s company Sense Networks is one of those institutions involved in bringing about the cloud city. The tag line of his company is ‘Indexing the real world using location data for predictive analytics.’

Whereas Cerveny conceptualized the city as the locus for both a civic society and a market place (of both commerce and culture), Sense Networks approaches the city from an individual point of view: how can we make everything the city has to offer more relevant for its users? (see also my review on the Handbook of research on Urban Informatics for this conceptual difference. A similar discussion on ‘what is a city for’ also came up in the Picnic Session on augmented reality. )

The way it is trying to do this, is by analyzing large sets of location data provided by operators of mobile phone networks. Every mobile phone user constantly beams his location to the network so that the network can find him or her when someone else tries to call. They have developped an appliction – Citysense – that  takes all this (anonimized) data, aggregates it and visualizes it. City Sense thus provides a map of San Francisco that shows real time traffic flows of people in the city:

Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations.

What they plan to do next is analyzing this data in ways similar to how Google analyzes the web: how many people that are now at location A have been at location B before? And how many of those will move on to location C rather than location D? Citysense uses this information to distill the behavior of different ‘urban tribes’, or in the words of Skibiski to compose a ‘lifestyle matrix’: people with similar spatial patterns and preferences for nightlife venues, restaurants or other urban amenities. This matrix can – this will be the next step that hasn’t been implemented yet – be used as the engine for recommendations.
So: while you move around the city with your mobile phone in your pocket, your phone company is drawing up a lifestyle profile of you, based on your geographical movement. This profile can then be used to get recommendations for restaurants, shops, people, etc – in an Amazon.com style. They call this a shift from ‘searching’ to ‘sensing’:

The application learns about where each user likes to spend time – and it processes the movements of other users with similar patterns. In its next release, Citysense will not only answer “where is everyone right now” but “where is everyone like me right now.” Four friends at dinner discussing where to go next will see four different live maps of hotspots and unexpected activity. Even if they’re having dinner in a city they’ve never visited before.

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Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield took a critical stance towards developments in urban computing. In a similar fashion to Ben Cerveny he conceptualized the city as an ‘interface’ – a system that continuously brings different worlds together. Or more precise: ‘The city is creating the maximum of interfaces in a minimum area’, the city is a complex system that brings together different people with different identities, goals, cultural backgrounds etc and provides them the interface to interact with others in order to achieve their personal goals.

While they do that, on an aggregate level other processes emerge. To illustrate that, Greenfield referred to Jane Jacobs who found that safety on city streets emerges because a number of different people (shop keepers, visitors, playing children, neighborhood inhabitants on their way to work or doing groceries) find themselves together in those streets – basically to mind their own business. Yet at the same time, the presence of all those people creates what Jacobs has coined ‘eyes on the street’: enough people keeping an eye out to provide a sense of safety. While nobody has been ordered to act as a safe keeper of the street, its safety emerges from the many eyes on the street, brought together by the function of the street as a collection of interfaces for different social processes. This is also what theorists like Sennett argue: the city is an interface that brings us in contact with people who are not like us, and it is this interaction that makes the city interesting and leads to an enrichment of our personalities as well as to social processes that foster urban culture as a whole.

Now, the problem with urban computing or networked informatics is that it shapes the process of meeting and encounter in a different way: ‘Spaces become addressable and query-able. It allows me to give instructions like: Please find me a Vietnamese Restaurant within 10 blocks that has a liquor license and a good sanitation record.’ This is a conceptual shift that Greenfield has theorized as a shift from browsing to searching. However, the search is always based on personal preferences – it is usually based on ‘affinity’ and ‘like’. Greenfield fears that this threatens the function of the city as an interface that brings differences together. Of course it is pleasant and comfortable. But while browsing might lead to confrontations with the unexpected, searching runs the risk of never finding anything truly different. (See also the interview we had with Adam Greenfield last year at Picnic)

The shift from browsing to searching also brings up another issue and that is that of the cultivation of local knowledge in relation to (sub)cultural capital. Part of the essence of being an urbanite, Greenfield finds, lies in the fact that one has accumulated a body of local knowledge of the best restaurants, hidden record shops, club nights etc. It takes years and years of browsing the city to build such a body of knowledge, that then can become part of one’s identity. Yet what happens if all this knowledge suddenly becomes available by a simple search query? Of course it would be nice to instantly find the secret spots when we visit an unknown city. But doesn’t it take something away from the process of browsing and discovery that is at the base of urban culture? (See also my post on Local knowledge and subcultural capital)

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 we generated more questions than answers–which is usually a sign that things went well. At the same time, related conferences in Europe were developing similar lines of inquiry – both the Media City conference organized by the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar (2006, 2008), The Locative Media Summer Conference in Siegen, and The Mobile City conference in the Netherlands proved important conversations partners at this juncture, and suggested there was significant interest in these issues.

