This international event will merge business (where is the money) and technology, and will focus on two Internet of Things cases: The individual andThe Home.

The event contains four linked activities:

• The seminar will tackle social, technical, cultural and design challenges, discuss innovative solutions, show new business opportunities and will give an outlook into the future of Internet of Things for The individual and The Home.
• The Science Hack Day / Hackathon 1/2 june. Results will be presented during the seminar
• Jam Session: Decentralized Power System, 4/5 june. Results will be presented during the seminar
• The exhibition will show Internet of Things products and services in its current and future formats

Internet of Things is still very much a technology driven activity applied by hard- and software developers, whereby competing technologies offer different solutions with unclear business cases. Besides that different industries who don’t know each other traditionally, need to work together in order to create new succesful IoT value chains.

The following topics will be covered during the conference:

• What are actual business cases for IoT in Healthcare, Consumer Electronics, Utilities and how will this impact business in the future
• What is the current status of IoT technologies (f.i. ZigBee, zWave, DECT ULE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, KNX etc.), how do they compete and are they complementary.
• Who takes the lead in the value chain of IoT
• What are legal, social and IP consequenses of IoT (will Big Brother watch us in the future?)

Science Hack Day Eindhoven 1-2 June 2012

Two exciting themes:                1. Healthy living; 2. Happy living
Two enabling technologies:      1. Open Data; 2. Internet of Things

Get excited and make things with science and technology! Science Hack Day Eindhoven is a 32-hour-all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and other geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking and building ‘cool stuff’. Science Hack Day is part of the Dutch Technology Week.

By collaborating on focused tasks during this short period, small groups are capable of producing remarkable results. We expect 50-100 participants, who work in teams of 2-6 individuals.

Prizes
The teams can win the following awards consisting of an award ceremony picture money prize and cool stuff to bring home:

1. Overall happy living
2. Overall healthy living
3. The best hardware innovation
4. The best software innovation
5. The best service design
6. Overall creative design

Venue: Fontys University Eindhoven
Participation is free and all catering is sponsored
Registration is required

Organisation: MAD emergent art center
Contact: info@madlab.nl
Partners: TMC, Fontys University, Technical University Eindhoven, Design Academy, Brainport, City of Eindhoven, Jakajima, and many others.

The awards of the Science Hack Day Eindhoven will also be presented at the Internet of Things Event (IoT), 6 June at High Tech Campus Eindhoven

Follow MAD emergent art center on Facebook

Twitter: @MADlabNL
#SHD040

4 – 6 pm (‘Poetry on the Screen program’) / 8 pm – 1 am (Augment It! program)

presale € 10 | door € 10 | trouwe honden € 9 | club
16.00 – 01.00 | doors open 16.00

The Stedelijk Museum and TrouwAmsterdam are very pleased to present Augment It! This special program in the TrouwAmsterdam building is devoted to all the possible forms of Augmented Reality (AR) that artists, poets, architects, and designers are experimenting with at the moment. With an extensive exhibition in De Verdieping, lectures in the clubroom, AR performances throughout the building, and a dazzling finale with an AR DJ, Augment It! presents all the many different possibilities of AR today!

Augmented Reality involves complementing reality with virtual digital images. In a search for the seamless interface between man, machine, and reality, a great deal of work is done to develop AR, for example, using special spectacles, smartphones, or webcams. But what are the latest trends? What can poets do with this new medium? What does AR DJing look like? How does the human body relate to this virtual reality? Augment It! will answer this and many other questions.

The afternoon and evening programs of Augment It! consist of the following elements:

Augmented Poetry
The latest presentation of “Poetry on the Screen,” in which six teams of poets and designers have experimented with AR on mobile screens (smartphones, iPads, etc.) specifically for this presentation,. In other words, the first AR poetry in the world.
With: Arnoud van Adrichem, Ines Cox, and Lauren Grusenmeyer; Wim Brands and Max Kisman; Maarten Doorman, P.J. Roggeband, and Nils Muhlenbruch;Hélène Gelèns and Luis Angel Rodil Fernandez;Saskia de Jong and Rens van Meegen; and Elmar Kuiper and Selby Gildemacher.
Presenters and moderators: Rita Raley (University of California Santa Barbara, USA; editor of Electronic Literature Collection Vol 2) and Margriet Schavemaker (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam).
During the evening program Augment It!, visitors will be offered the opportunity to meet with the creators of ‘Poetry on the Screen’ on the balcony in the club hall at 9 p.m.

Augmented Art
The entire De Verdieping site is filled with a marker-based AR exhibition, composed by AR artist and guest curatorSander Veenhof. The exhibition comprises an international selection of leading contemporary AR work.
Including works by: Will Pappenheimer, Mark Skwarek,James Alliban, Tamiko Thiel, Viktor Baltus.

