Marc Böhlen and Hans Frei

In response to two strong global vectors: the rise of pervasive information technologies and the privatization of the public sphere, Marc Böhlen and Hans Frei propose hybrid architectural programs called Micro Public Places (MMPs). MPPs combine insights from ambient intelligence, human computing, architecture, social engineering and urbanism to initiate ways to re- animate public life in contemporary societies. They offer access to things that are or should be available to all: air, water, medicine, books, etc. and combine machine learning procedures with subjective human intuition to make the public realm a contested space again.

http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/?q=node/104

http://www.ElectroSmogFestival.net

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=365624342173

http://www.DeBalie.nl/live

March 18 – 20, 2010

Concept

ElectroSmog is a new festival that revolves around the concept Sustainable Immobility. The festival will introduce and explore this concept in theory and practice. With Sustainable Immobility we refer to a critique of current systems of hyper mobility of people and products in travel and transport, and their ecological unsustainability.

The exploration of Sustainable Immobility is a quest for a more sustainable life style, which is less determined by speed and constant mobility. A lifestyle that celebrates stronger links to local cultures, while at the same time deepening our connections to others across any geographical divide, using new communication technologies instead of physical travel .

What we propose may sound a bit like a paradox: The proposition of the festival is that the unfolding crisis of mobility can only be effectively addressed by deepening our connections across geographical divides through new communication technologies. The festival wants to engage the fundamental promise of the information age that communication technologies can replace the need for physical mobility, and thus both contribute to ecological stability as well as a more rewarding both deep-local and translocal life-style. While this promise has existed since the dawn of the information age, it was never realised. New material realties, however, force us to critically re-examine these promises and seriously start to turn them into viable choices.

Nothing is self-evident for us. We will also critically question the underlying premise that reliance on electronic connections and local roots is self-evidently more energy efficient and more ecologically sustainable than current systems of globalised mobility of people and goods.

Is ‘going local’ the only solution?

What are the true energy costs and environmental and health hazards of using even more electronic technologies (increased levels of electrosmog)?

How can remote connections become a truly rewarding experience in and of themselves?

We believe that only by answering such questions a viable alternative to the current unsustainable systems of hyper-mobility can be found.

Bringing together a broad coalition

The ElectroSmog festival brings together a broad coalition of designers, environmentalists, urban and spatial planners, technologists, artists, theorists, and engaged and concerned citizens, to explore and ‘design’ sustainable immobility. The festival stakes its claim for a radical break with the current systems of hyper-mobility not simply by discussing the issue, but by actually implementing it. To achieve this the very concept of an international festival and its traditional conventions need to be rethought and redesigned from the ground up.

Connecting the local off-line local with the international on-line

ElectroSmog is a truly international festival, with everything you might expect of such a festival: international debates and discussions, performances, art projects, exhibits, site specific projects, screenings, design competitions, and much more. However, no presenter will travel beyond their local or regional boundaries to participate in this event.
To achieve this we will work together in a network of accomplished cultural and new media centres, labs, theatres and other public venues to create the local ‘hubs’ that will inter-connect for this unique festival.

A crucial dimension of the festival will be its on-line presence, where audiences from basically anywhere with an internet connection can follow events on-line, join in discussions and debates, and contribute to the program.

Beyond the broadband enclaves

ElectroSmog acknowledges from the start that bandwidth is not equally distributed across and within societies. Therefore remote connection to lower bandwidth spaces, do-it-yourself telematics, and information technologies for the majority world will be one the central concerns the festival wishes to address, again both in theory and in practice.

Thematic discussions, presentations and connected debates

The ElectroSmog festival-program is organised around a series of interlocking thematic programs, connected discussions and debates all transmitted live over the internet. Themes covered by these events include:
• Global views on the crisis of mobility
• Witnessed Presence
• Hyper-mobility and the urban condition
• City & regional branding debate
• e-mobility versus immobility
• Designing for (im-)mobility
• Public media art projects and sustainability
• Energy and information
• ElectroSmog is Good for You!
• Food and global mobility
• Deep local and remote technologies

Around the main program a host of satellite events is organised locally and translocally.

These include:

• Art projects and local interventions, including original works by Bureau des Etudes, Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat, John Cohns, Sean Kerr, Kevin McCourt & Bartolo Luque, and others.

• Special events, screenings, book launches, and more.

• A program of connected and localised workshops

• On-line projects and environments designed specifically for the festival.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More info here [in Dutch] >>

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.

with SARA, an urban augmented reality application, you can see and experience the built environment of the past, present and future, via Layar Browser. The NAI has set itself an incredible challenge: to make the Netherlands the first country in the world to have its entire architecture viewable on smartphones thanks to augmented reality.

