Saturday March 27 2010 I attended the public presentation of the project TwitterHouse at Center for Architecture Arcam in Amsterdam. This project, initiated by Max Cohen de Lara and David Mulder of XML Architecture, Research and Urbanism, explores the potential of new media in the architectural design process. As part of their final assignment bachelor architecture students of Delft University had to follow one Amsterdam-based ‘tweep’ (someone who twitters) who regularly uses the platform and also posts more or less personal messages. The students had to analyze his/her lifestyle from these ‘tweets’ without actually getting in touch with this person. Based on this analysis the students designed a house for their ‘virtual clients’ who initially were unaware that they were part of this project. At the end of the assignment the virtual clients were informed that they unwittingly were part of this project. They were invited and several of them actually attended the presentation. From the announcement:

Twitter, Facebook, Hyves, Flickr, MySpace, Linkedin.. We increasingly organize our lives online and share it with whoever wants to follow. What is the potential of these parallel online and offline lives? How do online networks, so eagerly called ‘social media’, organize offline social ties, and the inverse? And what is the effect of this on the collective spaces of the city? To what extend do new forms and meanings of public and private spaces arise from these exchanges?

In the fall of academic year 2009/2010 architecture students at Delft University researched these question under the guidance of XML.

A part of Amsterdam’s historical center was divided into 500×500 meter quadrants. Each student was assigned one quadrant to find a fitting location for a house of about 130 m2. They had to follow two rules: nothing could be demolished, and the house had to fit in the existing urban fabric. Because an interesting living space only comes into being in dialogue with an interesting client students were coupled to a ‘virtual client’. Eleven inhabitants of Amsterdam were selected who share their lives online via Twitter (and Facebook, Linkedin, and so on). These clients did not know they were part of an assignment to design a house for them.

Durting the ten weeks of the assignment an increasingly personal picture arose of the lifestyles of these clients from following their lives online. Twitter revealed were and how they drink their coffee, whether they prefer to stay on the couch or go into town, where their children are at school: in short, the personal lifestyle and life sphere of the virtual client. On the basis of this Twitter analysis a program of demands was developed that was specifically targeted at the virtual client. This program was translated into a architectonic concept for the chosen location which fitted the lifestyle of the virtual client.

During the presentation at Arcam the students showed their final work (maquettes and collages) and presented their research in short 3-minute ‘pitches’. Almost all students departed from an analysis of how their client organizes the day temporally and spatially, and on ‘reading’ their personality from the tweets. The majority of students focussed on spatial divisions in someone’s life: between public and private life, between work and home life, between order and chaos. In the case of most tweeps the students found these distinctions are very blurry. These persons they tweet a lot of private information. They often also work at home, and interact with friends while at work. In some cases however, particularly when the tweeps were more or less public figures (like @vkoblenko and @fatimaelatik), students concluded that these people would want to shield themselves off from prying eyes and need a vestige to retreat from public life. Most students also realized that what someone shares via Twitter is not necessarily the full picture of his/her life. Yet they did get a sense of getting to know the person better by following him/her online.

The difficult part was how to translate little chunks of information about someone’s life schedule and lifestyle into a physical design for a house. I discerned a broad division of proposals at the level of the ‘content’ of the ideas. The majority of proposed concepts were designed to accommodate the individual lifestyle of the client, and a minority of interventions were deliberate attempts to subvert or offer an alternative to the client’s lifestyle. An example of the former was the project for @covergirlsunny, a female DJ in a trendy nightclub with an outgoing personality who enjoys showing herself to an audience. The student following her concluded she needs a podium to show herself to the outside world. The idea developed was based on the typology of the theater with a big transparent frontstage lifted up from the ground where parties and fashion expositions can take place, and a small backstage area below ground level. An example of the latter was the project for @arjanduffels, a male entrepreneur who likes luxurious things, to consume, and often goes out to restaurants and bars with friends. Almost all of his social functions normally take place outside of the home domain. The proposed idea was to design a communal home which combines various functions internally and were he can live together with some of his friends.

Another broad distinction I saw was at the level of the ‘form’ of the ideas. How to translate someone’s lifestyle into a physical shape? Some projects chose a form that reflected the unique individuality of the client. One such project was a home for fashion designer @jolinejolink. She says she wants to be “unknown yet famous”: her brand should be recognizable but she herself wants to stay away from the spotlights. The proposed home tried to reflect the sculptural qualities of her work and be recognizable as the ‘brand Joline’. There was also a little studio space in the house and room for showcasing her work, but at the same time it offered a shelter for her to retreat. By contrast, other concepts in their shape tried to capture the social dynamics and mobilities of the client as an embedded part of wider networks and – perhaps, in my interpretation – their identities as a ‘distributed self’. Projects for @paulsebes and @marjolijn departed from the idea of ‘living’ as rooted in a fixed home. The last project in particular came up with the radical idea of temporary living spaces or “hubs” scattered throughout the city. Each of these special locations (a climbing wall, an old attic, etc.) can be leased for a limited period of time. Together they offer a “collage of experiences” of the city.

This research raises questions about ‘impression management’ via new media. Twitter messages of course do not reflect the ‘whole’ of someone’s personality. In Goffmanian terms social media platforms appear a stage for radical ‘frontstage’ behavior in presenting a public face to an audience. However, in practice the distinction between a public frontstage and a private backstage is blurring. Often people engage in semi-private one-to-one messages with other people which can be ‘eavesdropped’ by others. The role of the audience has shifted from being physically present and complicit in the performance to being largely invisible and unknown. Some of the tweeps who received notice that they were part of this experiment said they felt shocked. Moreover, an individual is less and less able to control his/her public face online. Even though he imposes a media ‘code’ on himself, others may not abide and for instance put ‘incriminating’ photos and messages online. The project itself shows that stuff people share online can end up in very different contexts that it was originally intended for (juridically it is questionable whether people’s uploaded photos are allowed to be republished in the project book..).

Some projects struggled to go beyond too literal or gimmicky translation of a person’s lifestyle to a concept. (Should a politician who is actively involved in the theme of migrant integration live under a roof with red tiles that ‘integrate’ well in a block with other buildings? To the credit of this student, he had other ideas as well that in my view were definitely good). Still, I believe the project as a whole is an interesting exploration of the potential of new media technologies (and social media in particular) in urban design. The project took up the glove to translate social processes, which now to a large extend happen via new media, into physical design interventions.