Augmented Body
Performances and installations will take place in various parts of the TrouwAmsterdam building, in which the human body becomes the interface or navigation point of an augmented reality or the augmented data by which we are surrounded.
Including contributions by: Karen Lancel/Hermen Maat,Bram Snijders, and Jeremy Bailey.

Augmented DJ
The evening concludes with a spectacular augmented reality DJ act presented by Resolume and Patrice Bäumel(Trouw, Amsterdam).

Augment It Yourself!
The boundaries between the viewer, artist, and curator become blurred in Augmented Reality. Do you have something to contribute to the exhibition? Put an example of your work on your smartphone, and during the evening (or before) put it on the enclosed marker, using the free “Stiktu” app. Do you create virtual 3D sculptures? Let us know if you have done anything like that, on the GPS coordinates 52.35451699670258, 4.9129486083984375.

Augmented Lectures
In addition to the program outlined above, there are various lectures and debates that examine the advantages and disadvantages of AR. Is the world improved by AR? Is AR a temporary craze or the start of the seamless interface between man, machine, and reality that we have been dreaming of forever? How can institutions such as the Stedelijk and TrouwAmsterdam, venturing into the virtual domain, make an effort to be innovative themselves in this way?
With contributions by: Will Pappenheimer.

Entrance price: € 10 / € 7,50 (students) for evening program / afternoon program is free of charge
Please make a reservation for the afternoon program ‘Poetry on the Screen’ via www.letterenfonds.nl/rsvp.

More information >>

May 18, 2012, 18:00-19:00
Location: Gouvernestraat 133, Rotterdam, NL

Presented by Angela Plohman, Baltan Laboratories and Melinda Sipos, Kitchen Budapest

Baltan Laboratories and Kitchen Budapest are pleased to launch a new joint publication focusing on their recent collaboration called Beyond Data. The two labs brought their different working methodologies and networks together in a series of workshops in which Dutch and Hungarian artists and designers explored new ways of embodying digital data. In addition to extensive documentation of the project and concepts developed during the Beyond Data collaboration, contributions by Attila Bujdosó, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Trevor Hogan and Eva Hornecker, and Attila Nemes have been specially commissioned to reflect on the theme, the open lab as a methodology, and the collaboration between the labs itself.

http://deaf.nl/program/modules/spotlight-beyond-data-book-launch-book-presentation-may-18

 Call for Projects: Interactivos?’12 Dublin: Hack the City. Current and Future Needs

Txt and the city
Michiel de Lange

Scope

Today’s cities are pervaded by a variety of visible and invisible media technologies, like mobile devices, rfid chips, wireless networks, GPS positioning, urban screens, media facades, sensors, CCTV cameras, and so on. The boundaries between distinct urban domains like work, home, travel, meeting, leisure become less clear. Social behaviour previously confined to one sphere is blurring. People are using social networks like Facebook or Twitter at work, receive work-related calls at home or during travel, listen to music or keep their eyes fixed on the mobile screen in public places, and so on. What does that mean for people’s behaviour in the media city? And what are the implications for brands?

Sociologist Erving Goffman pointed out that people in public situations engage in ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1959). They play varying roles in different situations to convey particular impressions (caring father at home, cheerful colleague at work, successful businessman in public, generous mate in the pub). This situation-dependent behaviour functions as a membrane of the self. In its porous state the membrane allows the self to diffuse and encounter new places, connect to other people and express self-identity. In its solid state it acts as a safety shield to protect the self from leaking too much personal information and to block an overload of outside information.

Goffman’s view underlines that for communication to be perceived as genuine is less about facts than about effects: does it work? Credible communication is not simply an action but an interaction that involves the audience as much as the actor. Blurring social roles are both liberating and challenging. On the one hand people have to be less worried about conforming to restricting etiquettes and social expectations. On the other hand they need to manage their selves on multiple online and offline stages simultaneously without having a clear view of who exactly their audiences are. How can brands enable people to navigate the complexities of this shifting urban landscape?

The search for relevance

For brands, the blurring of situations and roles means that it is more difficult to communicate by simply associating their products with clearly legible settings. As situations and social roles become more fluid the notion of ‘relevance’, which is always contextually defined, changes too. Urban apps are a response to the ongoing quest for relevance. Sensing apps and location-based services measure and visualise data and tie that information to places. These services are touted as allowing people to make situation-specific optimal choices. Where are places of interest nearby? Who recommends this restaurant? Where are my friends now? Is the air clean enough to go out? Is the traffic not too dense? Have I burned my 2500 calories today? What about the crime rate in my new neighbourhood?