We thought it important to sustain this discussion, and decided to produce a series of pamphlet length publications that would address some of the key research vectors that were beginning to emerge. Published by the Architectural League three times a year over the course of three years, the series is structured as a succession of nine “conversations” between authors from various fields. Currently in our second year with the series, we are just about to release the fourth pamphlet on Responsive Architecture by Phillip Beesley and Omar Khan. Further, as you mentioned, I am curating Toward the Sentient City–an exhibition that aims to critically explore this evolving relation between ubiquitous computing and urban architecture. The exhibition is scheduled to open this September and is organized by the Architectural League, who has commissioned five interdisciplinary teams to produce urban interventions that attempt to provide concrete examples of some of the more abstract ideas that have evolved though these discussions.

Overall, I think one of the main aspects of this evolving discourse is the shift in focus away from specific technologies to the larger social, environmental and political contexts within which these technologies take shape and are situated.

I want to return to this idea of users/participants, technology/instruments, public space/the commons. The difference between those two sets of concepts to me seems to signal a shift in thinking, from – to paraphrase Robert Venturi – planning for mankind to designing for men. The terms public space, users and technology indicate a top-down way of framing urban space, where ‘users’ are relatively passively constrained by the spatial design of public space that the architects have deemed right for them, and where technology is seen as a force with an outside impact on reality. The alternatives you put forward seem to frame urban culture from a more ‘situated’ perspective, reminding me of the tradition of ethnomethodology and Paul Dourish. The focus is on the bottom up processes of people who from particular spatial and social contexts try to achieve particular goals, the processes that when taken together make up the city or urban culture.

That’s an interesting way to frame it. True, we were interested in the notion of the “situated” not just in the sense of being located in a particular spot or position, but also in terms of ‘situated actions,’ as Lucy Suchman discusses in her book Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication (1987). Suchman writes that every course of action is highly dependent upon its material and social circumstances, “an emergent property of moment-by-moment interactions between actors, and between actors and the environments of their action.”[1] Similarly the term ‘instruments’ refers not so much to the technology in itself but rather about its possible performance in a particular context. Here, performance is understood along multiple vectors: technological, social and organizational, each with their own criteria for evaluation (effectiveness, efficacy and efficiency, respectively). Finally, public space is a term that clearly needed revisiting. Much of the so-called of “public space” in New York City, for example, is quasi-public: “public” plazas and atria managed by “private” developers and corporations where effectively a security guard decides who is allowed access and who is not, what one can do within the space and what one cannot do. Here, public space is no longer the geography of the public sphere. The Public, publics, and public opinion are formed less through the physical geography of specific urban places and more through networked information and broadcast media systems – we have known this for decades. Public space thus has become an imprecise and weak term, it means both everything and nothing today.

So how is the concept of the commons helpful to reconceptualize urban public space?

The ‘public’ that is addressed in the public sphere tends to be defined as a unified mass. The term ‘commons’ is based on the idea of the bottom up appropriation of a shared resource. Rather than thinking of public space as something to be legislated by the city government from the top down, thinking through the commons allows for shared collective action, which is more horizontally distributed. The term refers of course to the central grassland in English villages that was owned by no one but could be used by all villagers to graze their cows. Built-in was the notion that everyone was to benefit equally from this resource. Now this was not unproblematic, as Garrett Hardin has pointed out in his essay The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin reasons that for me as an individual it would be beneficial to add as many cows as possible. I would gain all the benefits of doing so, while the damage to the commons would be shared by everyone. Yet if everyone were to keep on adding cattle, the commons would become overgrazed. So we need some form of collective coercion that keeps individualist tendencies in check with the common interest.

Now, as with other aspects of the physical world such as land, water and air, the electromagnetic spectrum upon which contemporary wireless communications depend can be similarly understood as a shared and limited resource. Thus regulating it in ways that benefit everyone should be the objective. Hertzian Rain is a recent project of mine that that proposes a variable event structure designed to raise awareness of issues surrounding the wireless topography of urban environments through telematic conversations based on sound and bodily movement. Approaching the wireless topography of contemporary cities as a ‘commons’ makes much more sense than simply seeing it as public space, whatever that term may mean today. It provides a better framework for thinking about the sharing of scarce resources or our impact on the environment.