After our talk at the Day of the Young Architect we have been working on possible approaches to the relation between urban design and new media. One version that departs from technologies and/or an underlying normative view of the city has been posted recently. An alternative – less poetic, more rigorous – framework distinguishes between (1) Urban design with new media: how new media can be used in various ways as instruments in the design of cities; (2) Urban design for new media: how new media technologies and practices can be integrated in the actual design of spaces; (3) New media design for urban culture: how new media can be designed in order to contribute to a lively and healthy urban culture; (4) Applying urban design to new media: how architectural spatial knowledge can be employed to design informational spaces in intelligible ways. (More about this analysis will follow in an announcement we will make shortly). TwitterHouse clearly fits best in the first category. It has been used mostly as a tool in the design process. Interestingly, the idea of ‘educating the client’ which we developed in our talk may require rethinking. Who are the clients anyway? Do new media – and social platforms in particular – have the potential to change how design assignments are commissioned, and in its wake change the notion of ownership? But then the question arises why not interact with the virtual clients?

TwitterHouse raises several other questions. First of all, in most cases the virtual clients active on Twitter are without children and relatively young (aged 20-40). What about the changes in someone’s life patterns when he/she gets older? Will the house grow along and offer room for adaptation? Will it sell to someone else? Further, the focus on designing a house according to the inferred lifestyle of one individual may have caused the most poignant aspect of social media platforms – changes in how we organize social relations – to be ‘lost in translation’. To what extend is the social character of these media platforms acknowledged in this assignment which predominantly focussed on building a home for the individual lifestyle of a tweep? Perhaps it would have made more sense to use Twitter for the design of a more public place, a meeting space? Also, none of the students took a very critical look at the role of social media platforms in shaping urban life itself. Some of the well-known (well-worn?) themes are how such media not only afford individuals to organize their lives more flexibly but also puts various kinds of pressure on them (e.g. to be always available, the crumbling of work/leisure boundaries); how social platforms make interacting with the people we already know much easier but often at the expense of meeting strangers; and how new media may ‘optimize’ the use of urban spaces and services at the expense of surprise encounters and loss of privacy. In my view only a few students got to the heart of the question: is the (social) practice of ‘living’ still the same, and therefore should a house still be a house as we know it? If indeed it is not, as some concluded, should architecture uncritically accommodate to these developments (e.g. the nomadic living proposal) or should it offer an alternative, a commentary that ‘critically engages’ with these developments? The practice of architecture itself could have been questioned, but instead was left open. But then again, as one of the students confided to me afterwards, architecture must not overstate its importance in shaping social processes and the urban fabric. Sometimes a house is just a house.

Convergence Special Issue

Distractedly engaged: mobile gaming and convergent mobile media

Deadline for full and final submissions: 31 July 2010

From casual games on the mobile phone to fully-fledged networked, location-aware hybrid reality, mobile devices are increasingly widespread and well developed as cultural artefacts. Designers and players of mobile games and social media are participating in reconfigurations of location, space, place and corporeality. The iPhone, Android and other smart phones have integrated and commoditised features that were previously experimental, expensive and complex — mobile internet, location-awareness, rich gaming and so on. The innovations combining these affordances provoke new questions for scholars of computer games, media, and the human-technology relation.

The motivation behind this special issue of Convergence is to stimulate discussion, debate and research into the burgeoning area of mobile gaming and mobile social applications. We hope papers will effectively apply philosophical, new media and/or ethnographic approaches to extend the critical discourse about emerging and cross-platform ‘screen cultures’, new forms of telepresence and dynamics of mediatic distraction and engagement. In particular, the issue seeks to counter the notion that our experience of screen media is largely ‘virtual’ and disembodied — or at most exclusively audiovisual.

We seek papers that explore the following:

• Different forms of mobile gaming and mobile social applications and how they impact upon notions and experiences of distraction, engagement and technological embodiment.

• The gendered nature of technologies and how this manifests in stereotypes around gaming and mobile new media.

• The role of mobile media in networked, cross-platform and hybrid reality gaming, and the divergent or convergent relation between online and offline gaming.

• The relation between mobile gaming and the burgeoning user-created content (UCC) environment of Web 2.0, participatory media culture and convergent screen media.

• Mobile gaming and screen cultures theorised in terms of spatial, contextual and corporeal practices.

• Interpretations of mobile gaming and social applications that focus on the cultural specificity and geo-spatial located-ness of such experiences.

• Critical analyses of the relationship between mobile gaming and other media cultures. • Enquiries that focus on the emerging complex new media literacies associated with mobile gaming and mobile social applications, and the concomitant modes of embodiment and presence.

• In the context of these themes, critical explorations of recent innovative mobile games and handsets such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.

Guest editors:

Chris Chesher (University of Sydney) chris.chesher {AT} usyd.edu.au
Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University) larissa.hjorth {AT} rmit.edu.au
Ingrid Richardson (Murdoch University) I.Richardson {AT} murdoch.edu.au
Jason Wilson (University of Wollongong) jason_a_wilson {AT} yahoo.com.au

More info at: http://lrweb.beds.ac.uk/convergence/callforpapers/mobilegaming

Why does a superpower like China focus on the internet of things? Did you know Gartner reported that by year end 2012, physical sensors will create 20% of the non-video internet traffic? In the March edition of the McKinsey Quarterly the impact of the upcoming connected devices is examined. This is an area to keep an eye on.

We are about to complete the line-up. Speakers who have confirmed so far:
* Alexandra Deschamps (LinkedIn) – Co-founder Tinker.it, Twitter
* David Orban (LinkedIn) – Founder WideTag, Advisor and European Lead of Singularity University, Twitter
* Menno Huisman (LinkedIn) – Co-founder Booreiland, Twitter

* Date – Monday, March 29th

* Time – 16:00-19:00 (excluding drinks, doors open at 15:00)
* Location – De Duif (Prinsengracht 756, Amsterdam | Map)

RSVP opens next Monday
That’s right! Monday, March 15th (12:00 sharp) we’ll release the first badge of 350 RSVPs. Make sure you are in time for the first round of RSVPs – past events sold out within little more than 10 minutes. People who can’t RSVP Monday, will have another chance for the final tickets on Monday, March 22nd (12:00). RSVPs will be available via Meetup.com/momoamsterdam and are free of charge.

To help you remind the RSVP release, CM offers a SMS service to notify you in time (subscribe/read more). Remember: Mobile Monday is free to attend, but an RSVP is mandatory.

More info on MobileMonday.nl.

The Media City is a specialized project development workshop for urban projections in Amsterdam. From March 22 to April 3, eight top international artists from S. Paulo, Lima, Durban, Douala and the Netherlands will be given the opportunity to explore the possibilities of visual programming interfaces for urban facades and develop their own site-specific concept.

The Media City investigates architecture as narrative and social interaction in public space. It is interested in how these specific languages, spaces of cultural meaning, can be translated into media art projects in which similarities from African and Latin American cities can be found and re-interpreted in Amsterdam.

In addition to the workshop there are 3 semi-public lectures:

- Tuesday, March 23, 20:00 – 22:00: Edwin van der Heide, Gloria Arteaga, and Doeng Jahangeer.