The problem however with many mobile services is that they are designed for location-based relevance rather than social relevance. Even though these apps augment physical place with digital information, they limit and pre-script the roles for people to play. Way-finding and location-based services, digital signage, customer loyalty cards, and individualised search algorithms stimulate a culture of personalised consumption. Mobile screens, portable audio devices, and untethered access to one’s familiar inner circle enable people to retreat from public life into privatised capsules. Recommendations favour sameness instead of difference and induce people to dwell in the known instead of stimulating serendipitous encounters. By making the city smaller and more predictable, urban apps limit the bandwidth for behaviour to consumption and cocooning. Solidification of the social membrane – a ‘filter bubble’ – is neither good for lively cities that thrive on diversity, nor for brands that thrive on diversification and diffusion.

New tech, new social roles

Luckily, these same technologies also contribute to the emergence of new roles for people. With mobile media citizens start to take the organisation and design of their cities in their own hands. Key is that apps are designed to grant people ownership over urban issues (“this is my problem too”) and a high degree of agency (“I can do something about it”).

A first step is when people acquire new insights in urban issues. An example is the Trash | Track project by MIT’s Senseable City Lab. Location-aware rfid tags were attached to items people wanted to discard. At various stages the trash was tracked and its route, which in some cases spanned across the USA, visualised. By using pervasive technologies the project attempted to take a bottom-up approach to urban resource management and promote recycling as a behavioural change.

A step higher on the ladder of involvement is when citizens actively contribute to help solve collective issues with easily available technologies. Crowdsourcing and citizen science are terms often used for this type of distributed participation. In Boston for example citizens can help to map street bumps with a specially developed mobile app and contribute to improving road conditions. Citizens in this case have a signalling role, while fixing the street is left to the responsible authorities.

Another step up is when citizens become true co-creators. In the Dutch project Face Your World by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and architect Dennis Kaspori, young people adopted the role of urban designers and collaborated on a plan for a park in their neighbourhood. Simulation software allowed them to contribute ideas and deliberate over design choices. Local government was persuaded to abandon initial master planning for the park and execute the bottom-up plan instead.

Finally, people who participate in media art projects or urban games often invert or transgress scripted ‘normal’ behaviour, and engage with people and places in unexpected ways. Koppelkiek is a social game made by game developer Kars Alfrink that was played in the Dutch city of Utrecht. Players earned points by making pictures of oneself together with someone else in a specific physical situation, for instance together with a number. Opposite to the ‘gamification’ of individual achievements, this game was explicitly designed to reward playful social interactions.

Insights and opportunities

Everybody is a stakeholder in liveable and lively cities, including brands. In the cases above technologies are used to make cities more lively and social instead of only more personalised and efficient. Urbanites take on roles that are all about forging renewed relations with the environment, other people, and ultimately with the self. Following the logic of digital media as relational tools for more social cities, businesses that enable people to establish and maintain relations are in a privileged position. This is what market researcher Cova calls the ‘linking value’ of products and services (Cova, 1997).

By becoming actors in this field brands can contribute to a diversity of social roles and interactions in today’s media cities. That means doing credible impression management. There is nothing inauthentic about that. Everybody does. Through social interactions effects occur that are genuine. Real relations are not one-way but reciprocal. One gives and one receives. So if governments open up their data to become collective resources, why can’t brands do the same? Think Google’s Trends and Zeitgeist. Sure, public and private organisations have different aims. Yet there is a clear parallel with Goffman’s impression management, where an overly protective attitude toward private information signals that someone likes to keep the membrane closed. By contrast, opening the membrane by sharing private information invites new connections and makes existing ones deeper and longer-lasting.

Brands can also enable people to act on collective issues. They can help people to identify important issues. They can put in their weight to involve other institutional stakeholders. People should be allowed to not only contribute ideas (like the Philips + challenge in Indonesia) but to make actual decisions about their urban environment and co-create. Further, brands can give people experiences to share and stories to tell. Narratives act as blueprints for identity construction, and in turn people tell who they are through stories. A wide variety of available stories thus strengthens diversity. Brands can also stimulate chance encounters with unknown people and places. This can be elicited by play in the true sense, i.e. done for its own sake rather than extrinsically rewarded. Finally, brands can think of alternative measures of economic value. Local currencies and collaborative consumption turn transactions from impersonal one-time only events into durable and reciprocal interactions.

Why should brands? Well, it’s good for cities. If we think of cities as complex ecosystems, more behavioural variation means more capacity for adaptation and innovative approaches to existing and future problems. It’s also good for profit. Diverse cities are places that catalyse a variety of interlocking and mutually reinforcing processes. Such cities attract creative people, foster creativity and innovation, generate cultural liveliness, increase demand for high-value products and services, educate citizens, and breed out-of-the-box innovators, who in turn design the products and services of tomorrow. Brands as much as anyone benefit from social cities.