So far we have mainly discussed public space from an infrastructural perspective: the idea of the city as a bunch of infrastructures or collective resources that need to be distributed fairly or efficiently. Now, let’s shift this discussion a bit. A lot of the discourse on public space is not so much on the space itself, but rather on what happens inside these spaces, about our attitudes. Public space only comes into being if we choose to behave in a particular way, if we choose to be ‘public men’ so to speak, which means that we should not retract into our own social groupings but have to open up to the others with whom we share the city. Public space is thus also a highly ethical concept, it proscribes how we are to behave as ideal citizens. Should we update the concept of ‘public men’ as well, or is this public ethos as described for instance by Richard Sennett and Hannah Arendt still relevant?

I would be careful conflating Sennett’s notion of Public Man with Arendt’s concept of the Space of Appearance. Sennett laments the demise of physical public space as the space of social interaction, and sees a crisis in the retreat from more formally defined public life to more informal, individual, private, and intimate relations. Arendt’s Space of Appearance, on the other hand, is less a physical location than anyspace whatsoever where we come together in speech and action. “The polis, properly speaking,” she writes “is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” [2] So the two are actually quite different regarding how they view so-called “public space.” Again, it is important to distinguish between public space and the public sphere. While historically they have been congruent, this is by no means the case today.

There is the idea that the direct encounter with the ‘other’ in the public sphere produces a democratic condition that breeds tolerance of the other, and through that we have a public society. To address how this plays out in our contemporary world of electronic networks, we need to understand what is happening in social space now that mobile media are becoming truly ubiquitous in urban environments. Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchen have suggested that these kinds of “code/space” need to be understood ontogenetically, that is, as a spatial condition that is brought into being through specific practices that alter the conditions under which the space itself is (re)produced. Building on the work of Adrian MacKenzie, they differentiate between technicity (the productive power of technology to make things happen) and its realization through transduction (the constant making anew of a domain in reiterative and transformative practices). These assemblages of code, people and space are thus brought into being through specific techno-social performances or enactments within the course of daily life.

These new social spaces complicate the traditional notion of the public citizen. Take Twitter, for example, where one potentially develops an ‘ambient’ awareness of the emotional state of hundreds or thousands of people. Now what kind of public is performed and enacted here? What kind of place is this, which engenders citizens with a different kind of ‘public-ness’ than that of Sennett’s Public Man?

Now, lets connect these new type of hybrid social spaces you mention with the notion of designing ‘instruments’ as you proposed five years ago. Over the last years we have seen a lot of location based media services and art projects that could be understood as instruments. The question of course is: instruments to what aim? To me it seems that they often remediate old notions of the city, rather than take the new situations you mentioned here into account. That is, they either make the use of the city more efficient (as in way-finders or recommendation services), or they provide instruments for the serendipity (also a central concept in public man-theory) that we might loose through the increased efficiency that these location based services offer. I am not unsympathetic to these projects, but I am also wondering whether rather than building instruments to restore older notions of urban culture, shouldn’t we be looking at instruments geared to a new experience of the city that is emerging?

Personally I think it’s always more interesting to invent than reproduce. And who wants an ever-more ‘efficient’ life anyway? It’s funny that you raise the notion of serendipity. I am working now on a project titled the Sentient City Survival Kit. The project explores the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing for urban environments. It takes as its method the design, fabrication and presentation of a collection of artifacts, spaces and media for ‘survival’ in the ‘near-future’ sentient city. One item in the kit is the GPS-Serendipitor, a way finding device that determines a route to a destination that the user has not previously taken. Given a culture obsessed with getting from point A to point B, it seems we’re losing sight of what happens along the way. Where I am now and where I want to be are the important points. Every week there is a wonderful article somewhere about how somebody’s TomTom has led them over a cliff or into an oncoming train. Just recently I read an article about how bad GPS coordinates led a demolition contractor to demolish the wrong house!. Are we losing our ability to navigate, unassisted, through physical space? What does it say about us when we need to download an application for serendipitous encounters?

In this respect I am very much attracted to Anthony Dunne’s definition of ‘critical design,’ an approach to design practice he poached from architects and the idea of the design competition. The goal is less to design a solution to a given problem but to provoke public discussion surrounding a set of current issues. In the context of technology, critical design involves looking a upstream into what the research communities in computer science and engineering are contemplating for the near-future, and try to tease out some of the more absurd assumptions, naive projections and hidden agendas at play there. The aim is not to get involved in the business of forecasting future trends, but to stimulate a public debate about what kind of future we want.

[1] Lucy Suchman Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication 1987 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press p. 179

[2] Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. pp. 198.