- Monday, March 29, 20:00 – 22:00: Mayura Subhedar, Goody Leye and Alexi Anastasieu.

- Thursday, April 1, 20:00 – 22:00: Marnix de Nijs, Lucas Bambozzi and Walter Langelaar.

Participation in lectures for free.
Participation in workshop: drinks and lunch € 10 per day.
Please send your CV and short motivation max.100 words to elena [At] nimk {dot} nl.

Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Keizersgracht 264, Amsterdam, http://www.nimk.nl

More information: http://www.artscollaboratory.org/blog/elena-perez/media-city-amsterdam-workshop

In Visible Cities #02 NAi director Ole Bouman and Maurice Groenhart of Layar talk about the opportunities of augmented reality.

Wednesday | 03 February 2010 | De Verdieping @ TrouwAmsterdam | Wibautstraat 127 | start 20:00 | Entrance 2,50

For more info see http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=278336657918

Met de toenemende digitalisering van de openbare ruimte, gaat de informatiesamenleving een nieuwe fase in. Een invasie van informatietechnologie neemt bezit van deze ruimte: van de OV-chipkaart en betaalmobieltjes tot genetwerkte auto’s en het real time web.

Tezamen vormen ze een gigantisch net waarvan overheden, bedrijven maar ook burgers zelf gebruik maken om alles en iedereen te volgen en vast te leggen. De Nederlander gaat daarmee van ‘surfen op het net’ naar ‘een leven in het net’. Veel maatschappelijke vraagstukken van de informatiesamenleving komen daardoor in een ander daglicht te staan.

Ook de ontwerpers van de BNO kunnen bij deze ontwikkelingen een belangrijke rol spelen. Christian van ‘t Hof (Rathenau Instituut) vertelt op deze tweede Spellbound van het jaar over digitalisering van de openbare ruimte. Deze avond is een must voor elke ontwerper.

Datum: 09 februari 2010
Locatie: Pakhuis de Zwijger
Adres: Piet Heinkade 181K
Plaats: Amsterdam
Aanvang: 20.00 uur
Website: www.cvth.nl

More info here >>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

augmented reality

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

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

speakers

Frank Kresin

Frank Kresin posed the question how do you bring cultural heritage to people who don’t visit musea? One possible answer is to use the urban landscape itself as an exhibition space. The city is already rich in content and physical landmarks. Why not use these elements to “create a unified experience”, a “new active and social space with on-demand info for city residents, ‘culturists’, and tourists”? Kresin gave an overview of some of the ‘creative learning’ projects already done by Waag Society and 7Scenes which use some form of AR. He finished by summing up a number of practical challenges in order to meet such aims as “deepening experiences, improving accessibility of content, expanding audiences, and stimulating entrepreneurship”.

Although AR is in its infancy, there is potential for learning experiences. As a more critical remark, it seems that the idea of turning the city into a ‘unified experience’ contradicts the city’s inherent heterogeneity of both places and people. The target groups Kresin mentioned are al very different in how they see and use the city. How to make one “unified experience” for individual people, let alone for all urbanites at once? Why would you want that in the first place? This may be a problem of AR in general: who’s reality is augmented? And what kind of informational objects are inserted into everyday reality?

Raimo van der Klein

The second talk was by Raimo van der Klein, one of the founders of Layar, an AR app for Android phones. He positions AR as a playful “experience medium” for marketing purposes. According to Van der Klein, involvement is the preferred method of current marketing, above tell and show. Van der Klein tells how AR induces a certain skepticism about ‘realness’, making people wonder whether what they are seeing is real or not? He further announced a new version of Layar, which now includes 3D modeled objects. Later I joined a demonstration on the large grass field of the Westerpark. On the screen of an Android phone you could see large windmills turning, an airplane passing over, and a 3D version of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’.

Kevin Slavin

Kevin Slavin is critical of augmented city assumptions that more information is always better. AR will never win in terms of ‘polygone count’. It will never make the augmented city look as real as its physical counterpart. This is called the ‘immersive fallacy’ (a term coined by Salen en Zimmerman). Moreover, there are other senses than just vision. An interesting example Slavin mentions is a project by Columbia University called SiteLens (2009) (PDF). This project presents the presence of toxic substances as a digital visualization. It does not try to integrate these visuals into reality but clearly demarcates its separation from reality by using bright visuals. Slavin further warns for the ‘uncanny valley’. This is a term used in robot research. When robots become too human-like we tend to feel eeriness. Same thing with AR: it’s there but it isn’t there. AR developers must avoid this uncanny gap and games are a way out. Games have been ‘augmented’ from the start. When we are playing we know we are playing.

This is interesting in the light of discussions about ‘hybrid space’: the idea that social processes in the physical and digital realm merge. But do they really become indistinguishable, mixing to grey? Or are boundaries between them still present and important?

Rick Batelaan

Next up was Rick Batelaan form the municipality of A’dam. He presented a trial of the Personal Travel Assistant, an application promoting public transport by delivering real-time location-based personalized travel information. Depending on where you are, what time, were you are going, and your personal preferences, you get a targeted travel advise. You can also share your travel plans with buddies, enabling you to travel together.

This type of application is not strictly about adding new experiential layers over reality, yet is certainly ‘augments’ mobility with on the fly info. To me it seems a good example of a very pervasive idea underlying many location-based services: optimizing the individual experience of the city. The city is implicitly seen as a hindrance that has to be overcome in order to get form A to B. Urban space is taken as a space for moving through, not for dwelling in. This view seeks to minimize ‘lost’ moments, moments of pause, potential situations for serendipitous encounters and contemplation. One might also wonder whether in the longer run such a shift works against people who don’t use the city as a site for optimizing personal mobility, but for lingering.

Another interesting issue is the shifting perceptions of clock time these services may involve. Instead of depending on precise location and time schedules (12:30 pm at the central station) this service approximates duration and range (still 15 minutes to cycle the last 1000 meters to catch your train). It has been argued public transport made the time schedule necessary in the first place, and the automobile partially undid this fixation on scheduled time. Mobile media technologies are shared among the technologies that bring about a weakening of time schedules. Will mobile services like the Personal Travel Assistant extend this ‘weakening of time’ to what might be one of the last strongholds of scheduled clock time: public transport mobility?

