"The Web and Beyond: Mobility (1) - Adam Greenfield" - The Mobile City » Blog ... - The Diigo Meta page

• 26 May 08
  

  Yule Heibel

  Michiel de Lange reports on the CHI conference "The Web and Beyond: Mobility" in Amsterdam on 5/22/08, featuring Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia). In this post, he focuses on Greenfield's presentation. A key aspect that struck me was this observation by Greenfield: that ubicom / ubiquitous computing creates a new level of "ambient informatics," and "information processing dissolves into behavior." Greenfield's example is the seemingly choreographed swish of a public transit user who swings her purse in front of the transit card reader, never skipping a beat, but shaped indelibly by the technology into certain movements.

  adam_greenfield mobile_city ubiquitous ubicom technology

  • Networked processors are already showing up in new places, on the level of bodies and on the level of the streets. These become social objects. They help create an “ambient informatics”: delivering information locally upon which you can act. This really becomes ambient when information processing dissolves into behavior. Greenfield gives an example of a woman he saw using her transit card in public transport by swinging her handbag in full speed in front of the reader, almost becoming a choreography.
  • Architecture and building is becoming increasingly shaped by computation. It changes the city-scape. It changes mobility too. Objects become accessible, scriptable, queryable, and connected. All this changes the way we use cities from browsing to searching. We can now directly look for something and this search can be customized by recombining elements.

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      Yule Heibel on 2008-05-26

      - seems to me that G. leaves out one significant factor: when I look around, I don't see architecture & building "increasingly shaped by computation," I see people who use tools (including mobile phones) who are the ones shaping the city. If anything, the buildings & architecture themselves lag behind user preferences, although it is for sure a two-way street.
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  • • Greenfield ends with some “proposals for the real time city” that urban/media designers should leep in mind:

      
      

      1. Create beautiful seams: read/write access to city

      
      

      2. Underspecify: do not too much closure to space.

      
      

      3. Understand changing city life: from flaneur to consumer to user.

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Yule Heibel on 2008-05-26
  - seems to me that G. leaves out one significant factor: when I look around, I don't see architecture & building "increasingly shaped by computation," I see people who use tools (including mobile phones) who are the ones shaping the city. If anything, the buildings & architecture themselves lag behind user preferences, although it is for sure a two-way street.

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