Sources

Cova, B. (1997). Community and Consumption: towards a definition of the “linking value” of product or services. European Journal of Marketing, 31(3/4), 297-316.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

The article was originally published on Canvas8 here:

http://www.canvas8.com/content/2012/01/09/txt-in-the-city.html. Republished with kind permission.

Katharine Willis send us an announcement for this interesting event:

Remediating Urban Space Symposium

Remediating Urban Space: Exploring Design Responses

Wednesday 6^th June 2012
10.00– 16.30
Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK

Keynote: Mark Shepard, University of Buffalo

Communication technologies remediate everyday urban life, resulting in subtle shifts in the spatial, temporal, scalar and material processes which are ‘all too often overlooked in conventional and binary approaches opposing the ‘virtual’ realm of new technologies to ‘real’ urban places’ (Crang 2007). We need to move beyond an artificially created dichotomy of a real and a virtual world as if the two were opposed. Instead, we must develop a new understanding of our activities and behaviour in the spaces of the city; since online and mobile socially networked spaces and real-world places are connecting and converging in numerous and complex ways. The challenge before us is finding ways to engage with these changes as designers. The aim of the workshop is to consider more fully the multiple, subtle, and interdependent spatio-temporalities which together work to constitute ICT-based urban change. How do we start to create meaningful spaces that merge digital and physical interactions?

The workshop will examine and propose design responses for how to remediate urban space through a range of ICT’s, locative media and smart objects. It will draw on an interdisciplinary field of architecture, human computer interaction, geography, media studies, art and sociology to explore questions of how urban space can be conceived and inhabited when it is mediated, and the nature of these mediated experiences at an everyday level. Contributions will be a mix of ideas/projects and case studies. There will be three main themes/workshops:

Workshop 1: Chair: Ava Fatah, UCL - Urban screens, urban public space and sense of community

Workshop 2: Chair: Chris Speed, Edinburgh College of Art - The ‘internet of things’, social memory and networked objects

Workshop 3: Chair Alex Aurigi, Plymouth University - Urban Design, public place-making and regeneration in the information age

The aim of the workshop is to discuss current work, future developments and explore the issues associated with understanding, engaging with and designing for future spaces. Selected work and papers will be published in a Special Issue of a Journal. There will be an exhibition of project work presented in the School of Architecture and will be documented in a printed catalogue.

There will be no registration fee, but in order to participate please send a short abstract outlining your proposed topic and a short outline of your research interests (max. 500 words) to:

Katharine Willis, School of Architecture, Plymouth University: katharine.willis ** plymouth.ac.uk.

Deadline for Abstract Submissions: 15^th May 2012

More information >>

Latour’s ‘Parliament of Things’ is being put to practice with this event:

Who owns the data being generated by the world around you? In March 2011, we put forward the first “Internet of Things Bill of Rights”, which aimed to define the relationship between people and the Internet of Things. It has morphed along the way and spurred some great discussions, but now we want to put it out into the world and have it take on a life of it’s own. It’s a discussion that needs to happen for this next evolution of the internet to mature in a healthy manner and we want to invite you to become a part of that process.

A new Bill of Rights is being discussed, debated, and formulated on the open Google group here: http://groups.google.com/group/iot-open-data

We will gather on June 16-17 in London at the Open Internet of Things Assembly. The event will feature keynotes by Usman Haque, Adam Greenfield, and Rob Van Kranenburg, and involve attendees in a series of workshops aimed at generating an endorsable version of the “Bill”.
Tickets are now available and space is limited to 130 attendees (20% discount available until May 10th using code “OIOTA_Pachube”): http://openiotassembly.com/tickets/
Sponsorship opportunities are now available and start at an accessible £100 so that organizations of all sizes can participate and show their support: http://openiotassembly.com/sponsors/
We hope to see you there!

More information >>

The Architectural League invites you to celebrate the publication of the final pamphlet in the Situated Technologies Pamphlets Series, “Modulated Cities: Networked Spaces, Reconstituted Subjects,” by Helen Nissenbaum and Kazys Varnelis (available April 5, 2012). Bringing together contributors to the Situated Technologies Project throughout its first six years, this half-day event will address current issues surrounding situated technologies and the increasing entanglement of data, technology, and the built environment, and attempt to identify future trajectories for their evolution.

The afternoon will begin with a conversation between pamphlet authors Helen Nissenbaum andKazys Varnelis, moderated by Trebor Scholz, addressing the redefinition of privacy in the age of big data and the networked, geo-spatial environment, and questioning the implications for the construction of contemporary subjectivity. Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko, Laura Kurgan,and Mark Shepard will then present a series of case studies on open data and the process of making data public, focusing on distributed sensing initiatives and contrasting them with centralized programs managed by government agencies. Finally, Philip Beesley, David Benjamin,Laura Forlano, and Omar Khan will identify the challenges of developing data literacy among the next generation of architects, addressing these issues through an expanded architectural curriculum for the 21st century.

