Author Archives: Martijn de Waal

Three philosophical questions about the ‘sentient city’ – a response to the exhibition Towards the Sentient City

Written by . Posted on October 27, 2009. 2 Comments.
Sentient City

At certain points in the history of architecture and urban planning, the internal debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the boundaries of the discipline. At those times, the hopes and fears found in the disputes between architects, policy makers, engineers and planners are

Picnic 09 Report 2: The City as an Interaction Platform

Written by . Posted on October 9, 2009. 10 Comments.
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At Picnic I attended an interesting session called The City as an Interaction Platform that took this theme as its point of departure: Cities have always been about providing frameworks of services to improve the quality of life for residents and businesses. How will social

Interview with Mark Shepard: ‘critical design’, architecture, urbanism and location based media

Written by . Posted on July 3, 2009. Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments.

Mark Shepard is a media architect and researcher. His current research investigates the influence of mobile and pervasive media, communication and information technologies on architecture and urbanism. He is one of the organizers of the 2006 symposium on Architecture and Situated Technologies. This fall, for

Digital Cities 6: urban media / urban informatics and different notions of public space

Written by . Posted on June 25, 2009. 7 Comments.
Digital Cities 6 Workshop

I attended the Digital Cities 6 Workshop this week in State College Pennsylvania (put together by Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano and Hiromitsu Hattori, thanks for that!). The workshop started from the notion that with the advent of urban informatics, it is now possible to collect

Storytelling with Locative Media: Michael Epstein’s take on ‘terratives’

Written by . Posted on June 4, 2009. 6 Comments.
westendmap

A few weeks ago I attended a presentation at the MIT6-conference by Michael Epstein, the CEO of Untravel Media, a Boston-based company that produces location based storytelling media. Or as Epstein himself calls it: terratives – a combination of territory and narrative. Untravel’s portfolio includes

Mediated Space. Or: How to translate the logic of media into architecture

Written by . Posted on April 30, 2009. 1 Comment.
Villa Tugendhat à Brno

Recently I visited a seminar on Mediated Space at the Harvard School of Design. The organizers turned the usual approach to this topic – how is our experience of space changing, now that media ranging from mobile phones to urban screens have all but colonized

Semantic Wayfinding, mental maps and the keyhole problem of GPS-navigation

Written by . Posted on March 29, 2009. Tagged , , , . 2 Comments.
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Last week I visited an interesting presentation at Harvard’s Urban Mobilities Group. They had invited Austrian cartographer Georg Gartner who gave a talk about his ‘semantic wayfinding‘ project. Semantic wayfinding is an approach to navigation media that takes human thinking, language and action as a

Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: a matter of ‘U-City’ or ‘U-Citizens?’

Written by . Posted on February 24, 2009. Tagged . 2 Comments.
Marcus Foth’s Handbook of research on Urban Informatics

I just finished reading Marcus Foth’s Handbook of research on Urban Informatics. It’s an edited volume as thick as a fist, packed with essays that when taken altogether give a great overview of this exciting new interdisciplinary field of research and design practices. So what

On the design of geographic interfaces: verisimilitude -vs- subjective experiences

Written by . Posted on January 30, 2009. No comments.

Last night I attended Michael Naimark’s interesting lecture at the Rotterdam Film festival. This year’s edition of the festival wants to broaden the discussion on ‘screen culture’, and Naimark took up on this theme by focusing on maps and globes as important elements of our

Film festival Rotterdam: What content makes Urban Screens interesting? Let’s move beyond the cinematic.

Written by . Posted on January 28, 2009. No comments.

This week I visited the international filmfestival in Rotterdam. For this year’s edition the festival left the confinement of the city’s film theatres and expanded onto three urban screens erected in the city’s public space. During the festival three specially commissioned films are projected on

Towards a Myspace urbanism?

Written by . Posted on December 22, 2008. 4 Comments.

In 1938 Chicago School Scholar Louis Wirth wrote the now famous article ‘Urbanism as a way of Life’. According to Wirth, the modern metropolises that had emerged in the preceding half-century or so, weren’t only striking for their until then unparalleled sizes and shapes. The

Rob van Kranenburg: The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID

Written by . Posted on October 16, 2008. No comments.

On October 28th Rob van Kranenburg’s book The Internet of Things A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID will be launched (5:00 pm, Waag Society, Amsterdam) A pdf download is already available at the Institute for Network Cultures website. The main

Interview with Adam Greenfield on designing for urban computing

Written by . Posted on October 2, 2008. 3 Comments.
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Adam Greenfield is one of the most interesting thinkers on many of themes that we regularly address at The Mobile City. He is head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia, and is currently working on a book called “The City Is

The Big Sort, The Uses of Disorder and mobile media

Written by . Posted on September 12, 2008. Tagged . No comments.

I just read two books – written almost 40 years apart – that signal the same urban problem: cities and towns in the United States are becoming increasingly segregated into monocultural lifestyle enclaves – like flocks to like. This made me wonder what role locative

ISEA 2008: Locative Media Core Works & Classifications

Written by . Posted on August 14, 2008. 1 Comment.
classifications

Is there a number of crucial or core works in locative media? A corpus of best practices? At the International Symposium on Electronic Art it seemed that there might be; many presentations referred to the same set of examples. Some other presentations came up with