Ben Cerveny

The last speaker, Ben Cerveny, gave a whirlwind overview of the history of cities. Cities began as isolated cells along favorable points. Then these cells became connected networks. For instance Amsterdam as a trade city in the Golden Age (17th c.). This gave rise to the metropolis. Cerveny explored the idea that when urbanites express their individual experiences via networks, these experiences can be aggregated into an image of the city, which can then be fed back into people’s experiences. Cerveny then jumped from individual urbanites to the city as a whole. He argued online data sets about flows of resources, products and citizens in cities, when aggregated and recombined, form a kind of self-awareness of the city. This ‘sentient city’ can perceive its own environments, and interact with other cities. Cerveny further criticized the fact that AR is mostly location-agnostic. It brings information to places, but not according to the ‘personality of the place’. Cerveny is interested in somehow showing the “moods of the metropolis”, close to Ben Russell’s 1999 future vision of being able to find sadness in NYC (see his Headmap Manifesto – PDF). Cerveny also wants to trace social networks of cities. Some cities share more with other cities abroad than with towns in their own country. How do these networks look?

Inspiring as it seems, I do wonder what Cerveny’s idea of awareness entails? For one, doesn’t awareness need some sort of intentionality invested in agents (i.e. human intelligence)? Then who designs intentional agents for the sentient city? What political deliberations and processes underly city sensing projects?

discussion

The talks and ensuing discussion brought up a number of interesting issues dealing with AR’s place in the city. One thing is ‘attention’: AR is meant not to replace one’s primary view of everyday reality but only add certain layers of information to it. Yet in practice when people are presented with screen-based information they tend to focus their attention on the screen and not their environment. Cerveny argued AR should not replace your primary view but exist on the side, as a ‘glance’, something when applied to your social network is also called ‘ambient awareness’.

Another question raised is what happens to publicness? Cerveny proposed to redefine the notion. There is already broad ‘media literacy’ about the public domain in digital space but not in physical space. Maybe this should grown. With this proposition Cerveny comes close to the idea of understanding public space in terms of a physical, urban commons for which we collectively carry responsibility (see the interview with Mark Shepard posted on this blog).

As a final general remark, this session made me rethink the merit of stacking ever more informational layers on everyday reality. As already said, AR and location-based services often depart from the wish to optimize individual experience and choices. This is frequently described in quantitative words: more, better, ‘enriching’, and so on. But not all mediation of the city just adds. The can also act as filtering devices. Instead of phrasing these developments solely in terms of ‘augmentation’, one can also think of them in terms of subtraction: a ‘diminished reality’. This needn’t necessarily be understood in moral terms: what is being lost through AR? what does it take away of everyday reality? It may also be an aid in achieving what city dwellers have always been doing: make their city smaller and more manageable.

Read more about this workshop in Assia Kraan’s report.

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

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

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

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

The book is divided into three parts and nine sections. Each part, section, and article or book excerpt is meticulously introduced by Graham, often up to the point where reading the actual article becomes unnecessary. Graham also provides the reader with many references for further reading.

The first part – Understanding Cybercities – consists of theoretical explorations and conceptualizations of the cybercity. The first section Cybercity archaeologies consist of articles that together counter the idea that cities are only now transformed by ‘revolutionary’ technological developments. Graham argues that historical continuities exist. Cities have always been infused by technologies. The second section Theorising cybercities consists of articles which follow two broad approaches to the interrelationships between cities and ICTs. The first approach is that of substitution: new technologies somehow replace existing urban space, place, and social relations based on co-presence. Graham already criticizes this view in his introductory article. The second approach is that of coevolution: urban space/place and electronic space are produced together and mutually shape each other. This view is mostly associated with neo-Marxist thinkers. It runs the risk of oversimplification (by regarding both city and technology as singular entities) and determinism (by radically separating the global from the local and seeing the first as the unavoidable conqueror of the later). The third section Cybercities: hybrid forms and recombinant spaces comprises articles that follow a third approach: recombination. This approach – to which Graham is most sympathetic – applies actor-network theory to the interrelations between cities and technologies. It takes “a highly contingent, relational perspective of the linkage between technology and social worlds” as composed of multiple heterogeneous networks (p. 69). Cities are composed of hybrid spaces on multiple geographical scales from local to global. This makes it far less clear what a city actually is (p. 113).

The four sections of the second part  – Cybercity Dimensions – cover various domains in which ICTs and the city influence each other. The sections in this part are called Cybercity mobilities, Cybercity economies, Social and cultural worlds of cybercities, and Cybercity public domains and digital divides. The mobilities section addresses the complementarity of ‘digital mobility’ with physical mobility. It also addresses the ‘power geometries’ of unequal mobilities. The economies section addresses the ways urban economies move between centralization and decentralization, tie cities together on a global level, and remediate urban consumption through e-commerce. The social and cultural worlds section addresses three issues: the tensions between distance and proximity; challenges in representing the cybercity (esp. its invisibility); and political biasses of urban ICTs (esp. surveillance issues). The public domains section addresses the question whether and how digital media technologies can create new public domains. Hurdles are the invisibility and individual use of ICTs, their appropriation for narrow commercial interests both local and global, tendencies among the affluent to both extend their reach beyond the local and seclude themselves, and the centralization of ‘electronic power’ on a small number of people, institutions and places.

The third part – Shaping Cybercities? – explores the ways in which urban policies have been and can be deployed to shape the new reality of the cybercity. The section Cybercity strategy and politics contains a cross section of existing policy cases from various cities throughout the world. In the final section Cybercity futures Graham return to his original question about the persistence of “end of city” scenarios. He briefly introduces both utopian and dystopian urban future predictions, and exposes the influence of  cyberpunk novelists on both modernists and critical urban social science. There is a crisis in technical rationality and in the legitimacy of future predictions. Challenges for future scenarios are: exposing the role of ICTs in and between cities at various scales; revealing the role of ICTs in non-deterministic ways; and developing new and powerful – even utopian! – notions for future urban thinking. Governments and social movements need to deal with pressing issues of our urbanizing planet: “neoliberal economic restructuring, migration and multiculturalism, sprawl and environmental crises, the privatisation of public space, endemic inequality, social fragmentation and capsularisation, and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream democratic politics” (p. 391).

This collection of articles may be the first comprehensive attempt to collect the current state of thinking about cybercities. And it’s a very broad and thorough one. It can be read as a baseline work for further inquiries into the interplay between digital media technologies and the city. Since its appearance in 2004, many of the developments described in this book have intensified, withered, or changed directions. One of the main characteristics of urban ICTs for instance, their invisibility, has been subject to change. Graham writes “[e]very urban landscape crosscuts, and interweaves with, multiple and extended sets of electronic sites and spaces. Most of these remain invisible. Many are simply unknowable” (p. 113). This visualization or materialization of “Hertzian space” is precisely what many locative media projects are now actively addressing. In addition, new developments have taken place. Examples of recent developments which (obviously) do not feature in the book are – from a technological side – GPS-based navigation and mobility, location-based services and contextually relevant information technologies, the use of locative media for urban annotation, social proximity, mapping and urban story-telling, pervasive games and urban play, distributed sensing and measurement projects in ‘urban computing’ (e.g. Pachube). From a more urban perspective for instance more recent developments are an increasing interest in urban ecology and urban farming, alternative sustainable mobilities, practises like ‘smart/flash mobs’, and so on.