Tickets
Tickets are free for League members and students with a current ID; $20 for non-members. Members may reserve a ticket by e-mailing: rsvp@archleague.org. Non-members may purchase tickets here. Purchased tickets are available for pick-up at the venue check-in desk and are non-refundable.

AIA and New York State Continuing Education Credits will be available.

This event is co-sponsored by Eyebeam Art + Technology Center.

About the Situated Technologies Project
The Situated Technologies Project, co-organized by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard in partnership with the Architectural League, explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How is our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities? The project began with a 3-day symposium in fall 2006 and continued with the publication of the Situated Technologies Pamphlets, a nine-part series of conversations between leading practitioners and researchers from architecture, art, technology, sociology, and related fields. In fall 2009, Toward the Sentient City, an exhibition curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the League, presented five newly commissioned installations and projects that explored the evolving relationship between ubiquitous computing, architecture, and the city. A book based on the exhibition is available from MIT Press.

Links
Architecture and Situated Technologies Symposium–Podcasts
Situated Technologies Pamphlets
Toward the Sentient City
Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space

For more information, visit www.situatechtechnologies.net.

About the Speakers
Philip Beesley is a professor in the School of Architecture, University of Waterloo and an architect who is developing responsive kinetic architectural environments that approach near-living functions. His work is widely cited as a pioneer in the rapidly expanding technology of responsive architecture. He is co-author, with Omar Khan, of Situated Technologies Pamphlets 4: Responsive Architecture/Performing Instruments.

David Benjamin is an architect and a principal of The Living. He teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation where, with Soo-In Yang, he is co-director of the Living Architecture Lab. The Living received a New York Prize Fellowship from the Van Alen Institute and was a winner of the Architectural League’s Young Architects Forum. The Living’s project with Natalie Jeremijenko, “Amphibious Architecture,” was one of five commissioned projects for the Architectural League exhibition, Toward the Sentient City.

Laura Forlano is an Assistant Professor of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her research is on the role of information technology in supporting open innovation networks in urban environments with a specific emphasis on the use of mobile, wireless and ubiquitous computing technologies to support collaboration. She is co-author, with Dharma Dailey, of “Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy.” Her project, “Breakout,” was one of five commissioned projects for the Architectural League exhibition, Toward the Sentient City.

Usman Haque is the director of Haque Design + Research Ltd, which specializes in the design and research of interactive architecture systems. He is also founder of Pachube.com and CEO of Connected Environments Ltd. He is co-author, with Matthew Fuller, of Situated Technologies Pamphlets 2: Urban Versioning System 1.0. His project, “Natural Fuse,” was one of five commissioned for the Architectural League exhibition, Toward the Sentient City.

Natalie Jeremijenko directs the xdesign Environmental Health Clinic at New York University. Previously she was on the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD and the Faculty of Engineering at Yale. Her project with The Living, “Amphibious Architecture,” was one of five commissioned for the Architectural League exhibition, Toward the Sentient City.

Omar Khan is an architect and Chair of Architecture at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, where he is also Director of the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies. Khan is a co-organizer of the Situated Technologies Project and co-author, with Philip Beesley, of “Situated Technologies Pamphlet 4: Responsive Architecture/Performing Instruments.”

Laura Kurgan is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where she is Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab and the Director of Visual Studies. Her recent research includes a multi-year SIDL project on “million-dollar blocks” and the urban costs of the American incarceration experiment, and a collaborative exhibition on global migration and climate change.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Senior Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Her book Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life accounts for privacy threats posed by IT and digital medial systems in terms of the theory of contextual integrity. She is co-author, with Kazys Varnelis, of Situated Technologies Pamphlet 9: Modulated Cities: Networked Spaces, Reconstituted Subjects.

Trebor Scholz is a scholar, artist, organizer, and chair of the conference series The Politics of Digital Culture at The New School, where he also teaches in the Department of Culture and Media Studies. Scholz is co-organizer of the Situated Technologies Project and is co-author, with Laura Y. Liu, of Situated Technologies Pamphlet 7: From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City.

Mark Shepard is an artist, architect, and researcher whose post-disciplinary practice addresses new social spaces and signifying structures of contemporary network cultures. Shepard is co-organizer of the Situated Technologies Project and is co-author, with Adam Greenfield, of Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1: Urban Computing and Its Discontents. He was also curator of the exhibition Toward the Sentient City.

Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He is editor of books includingNetworked Publics (MIT Press, 2008), The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles(Actar, 2009), and The Philip Johnson Tapes (The Monacelli Press, 2008). He is co-author, with Helen Nissenbaum, of Situated Technologies Pamphlet 9: Modulated Cities: Networked Spaces, Reconstituted Subjects.