What is interesting about SARA is that it not only functions as an annotated tour through Dutch cities, revealing bits of background knowledge concerning the architecture that is visible to the eye and the mobile phone camera. It can also project images of the past and the future on top of existing reality. Users can watch historic buildings that once were present at their current site, examine alternatives (in the case of competitions where different architect have sent in proposals), projects that were never realized, or future buildings.

In Rotterdam for instance, SARA-users can take a look at the Market Hall, a giant structure designed by MVRDV. It can even be rendered in 3D, so that users can virtually walk through or around the building that is to appear there in a few years time.

Ole Bouman sees interesting opportunities here for architects. This new technology enables them to launch all sorts of future plans –  from the functional and realistic to the utopian and provocative. Whether it can actually be build (according to either current construction technology or financial or procedural logic), doesn’t matter. Architects can thus take up their role as storytellers, by showing us alternative realities and futures for our cities through AR. Bouman ‘For me, architecture is not limited to the construction of the physcial. It is about organizing spaces inteligently. For instance, the paintings on stained glass in a cathedral are technically not architecture. They are made by artisans that added to the builded process. But of course they add tremendously to the experience of the church, by giving medieval visitors a connection with heaven. In this way they contribute more to the experience of space than the bricks and mortar do.’ Perhaps AR can fullfil a similar role?

With SARA the NAi also wanted to reflect on the role of musea in society. Ole Bouman: ‘Most people know us as state archieve. We have 18 km of stacked historical sources, that is an amazing container of physicality.’ Yet, when a medium arises that is able to represent the history and future of architecture on site, may be we will no longer care so much about physicality, Bouman conjectures. ‘We want to anticipate what might happen to architecture in the future’

AR as a medium for organizing social processes in space

The projects that developer Johannes La Poutre of Squio.nl has been involved in addressed a different dimension of architectural practice: the organization of social practices in space. La Poutre showed us a few layers that he (co-)developed for the Layar AR-browser on the mobile phone.

For instance Tweeps around is an AR layer that allows you to see what has been tweeted about the space that you are in. “Tweeps Around queries Twitter for posts for which an exact location is given. All posts within a certain distance from your current location are shown.”

Similarly his Verbeterdebuurt-Layar (the dutch equivalent of Fixmystreet.com) displays nearby suggestions given by citizens to improve the neighborhood.

Copenhagenlayer was a project executed during the climate summit last december, that mapped ‘live enviromental measurements taken by Sensaris Senspods strapped to bike messengers plying the streets of Copenhagen’ on an Augmented Reality Layer. The central idea is that with your mobile phone you can access live data about the air quality of your current location.

Although quite rudimentary, this could be a promising direction for future research, where crowd sourced measurements of environmental data are aggregated and made accessible to the public at large. The project reminds me of Biketastic by the Cens-lab in Los Angeles that aims to use censor technology to collaboratively map the most attractive biking routes in LA. I think this is an interesting direction in information design and potentially can impact the way we move through and experience our cities.

Current limitations and challenged of AR

So while the opportunities are huge, in the discussion also lots of shortcomings of the current day technology were brought up.

First of all, the processor speed of current mobile phones and exactitude of GPS signals makes the experience somewhat akward. Walking through virtual models is not yet a smooth experience. If Moore’s law doesn’t let us down, this is something that can be resolved in the near future

Second, there is the issue of the immersive capacities of AR through the mobile phone browser. Can users through their small mobile phone screens really be immersed in an AR-experience? Or is it more like watching through a keyhole? This is a more serious problem. Larger screens will solve this problem, but larger screens are also less portable. Or do we need projection technology, or AR-contact lenses for the medium to fully take off?

Third there is the fallacy of spatializing information. Currently lots of layers available in AR consist of existing datasets mapped in 3D (for example houses for sale nearby). Yet while  adding such a third dimension may look sexy, it does not always necessarily make the dataset more intelligible. Sometimes an abstract two-dimensional table or 2d map may be much more effective in communicating a message than adding data in 3d to the real world. How do you meaningfully visualize (agregated) information in a 3d, augmented reality environment? This will remain an important search for information designers in the next few years.

Fourth there are issues of control and authorship. Currently in their rendering of future projects, architects are able to control the point of view and select favorable perspectives. But what if prospective clients and public can actually inspect the whole building in 3d on site? Once a rendering is available through AR, does the architect loose control? This is not so much a shortcoming of AR itself (rather it is a feature of new media technologies in general that traditional professionals loose their control over their content), but might make architects exercise restraint in embracing the use of AR. (On the other hand, this also offers opportunities for bottom-up appropriations that could make the medium more interesting).

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

About the topic

In December 2009, the Amsterdam-based new media research centre Institute of Network Cultures (INC) organized an event on Urban Screens in which artists, architects and theorists presented their research and design projects that regarded the city as a space of informatics, buildings as interactive surfaces, and mobile phones as pocketsize urban screens. Building on this research and design practice, and collaborating with the INC, the International Urban Screens Association, and other parties such as Vurb.eu and De Verdieping, Impakt online will commission new works within this field of interest. Engaging with changing conceptions, structures and practices of urban landscapes, the Impakt Online topic of “The City as Interface” works meaningfully with the Impakt festival’s overall theme of ‘Matrix City’.