Does this book have any weak points? Partly due to the varying quality of contributions by individual authors, one of the weak point of this compilation is that – in spite of its intention – a dominant picture arises of the ICTs – city relationship as a one-way street. Far more attention goes out to the working of ICTs on the urban domain than how ideas about the urban shape ICTs. The book predominantly focusses on very particular, often quantifiable, changes in urban life in the cybercity ‘caused’ by ICTs. It gives far less attention to various new ways of imagining the cybercity. Further, with a few exceptions the book consists almost entirely of academic contributions. Fields of practises which have long occupied themselves with either or both the city and new media technologies – e.g. architecture and urban planning, (media) design, the arts – are largely left out. This is regrettable, since these field often contribute very interesting new ideas to our understanding of ‘cybercities’. Another point of critique is that although the book contains cases from all over the world, the bias is mostly on north America and Europe, with some examples from south-American and Asian cities. Africa is completely left out and again remains the forgotten continent. Finally, the book does not give an overarching new framework for understanding the cybercity. No overarching broad analysis is given of how ICTs differently ‘affect’ various cities and regions worldwide. Although this might not be the main task of a reader (especially when it tries to put “urban ICT studies” on the map as an emerging field of research) the lack of overarching theory feels like an omission. To show that there is no longer a clear urban essence defined by neat boundaries, Graham uses terms like multiplicity, heterogeneity, complexity, diversity, hybridity, and so on (e.g. pp. 113-114). However, I feel such abstract notions in themselves are hardly illuminating for the formation of theory about cybercities. In my view it confuses implicit pre-understanding or methodological points of departure for actual theory. It seems to take epistemology (how can we know things?) for ontology (what is the nature of things?). Such obfuscating notions further widen the gap between ‘grand theory’ about cybercities on the one hand, and ‘on the ground’ analyses of actual ‘hybrid’ urban practises on the other hand.
This raises the question what the state of affairs is five years later. Have there been significant developments in theorizing cybercities since this book? I am very much looking forward to an updated version of the Cybercities reader, say in 2014, ten years after this version…

Photo by Anne Helmond

As MoMo is a kind of trend-watching event, the main emphasis of this MoMo#11 was on the emerging field of augmented reality. Of course this vision has been around for a long time. Yet prototypes have mostly been very clunky head-mounted displays, or relied on some flat surface to project things on. As our mobile devices have by now arguably become the most ubiquitous technology humans ever carried with them (becoming a third skin, like our clothes are a second skin), they appear the ideal platform for all kinds of new forms of augmented reality in new and unexpected ways. This arguments of course echoes the argument made by Bell and Dourish (“Yesterday’s tomorrows”, PDF) that the vision of ubicomp has in actual practise taken shape in a different way on the mobile phone. Below some of my notes and impressions of MoMo#11.

speaker 1: Alan More – Social Marketing Intelligence (video)

Alan More claims in the future there will be wars about information. In the past identity had been shaped externally. Now there is “psychological self-determination”. The main question in this individualized age then becomes: how to reconnect to other people? In medieval times there were many festivals. Communication = communion (being together). According to More, we are a “we-species”. So new media must be participatory, More argues. Or in Rheingold’s terms “technologies of cooperation”. For mobile marketeers this means that they have to make “search” contextually relevant, because “we live in a world of search”. However, there are privacy issues involved in data scraping. More mentions a number of examples in his talk. Ushahidi in Kenya is a citizen journalism project about political crisis; Japanese link-up service Otetsudai; Japanese girlwalkers.com is a “community of interest” network to buy fashion via mobile phone; BMW winter tires campaign using MMS to remind people to put on winter tires.

Not a brilliant talk but nevertheless interesting to see what marketeers are thinking about when they try to involve mobile media in their strategies.

speaker 2: Jamais Cascio – Mobile Intelligence (video)

Cascio is the writer of Hacking the Earth (available on Lulu). Cascio raises the question what “augmenting the future” could mean. Does it involve wearing augmenting glasses? Taking smart drugs? But it could also mean just taking portable books – like Amazon’s Kindle – with us to make us ‘smarter’ on demand? Cascio sees Twitter as extension of processing knowledge. Cascio gives an example from his own experience, when he got an earthquake message first via Twitter and only after that he felt the earthquake for real. Urbanisation, he says, is also an organization of collective intelligence. Augmented awareness is increasingly based on a combination of sensors in the city and mobile networked technologies. Augmenting reality can also mean blocking out people (a “bozo filter”), or filtering information.

This is were I think it becomes interesting. Because this filtering could also mean filtering away ‘the stranger’, or ‘the serendipitous experience’ of city life. Is that a desirable development? As with most new media technologies, augmented reality brings up the tension between freedom and force. Augmenting reality can on the one hand be seen as a liberation from constraints, e.g. spatio-temporal, social, lack of information and knowledge at hand. Yet on the other hand there is new force involved. To what extend do we have to follow, for instance taking smart drugs when everyone else does, as Cascio himself brings up? Technology is political, Cascio closes his interesting talk. It is a manifestation of our desire to affect change in the world.

I posed a question: “augmenting intelligence” somehow suggests a quantitative improvement in our intelligence. But could it also lead to a decrease of intelligence, for instance our capacity for navigation? Cascio’s answer was something like: we ourselves decide, if we choose not to, then it won’t happen.

speaker 3: Andrew Grill – mobile & advertising (video)

Grill is working on a book “Twitter for non-dummies”. He points to ubiquity of mobile devices, and how it is even more personal(ized) than wallet. Grill mentions various branded applications on the iPhone as playful ways to get a brand on the most personal device people carry with them. Examples are a Gilette beard growing app, Carlsberg beer app, BMW Z4 racing app. he also talks about in-game advertising. The integration of a compass into mobile devices offer new possibilities. An example is the locative/augmented GeoVector: pointing in a direction to see what’s there. Grill finishes his quite commercial talk by saying mobile marketeers should mind the three Ps in mobile marketing: permission, privacy, preference.

speaker 4: Joe Pine – Infinite Possibilities (video)

Pine, co-author of the hugely successful book “The Experience Economy” reiterates that “we were into things, but now into experiences”. This includes the mobile phone. [Although the thing is grossly underestimated in my opinion when it comes to for instance the role of the mobile phone as an artefact for status enhancement in many countries.] Pine refers to Stan Davis who coined term “mass customization” in his book “Future Perfect“. Time and space have become resources instead of existing ‘out there’. Pine takes this idea and moulds it into a 3D model of various realities along axes of matter – no-matter; time – no-time; space – no-space. He calls this model “the multiverse”.