REVOLUTION IN THE SPACE INBETWEEN
Revolution, participation & discourse between digital and urban public spaces

A conference from die urbanauten and the Ev. Akademie Tutzing

Date: 23. – 25.3.2012
Place: Ev. Akademie Tutzing near Munich

It is impossible to think about the future of the city, urban society and public space without considering that urban and digital spaces are interfering with each other more and more. A new space is developing, which we would like to call the “public space inbetween”. It is not only the people that try to claim this new space “bottom up”. There are also “top down” strategies from municipal or city governments and “iniside out” initiatives from large companies.

How does the “Internet in your pocket” and social media change political, cultural and economic power structures in the city? What role do specific public spaces in our cities play? How can participation and social commitment be developed and improved upon through digital media? What impact might this have on the discourse surrounding the development of urban society? Is there a “global, digital-urban civil society” and a newly rediscovered, political, public space arising?

Prices & Registration

E-Mail (quoting conference reference 0512012) to: brosch@ev-akademie-tutzing.de

Further information regarding prices and registration is in the programme flyer or at www.ev-akademie-tutzing.de

Closing date: 16. March 2012

More information >>

These are the results of the three-day “Social Cities of Tomorrow” workshop (14 − 16 Feb. 2012). Most teams made two presentations: a longer one for the public presentation at Mediamatic  on 16 February 2012, and a shorter one for the public presentation during the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference on 17 February 2012.

Team briefing
Each team received a detailed briefing about the workshop setup, method, readings, and per team case description. Briefing of teams (pdf 170 KB; personal details and per team case description removed).

Outcomes team 1 - Urban Pioneers Zeeburgereiland
Longer presentation 16 Feb (pdf 5.2 MB)
Shorter presentation 17 Feb (pdf 3.9 MB)

Outcomes team 2 - Haagse Havens
Longer presentation 16 Feb (pdf 7.3 MB)
Shorter presentation 17 Feb (prezi screenshot)

Outcomes team 3 - Strijp-S Eindhoven
Longer presentation 16 Feb (pdf 4 MB)

Outcomes team 4 - Amsterdam Civic Innovator Network
Longer presentation 16 Feb (pdf 3.9 MB)

Note: all material is published under the following Creative Commons license:

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).
In human terms this means you are free to use these works as long as you 1. give credit to the makers, 2. do not use the works for commercial ends, and 3. share your work under the same or similar license.

Nanna Verhoeff (2012) Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

More information >>
Download pdf >>

Imar de Vries (2012) Tantalisingly Close: An Archaeology of Communication Desires in Discourses of Mobile Wireless Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

More information >>
Download pdf >> 

Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist. She is also the director of the Environmental Health Clinic at NYU, a space where environmental issues are approached as health concerns. In her clinic the (im)patients leave the consultation not with a series of pharmaceuticals but instead with a prescription for actions that could have an impact on their surroundings.

Jeremijenko surprised the audience at the Social Cities of Tomorrow with some examples of her experimental practice. For instance, when a study showed that in Canada the majority of traffic accidents involved pedestrians, Natalie Jeremijenko invited us to move away from the ground and to imagine a city where flying could be an alternative (and safer) mean of urban transportation. For this event she created (in collaboration with Usman Haque) a series of temporary fly-lines that enabled citizens to fly across the Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto and experience their city from the unexplored dimension of height. In another occasion when citizens of New York were unsure of the existence of living fish in the East River, Jeremijenko gave the fish a chance to make themselves visible. Together with her team she started Amphibious Architecture, a digital-meets-nature project which consisted of the installation of led sensors (half way under, half way above water) that lit up with the movement created by the fish swimming trough them. The sensors also monitored water quality and on request “texted” information about the river. The led sparkled constantly, giving the fish a visible form above water and citizens a way to acknowledge their presence. However, Jeremijenko was after an even more straightforward relationship between the fish and humans: she works on encouraging citizens to feed the fish with food that is adequate for them and that would make their lives better—opposing a more traditional “don’t intervene” environmental approach in favor of an action-oriented relationship.

Finally, in Natalie Jeremijenko’s words, experimenting will help change the scope of what is possible and of what can be expected. Blurring the boundaries of imagination, science, art and urban planning seems to be Jeremijenko’s  inspiring answer to the social cities of tomorrow.

As part of this collective reflexion on how to make our cities more social, Premsela, the Netherlands Institute for Design and Fashion, held a very interesting debate on designing trust last Wednesday evening. All of this served with pizza and beers!

Premsela launched the research project Trust Design to explore the relationship between design and trust. Since 2001, Trust Design worked with Volume magazine on four supplement issues. Already three discussions were held at the Designhuis in Eindhoven (Design Breakfasts Premsela) and the fourth one took place last Wednesday at the ARCAM.