‘Matrix City’ maps out the recent developments in this new urban landscape along two regularly intertwining lines. On the one hand, the city is viewed as a gathering place of subcultures and communities. Another viewpoint reflects on the city as an immersive audiovisual environment, as a modal structure in which virtual and real systems merge.

About the call

Impakt online will select and support a max. total of three online projects to be presented at Impakt.nl/online. In addition, applicants may also submit a proposal for a residency at Impakt headquarters in Utrecht, as part of the Impakt Works program, which includes a workspace and housing facilities for a period of two months.

Deadline for Impakt Online project proposals: April 30, 2010

Please submit your proposal (max 1000 words) and a short bio (max 500 words) to online(at)impakt(dot)nl, by April 30, 2010.N.B. Impakt online projects are indeed presented online, so please do not submit ideas for art installations for the Impakt Festival.

Deadline for Impakt Works residency proposals: March 31, 2010

Please submit your proposal for an Impakt Works residency (max 1000 words) and a short bio (max 500 words) to online(at)impakt(dot)nl, by March 31, 2010.

http://www.impakt.nl/index.php/online/Impakt_Online_2010_Call_for_Contributions

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

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

Having said that, the addition of the new media technologies such as mobile phones has increased the density of different logics operational in (urban) space, and new cultural practices and adaptations of space are emerging as a result. This makes the urban experience more complex and messier than ever. It’s even doubtful whether we can truly get a grasp on these processes. What we can do is try to increase our sensitivity of the complexity of different logics at work. It was this issue that most of the presentations in this session addressed.

Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teletrust

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

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

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

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 >>

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

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

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

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

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

So what should we do with this insight?

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

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

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

As a prelude to the ElectroSmog festival De Balie in Amsterdam will present a showcase of design proposals, practical projects and design-ideas that should persuade us to start moving less.

With on-line and on-site contributions by among others:

John Thackara, director of Doors of Perception, the international conference and knowledge network which sets new agendas for design, will highlight design projects that try to tackle the question of mobility reduction.
www.doorsofperception.com

Stefan Agamanolis, director of  Distance Lab, Dublin, will present the specific focus of his organisation on networking rural and remote area’s. The relevant question for the ElectroSmog festival  is whether we can live in a sustainable way in the green and still connect to the rest of the world, culturally and economically?
www.distancelab.org

David van Gent is a managing consultant for IBM on Learning Strategy & Technology, Virtual Worlds, Serious Gaming & Web 2.0. He will talk about and demo the Virtual Offices project of IBM, using open SIM technology (similar to second life):
( See for instance this CNN item )

The Medialab Prado, Madrid will present their recent project “In the Air” (tbc); “a visualisation project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.
(..) The project proposes a platform for individual and collective awareness and decision making, where the interpretation of results can be used for real time navigation through the city, opportunistic selection of locations according to their air conditions and a base for political action.”
www.intheair.es

Eric Kluitenberg, head of the media department of De Balie and initiator of the ElectroSnog festival, will present the concept behind the festival. Besides exploring the critique of mobility theoretically, ElectroSmog will also address the issue practically. All international presentations in the festival will be realised by means of tele-connections between the different international locations.
www.electrosmogfestival.net

This program will be streamed  live on the internet – for details please refer to:
www.debalie.nl/live

datum | Thursday 21 January, 20.30 hrs.
language | Engels
entrance free entree

www.debalie.nl/media

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.

8 December 2009
Location: Virtueel Platform, Damrak 70, Amsterdam, Netherlands
9.30 am – 3pm

Virtueel Platform (the Netherlands sector institute for electronic culture) and DISH conference partner will host a workshop on innovative new media applications for the heritage sector, with Matt Adams of internationally renowned group Blast Theory. Blast Theory has focused most recently on new uses of location technologies for non-commercial content in the public space using existing technology to new purposes. The one-day workshop will kick off with some insights into Blast Theory’s own projects and their relevance to the heritage field. The rest of the day is a workshop in which participants will be helped to devise new ways in which their own cultural content can be used to best advantage with (mobile) technology.

Blast Theory is a Brighton-based group of artists and researchers who make interactive works for the gallery, the street and television. Their recent collaborations with the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham have been recognised internationally as breaking new ground in the combination of online games, wireless networks and virtual worlds. Other partners include BBC Interactive and the Science Museum, London.

http://www.blasttheory.co.uk
http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk

For specific questions about the workshop, contact Cathy Brickwood (Programme Manager, Virtueel Platform), cbrickwood [at] virtueelplatform.nl, tel. +31 (0) 20 6273758