Photo by Anne Helmond

Pine has a term for each of the eight quadrants in this model.

real

• reality (time – space – matter)
• augmented reality (time – space – no-matter)
• alternate reality (no-time – space – no-matter)
• warped reality (no-time – space – matter)

virtual

• virtuality (no-time – no-space – no-matter)
• augmented virtuality (no-time – no-space – matter)
• physical virtuality (time – no-space – matter)
• mirrored virtuality (time – no-space – no-matter)

Although quite an impressive exercise in analysing the various types of spaces that are brought about by new technologies, I did have my doubts. This model departs from a vision of original space as objective, Euclidian space. This is the domain of (what we used to call) “reality” and it used to have “virtuality” as its opposite. I wonder whether this complex model isn’t reinstating the old binary distinctions between real-virtual, matter (atoms) – non-matter (bits), space – non-space, which recent theories are trying to overcome? I posed the question whether it wouldn’t be better to talk about “hybrid reality” instead, in order to understand how these domains actually blend? Pine answers that his model is an ideal type and that they almost never exist in isolation.

speaker 5: Howard Rheingold – Smart Mobs (video)
Rheingold departs by saying that mobile technologies lower the threshold for collective action. Although he says he doesn’t want to repeat the argument made in “Smart Mobs“, he does exactly this during his otherwise very pleasant talk with many real-world examples that are a real treat after many stretched cases infused with marketing-buzz and hopes. Smart mobs emerge when media amplify cooperation. They can have both beneficial and destructive impact. They are where the PC was in 1980 and internet in 1990. Mobile media are used to harvest collective intelligence and computing power. Rheingold refers to “collective action theory” by Mancur Olsen. Rheingold brings up many examples of collective intelligence being tapped by means of new technologies. One I found interesting in particular. In China the web is “harmonized”, which in Chinese sounds like the word for “river crab”, so many people have put up a picture of a river crab on their websites. This is a nice example of ludic behavior, subversiveness within limits, in relation to new media technologies.

Rheingold feels that the idea of a public sphere is reinforced through social media. But it is not all rosy. There are also nasty examples, like racists organizing via their cellphones to go out beating up non-whites on Brazilian beaches. Rheingold is involved in a new project called cooperationcommons.com.

Under the name “The era of sentient things” Rheingold proceeds by sketching a future world when chips are in everything, information is delivered to places, and the mobile phone acts as remote control, a “window on the world”. Information becomes augmented, situated, and social (Pat Rawlings – SAIC). Some examples Rheingold geives: Wikitude; mobile phone as a metal detector; Pachube, a project harvesting information by using the mobile phone as a sensor; mobiles to track diseases (EPI surveyors); the Grameen phone whereby fishermen in India getting best price (mentioned in Smart Mobs book); open mobile consortium doing Ushahidi; an idea by Intel called ‘Clone Cloud‘ (scroll halfway down or look here) for facial recognition via mobile phones using cloud computing power.

A question from the audience was: is this any good for us? Answer by Rheingold: it depends on who knows what. Does multitasking degrade human attention? What we need is access, media literacy, and participatory culture.

speaker 6: Robert Rice – The Future is calling (video)
The final speaker boldly claims “mobile is dead”. According to Rice, mobile communication is still pretty much 1-to-1 comm. Even Flashmobs have to be started by one person in a top-down fashion, he adds. ‘Smart phones’ mean the convergence of PC and telecommunications. To bring new functionality to the handphone like augmented reality it has to be more immersive. [here I immediately though how this relates the often mentioned property of casualness of the mobile phone: using it while doing something else, see chapter by Fujimoto about nagara in Ito, Okabe, Matsuda (2005) - Personal, Portable, Pedestrian.]. Augmented reality blends the virtual and the real, like in the General Electric commercial. According to Rice, media can be characterized according to whether they are passive, active, interactive, dynamic, or meta. Like journalism, augmented reality has to ask the questions who, what where, why, and how (5Ws+H)? Immersiveness is still being investigated with huge masks and weirds suits. We should also ask: what can go wrong (e.g. isolation)? So what are the “money scenarios” of augmented reality, asks Rice? Micro-transactions, augmented virtual goods, advertisements. “Augmented reality is something entirely different, and will change everything”, Rice claims. Rice calls Sixth Sense by MIT a good idea but the wrong implementation. We have to get away from projecting stuff on flat surfaces. We have to wear glasses!

In conclusion, this Momo#11 meeting was an interesting overview of how some of the main people in the field are thinking about the future of mobile and augmented reality. It made me think about how augmented reality relates to everyday life. Augmented reality has the same hurdle to take as ubicomp, namely that it has to somehow infuse and blend into our everyday reality, yet it can only exist because we can recognize it as not being reality. In this sense, I guess what we have to do is not to try to capture and define its essence, but to think about it as a kind of border-play. Such a ‘ludic approach’ to conceptualizing these developments may shed new light on how these technologies interact with the mobile city.

In this book, Lynch argues that people in urban situations orient themselves by means of mental maps. He compares three American cities (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles) and looks at how people orient themselves in these cities. A central notion in this book is that of legibility (also called imageability and visibility). Legibility means the extend to which the cityscape can be ‘read’. People who move through the city engage in way-finding. They need to be able to recognize and organize urban elements into a coherent pattern. “In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action” (p.4). Lynch proposes that these mental maps consist of five elements: (1) paths: routes along which people move throughout the city; (2) edges: boundaries and breaks in continuity; (3) districts: areas characterized by common characteristics; (4) nodes: strategic focus points for orientation like squares and junctions; and (5) landmarks: external points of orientation, usually a easily identifyable physical object in the urban landscape. Of these five elements, paths are especially important according Lynch, since these organize urban mobility.

A clear mental map of the urban environment is needed to counter the always looming fear of disorientation. A legible mental map gives people an important sense of emotional security, it is the framework for communication and conceptual organization, and heightens the depth and intensity of everyday human experience. The city itself is thus a powerful symbol of a complex society, argues Lynch. An environmental image has three components: identity (the recognition of urban elements as separate entities), structure (the relation of urban elements to other objects and to the observer), and meaning (its practical and emotional value to the observer). It is important that these urban elements are not hermetically designed into precise and final detail but present an open-ended order. Urban inhabitants should be able to actively form their own stories and create new activities. Lynch presents his work as an agenda for urban designers. They should design the city in such a way that it gives room for three related ‘movements’: mapping, learning, shaping. First, people should be able to acquire a clear mental map of their urban environment. Second, people should be able to learn how to navigate in this environment by training. Third, people must be able to operate and act upon their environment.