-Crisis of confidence: public vs private

During this night, Premsela’s Tim Vermeulen first introduced the researcher and project manager of Premsela’s Trust Design project Scott Burnham who gave us a detailed explanation of the crisis of confidence we all experience since the financial crisis hit in 2009. Burnham argued that during these past decades we have seen a shift from public associations to the private sector with the consequences of a loss of trust. The Sociologist Robert Putnam also investigated this historical change in his study Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, 2000. Here, Putnam surveys the decline of participation among Americans in amateur group sport such as bowling that marks therefore a decline of social capital (social relations).

-Re-allocating trust: sharing economy

As trust in society radically decreased we have nonetheless employed other tactics to build a brand new model in using new technologies. This is what we have seen recently with the rise of sharing services. Burnham states that we might have lost trust in public and private institutions however we found a way to design new trust systems in a sharing economy. A distributed system or collaborative consumption gives the feeling of being part of something.

Websites such as Amazon.com, eBay or Airbnb using peer-to-peer ratings offer more commons-based values where technologies play an important role of efficiency. This is what Mywheels is also doing. Henry Mentik, co-founder of this car sharing service, took also part of the debate last Wednesday to explain how this system helps to break barriers in the normal way of thinking. Sharing economy represents a new business and marketing for the future. This phenomenon of reuse everything was also discussed by the landscape architect Ronald Rietvelt who brought the issue of vacant buildings in The Netherlands. There is a need to colonize the public space and to impulse creative knowledge economy, says Rietvelt.

-New media and urban issues

Michiel de Lange, co-founder of the Mobile City and new media lecturer at Utrecht University reminded us that all of this could not have been achieved without the new media technologies, which allow rapid feedback. Even if the Internet fosters “network individualism”, concept coined by the Sociologist Barry Wellman, there are still many collective projects out there, says de Lange. New technologies enable us to act collectively in the urban sphere. A characteristic that was the core of the event Social Cities of Tomorrow last week!

After three long days of workshops, on Friday it was finally time for the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference event. Usman Haque was one of the day’s keynote speakers. He is perhaps best known as the founder of Pachube, an online hub for open and distributed data collection for the Internet of Things. Thousands of sensors are hooked up to this network and data pours in from all corners of the world. Of course, collecting data is nice and all, but where it gets interesting is when you start thinking about what you can do with this data. Even more so, things get really interesting when you start thinking about how this information can inspire other people. For Haque, this is what Pachube is all about.

Haque went on to explain by referring back to the early days of the Web. Back then the Web already consisted of many, many pages, but it was difficult to navigate. Most people simply did not know what was out there, nor was there an easy way to discover new things. This changed when Yahoo! started cataloging the Web and created a directory for people to browse. Suddenly, the Web became far more accessible. This enabled people to discover new things and, as Haque was keen to emphasize, each new discovery can lead people to new creative ideas. Inspiration through exposure, so to speak.

Pachube was launched with the same idea in mind. With commercially available sensor technology becoming cheaper and open source hardware platforms like Arduino reaching maturity, it’s become easier than ever to collect and share large quantities of data. What Yahoo! did for the Web, Pachube hopes to do for the world on a much larger scale. By gathering data, Haque hopes it will inspire people to be more active and creative by giving insight into things that were hitherto inaccessible or simply unknown.

One recent example, mentioned by Haque, was the grid of Geiger counters that now exists in the Fukushima area surrounding the shutdown power station. As with many things, this grid started small. At first there was only one Geiger counter, but it wasn’t even close to Fukushima. It might have been a sensor somewhere in a Kyoto science lab set up to measure background radiation. It’s particular reason for being active isn’t that important, however. What is, is that this single sensor inspired people to set up a whole grid of Geiger counters close to Fukushima so that the everyone could have access to real-time data about the radiation levels in the area without having to rely on government reports or newscasts.

One more example I’d like to single out is Haque’s project to measure the air quality in Barcelona. Generally, Haque explained, air quality sensors are placed out of reach of citizens, on top off buildings or up high against walls. Of course, people don’t live, walk and breath on top off buildings, they do so on the street level. Haque’s solution to this mismatch was to send a team of students out into into the streets of Barcelona and have them wipe down street level surfaces with paper napkins. This, of course, is a very low-tech yet intuitive way to measure air born particulate in the area. It is perhaps not the most accurate nor rigorous scientific method to use, but that is not its primary concern. The strengths of this methodology are twofold. First, it actively involves people in the act of measuring. Having to pay close attention to the grime and particulate on the streets makes one far more likely to start caring and to actively support a more environmentally sound way of life. Second, many passers-by on the street were intrigued by what the students were doing. Admittedly, the fact that they were wearing mouth masks made them stand out rather easily, but the important thing is that people were interrupted in their routines and stopped to think about the pollution in their city.

This is what Haque’s work is really about. He likes to trigger people. It might take a worldwide network of sensors or it might just take a paper napkin, the key idea behind all of his work is to get people to engage with their surroundings, to be active, to be critical. This is exactly the overall point that Social Cities of Tomorrow is trying to make. It’s about the people, not the technology.

International conference & workshop in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (14-17 February 2012)

Our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies, from smart cards and intelligent GPS systems to social media and smartphones. How can we use digital media technologies to make our cities more social, rather than just more hi-tech?

This was the lead question for the international conference and workshop Social Cities of Tomorrow, organised by The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform with the support of ARCAM. The event took place in February 2012 at several locations in Amsterdam and brought together key thinkers and doers working in the fields of new media and urbanism.

See the background-section for our in-depth take on the theme of ‘social cities’. There you will also find our publication Ownership in the Hybrid City, in which we propose the design approach for urban media that has inspired us to organize this event.

Conference (17 February 2012)

The conference featured keynote speakers  Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko and Dan Hill who spoke for a sold-out house about the promises and challenges in the newly emerging and highly interdisciplinary field of new media and urban design. The keynotes were accompanied by presentations of ‘showcases‘ from various disciplines, such as architecture, art, design, and policy.

Workshop (14 − 16 February 2012)

A preconference workshop was held at ARCAM, Amsterdam for a select, interdisciplinary group of designers, programmers and digital creatives. The aim of this experimental workshop was to bring together local stakeholder organisations, and participants from various professional and national backgrounds to collaborate in real-world social design challenges.

As part of the workshop, Premsela organized a public discussion on the design of Trust.

The outcomes of the workshop were presented on an sold out event at  Mediamatic.  See theWorkshop Reports for an overview of the workshop and projects presented.

Video’s, Reports & Press Coverage

Video’s of the presentations will be made available soon. Read the reports of the workshop outcomes, and check out what the bloggers and press have made of our events.

by NATALIA SANCHEZ

On Thursday night the four groups presented their results and prototypes that they had been respectively working on during the workshops. The event, which took place at Mediamatic, was completely sold out.

“When you do an image search for the query smart city”– Martijn from the Mobile City began explaining to the audience—“mostly the results you get are pictures of buildings, cars and technology. People are nowhere to be seen. Not a single image”. This type of imagined city is precisely the opposite of what a social city embraces: the idea of city as a self-regulated technological space is put aside in favor of a urban space that is sustained by human connections (and technology as a facilitator for such connections). As a result, the night began with strong words such as “compromise”, “engagement” and “ownership”: a city where citizens communicate with each other and with their government in a two-way, ideally transparent process. As the night unfolds it becomes clearer that a social city is as strong as the relationships that take place in it.

The dynamics of the round of presentations reflected (not only from a content perspective but also in a performative manner) just how important and complex the ideals of communication and the socialization of ideas are. Ultimately, each group had a short amount of time to explain their project to the audience and to the corresponding stakeholder. This was followed by a response from the stakeholder stating his/her thoughts regarding the solutions proposed by the group and possibly a potential compromise to include in their agendas. Each project underwent the same process as the audience listened carefully and asked (if the time allowed it) a few questions. This was done with each “party” physically facing each other in a direct, face-to-face dialogue. In a week where statements such as “citizens need to communicate with their representative”, “citizens should have the means to affect their surroundings” and “collective participation” were common, the former exercise results were even more interesting.

Little moments during the presentations brought a nervous laughter to all members present at the venue. For example, one the workshop presenters said (if I can remember the words correctly) that a specific crowd-sourced city project didn’t quite deliver what it promised and used that as example of why her project was taking a different approach. Only it just so happened that one of the persons in charge of the crowd sources platform in questions was sitting the first row. When this became known (I believe by the intervention of one the hosts) the presenter apologized, the audience laughed, the city hall representative gracefully smiled and the presentation went on – talking to City Hall in its most literal sense!  Another example. Group one presented a plan that consisted on the short-term leasing of empty property in Amsterdam:  a way to allow everyone to own (and develop) a piece of the city for the period of a year. Some of the comments from the audience were focused on “how will you get people to leave a space where they have invested so much during a year” or  “they tried that somewhere else but money became a problem between people”. The laughter of the audience was now more of a nervous tittering. The project was seen as a solid plan; however, the citizen’s ability to make it happened was put in doubt.

These small but meaningful moments during the presentations help understand that a social city will need to depend everyday more on solid traits of human character. A social city is definitely a positive way to head for, but nonetheless a way that still holds significant challenges for us in becoming (perhaps in a symbiotic process with our cities) more sociable citizens: a social city is as strong as the relationships that take place in it.