In my view this book is an incredible valuable work to understand how people perceive, inhabit and move around in the urban landscape. It shows that urban space is not just composed of its physical characteristics but equally by representations in mental images. Mobility is not just (the potential for) free-flowing movement but heavily relies on structuring and identifying the environment through the aid of mental maps. Lynch’ work has been influential to many. Theorist of postmodernity Fredric Jameson (1991) for instance refers to Lynch when he argues that the cognitive map is a means to cope with societies complexities by bridging ‘objective’ and abstract representations of space, and subjective existential experiences of ‘lived space’. Lynch can also be seen as a precursor to the influential thesis by Henri Lefrebvre from 1974 that space is not just ‘out there’ as a mathematical entity or a priori category but always socially produced. Lynch’ work has many implications for urban design and raises various questions about the present role of mobile and locative media technologies in the urban context.

One such question is the extend to which our way-finding shifts from orienting ourselves to mostly ‘objective’ urban elements to become increasingly subjective by means of locative media technologies. We are far more able than ever before to “write” the city with our own subjective experiences and share these with other people through mobile media. A recent post by Martijn de Waal discusses this issue of ‘semantic way-finding’. The element of visibility is crucial here. Lynch is talking about elements of the city that are publicly visible to all people. But what happens when people increasingly rely on private and idiosyncratic points of orientation through their portable devices? Locative media add invisible layers of social meanings to the city that are only visible through a different interface (the mobile screen), accessible to others elsewhere, although often only to those who are members of that service or community. What does this mean for notions of general legibility, the public and private character of mental images, and social inclusion/exclusion?

In addition, Lynch’ emphasis on clear legibility of the urban environment poses some critical questions about the current tendency to saturate the urban landscape with information. What happens to the overall legibility of the city when every building, object, and place wants to communicate and announce its existence to us by yelling “I Am Here, Look At Me!”? To what extend will mobile and locative devices come to act as filters for coping with the torrent of information, or actually become part of the problem itself?

Another issue brought up by Lynch’ work is the eternal question of (the end of) serendipity, so often discussed in relation to mobile media and location-based services. Are locative services undermining the potential for exploration and unexpected encounters with new places and people, when our movements are guided and goal-oriented? Lynch himself feels that disorientation is the cause of fear and anxiety, and already claims that “[t]o become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city” (p. 4). Yet under controlled circumstances he acknowledges that “there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment” (p. 5).

Lynch work also introduces a question that is especially relevant nowadays. Is our capacity for orientation and way-finding something we learn (and thus can unlearn as well when we externalize this to our GPS navigation devices, see earlier posts on this blog here, here, here, and here), or is it innate to people as well as other animals? Lynch takes a clear stance when he says “it now seems unlikely that there is any mystic “instinct” of way-finding” (p. 3), but that seems to be countered by recent biological evidence about for instance bird migrations.

Finally, some more critical remarks. Lynch primarily emphasizes the role of the visual sense. He says how people find their way in the city by relying on vision. Other faculties such as hearing and even smelling are lacking in his work. Some later authors have stressed the role of sound in experiencing the city (e.g. Paul DuGay about the Walkman; Michael Bull about the mobile phone as an audio device; Caroline Basset, and De Jong & Schuilenburg in a special issue of Open Magazine about sound). A related omission in Lynch’ analysis of the urban experience is the role of media in general and text in particular. This is odd since Lynch so prominently uses the term legibility in his work. Of course it could be countered that media did not play such a big role in the urban context at the time of writing of this book (1960) but this misses the point that cities from their inception have been inscribed by signs and media, as Malcolm McCullough so clearly demonstrated in his keynote speech at The Mobile City 2008. An early modern writer such as Walter Benjamin for instance already looks at the relation between print media and the city, and emphasizes that the modern city is increasingly being dominated by “script-images”. “Script – having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence – is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos”, he says in an essay called “Attested Auditor of Books”.

Still, “The Image of the City” is a classic work and can be reread as a fresh work in this age. Lynch’ division of mapping/learning/shaping can well be applied as important questions that can be posed for each locative media project. To what extend do locative media accurately or insightfully map our (experience of) environment? To what extend do locative media teach us to see and experience our environment? To what extend do locative media enable us to shape and modify our environment?

Recently I stumbled across two examples that explore its very edges. The first is a fascinating map of the remotest place on earth.

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city – around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province.

(image source)

The map is created by researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank. It is part of a research that measures urbanisation from the new perspective of travel time to 8500 major cities. Key findings are:

• we passed the point at which more than half the world’s populations live in cities around the turn of the Millennium (2000) – much earlier than the 2007/8 estimate;
• more than half of the world’s population lives less than 1 hour from a major city, but the breakdown is 85% of the developed world and only 35% of the developing world;
• 95% of the world’s population is concentrated on just 10% of the world’s land; but
• only 10% of the world’s land area is classified as “remote” or more than 48 hours from a large city.

The map beautifully shows just how incredibly connected the world has become – not only via telecommunications but also by physical mobility – and how even the remotest regions are now closely tied to the urban sphere. The fact that 10% of the world is more than 48 hours from a large city raises questions about the definition of ‘urban’, as states the news release. More nice maps here.

A second example is the Reuters news that a Nepali telecom firm is planning to expand its mobile phone service to the top of the Mount Everest. The Mount Everest is one of the busiest high mountains. Each year hundreds of climbers attempt to reach the summit. Until now they were dependent on expensive satellite telephones to call family and friends from the top. Now even the highest peak on earth will become connected to the worldwide communication networks.

The question of course remains whether this potential for mobility and connection to ‘the global’ actually contributes to a worldwide “imagined community”. What this map does not indicate is that mobility and connections are unequally divided. Doreen Massey has called this “the power-geometry of time-space compression” (see article). While for global and digital ‘neo-nomads’ the world may indeed seem one homogeneous ‘smooth space’, for others it remains firmly divided by barriers and obstacles.

Artist Jorge Colombo (Portugal) made a couple of cityscapes by drawing with his fingers in an application called Brushes on an iPhone. He also posted a short movie showing in speed-up how he created his drawings. You can see all of the drawings on his website. Not only do these drawing look really nice, they also come quite close ‘the urban experience’ of neon lights, big structures, and a blurry sense of movements and speed. The medium indeed perfectly fits the subjects depicted. It also possible to relate this to the theme of “urban computing”, as an artistic way to ‘write’ one’s experience of the city, as Greenfield and Shepard call it (though, granted, this experience doesn’t ‘stick’ to the location as a kind of locative tag; that should be the artist’s next step!).

What I think is really interesting about is how the mobile device gradually becomes a platform for creative production and playfulness, like the (desktop) computer has been for much longer. A similar kind of creative production on mobile devices has existed for a while in the digital music scene. Here, the iPhone is used as an interface for music sequencing, tracking and beat creation. And in a related field called Chiptunes or 8Bit music, much older portable devices such as Gameboys have been given a brand new second life in being used to make electronic tunes. Also, as posted elsewhere by me, the mobile phone is increasingly being used to make (short) films. Last example: the mobile phone is used to not only read but also write texts and even entire novels. This has to do with the fact that many Japanese make long commutes by public transport.

It’s really nice to see how the mobile phone develops from a platform for consumption of services to a medium for creative production as well. Moreover, some of these examples clearly indicate that there is a relation between artistic creation on mobile platforms and the physical surroundings and urban experience, apparently much more so than with fixed computers.

(Via http://varnelis.net/blog/mit_htc_forum_2009)

Javier Arbona, Mark Jarzombek, and Kazys Varnelis

Blogitecture: Architecture on the Internet
The state and influence of architectural criticism in an age of digital networks

Tuesday, April 7
6:30 pm
Room 3-133

“Has a blog actually had a significant impact on a building in the process of being designed or built? What was the outcome? …But even if this were the case, I’m not sure that blogs have actually changed much of the way theory is written or performed.”
-Javier Arbona, Javierest (http://javier.est.pr/)

“Blogs have, thus far been both anti-theory and anti-history. I think they’ve played a role in that regard.”
-Kazys Varnelis (http://www.varnelis.net)

Mark Jarzombek will moderate a discussion between bloggers Javier Arbona and Kazys Varnelis on the state and influence of architectural criticism in an age of digital networks, from their respective positions as producers of criticism and scholars of architecture.

Javier Arbona is a PhD candidate in geography at UC Berkeley and a former chief editor at Archinect.com. He blogs at http://javier.est.pr/.

Kazys Varnelis, PhD, is Director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He blogs at http://www.varnelis.net.

Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture and Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, will moderate the discussion.

________________________________

The lecture will be at 6:30pm in 3-133 at MIT, 77 Mass Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139, see http://whereis.mit.edu

EEE Consumer Electronics Society’s
Games Innovation Conference

The International IEEE Consumer Electronics Society’s Games Innovations Conference 2009 (ICE-GIC 09) aims to be a platform for innovative research in games technologies and to make these technologies more accessible to academia and industry. The conference will take place in Imperial College London in UK between 25th-28th August 2009. Web: http://ice-gic.ieee-cesoc.org/

Areas of interest of ICE-CIG 2009 include, but not limited to: Designing for mixed-reality gaming

Screen cultures to date have been dominated both by narrative and by its modes of framing. Dispersed modes of gaming interaction raise a series of questions about emergent new media forms, particularly in relation to an audience’s changing modes of participation and reception. The convergence of mobile technologies and pervasive computing methods are creating a world where information-rich layers can be mapped directly onto urban topologies. This opens up a series of interrogations around changing concepts of space and place and new perceptions of urban space for games designers. The blurring of the boundaries between physical and virtual demands a new theory-base to explain our changing concepts of the “real”, and, with the growth of hybrid environments, the concomitant changes in user engagement and behaviour patterns. The nature of audience interaction is responding to a socio-cultural dynamic that, although yet far from being quantified, demonstrates both a desire for a greater degree of ‘participation’ (evidenced in popular broadcast television e.g. Big Brother and its interactive outlets) and in the meteoric expansion of social networking on sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Where both these participatory and networking imperatives meet with pervasive media, an emergent games practice is developing, which is pushing at the boundaries of these technologies.

Papers and proposals in this stream may consider any aspect of the contribution of mixed-reality games innovations and technologies development, and will be considered in 4 categories. Papers and proposals may cover, but are not limited to, the following –

* Original uses of location in mixed-reality gaming environments
* Experimental/creative uses of games for hybrid environments
* Exploration of games tools, which enhance mixed reality gaming
* Evaluation of structuring and conceptual models and techniques for supporting mixed-reality games innovations

Call for Papers and Proposals

Paper Presentations: Papers must be submitted as per the conference guidelines for research papers. Presentations will be a maximum duration of 30 minutes and must include an opportunity for audience questions.

Panel Discussions: panels may comprise a chair and up to 4 members. Panels must comprise a brief introduction to the core theme by the chair, and introduction of members (including a biography). The chair will moderate the discussion, which will last one hour, including an opportunity for questions from the audience. Proposals must identify panel members on submission.

Workshops/Tutorials: Workshops/tutorials will focus on some aspect of production for game development. Workshop/tutorial durations may be 2 or 3 hours long and proposals must identify the aims and objectives of the session, the nature of activity and type of equipment, including any software that will be supplied and/or required for use in the workshop. Copyright permission for software or other content use in the workshop/tutorial is a prerequisite for submission in this category and any approvals should also be identified in the proposal.

Screenings (Curated and Non-Curated): screenings that illustrate some aspect of novel use of games tools, which might be of interest to games developers. (please contact mrieser@dmu.ac.uk to discuss). Proposals should include 2 screenshots , a brief overview of the area of interest and a synopsis of the screening including run time, games environment and other production tools used. Proposals accepted in this category will be required to provide full production team details.

More info: http://ice-gic.ieee-cesoc.org

Mobility and ubiquitous computing
The mobility@lse research unit (mobility.lse.ac.uk), led by Dr Carsten Sorensen (www.carstensorensen.com), has since 2001 studied organisational and societal implications of mobile and ubiquitous information technology. The research has over the years built up a large body of research and empirical studies covering a range of issues spanning innovative organisational practices with mobile and ubiquitous technology, to studies of innovation networks in the mobile sector. A current interest is in particular understanding mobile services. So far 9 doctoral students associated with the unit have successfully completed their doctoral studies. The unit will from January 2008 be engaged in two projects co-founded by EPSRC and Mobile VCE (www.mobilevce.com) on flexible mobile networks and future user interaction. We are generally open to any applications within the domain of social and organisational aspects of mobile, pervasive and ubiquitous computing.

Each scholarship includes an allowance for training / conferences, tuition fees and a tax-free stipend of around £12,000 per annum, subject to satisfactory progress.

For further information about the studentships, please contact Francis White (fwhite {AT}lse (DOT)ac[DOT]uk) in the first instance. Information on the application procedure is available at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems/PhDProgramme/Default.htm.

The initial deadline for applications is 1 May 2009, though we will remain interested in discussing possible applications beyond that date.

1) mSOCIETY 2009: The 2nd International Conference on Mobile Society

2) EURO mGOV 2009: The 4th European Conference on Mobile Government

3) mDEVELOPMENT 2009: The 1st Int. Conference on Mobile Development

These conferences will be held during 2-3-4 September, 2009, in Barcelona, Spain as part of Mobile Life Conferences and Exhibitions.

For more on submissions, participation, exhibitions of demos and applications, please visit http://www.m4life.org or send email to conf {AT} mlife (DOT) org.