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The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future - Future metro - io9
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Adam Greenfield, a design director at Nokia, wrote one of the defining texts on the design and use of ubiquitous computing or 'ubicomp' called "Everyware" and is about to release a follow-up on urban environments and technology called "The city is here for you to use". In a recent talk he framed a number of ways in which the access to data about your surroundings that Hill describes will change our attitude towards the city. He posits that we will move from a city we browser and wander to a 'searchable, query-able' city that we can not only read, but write-to as a medium.
He states:
The bottom-line is a city that responds to the behaviour of its users in something close to real-time, and in turn begins to shape that behaviour.
Again, we're not so far away from what Archigram were examining in the 60's. Behaviour and information as the raw material to design cities with as much as steel, glass and concrete.
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The city of the future increases its role as an actor in our lives, affecting our lives. This of course, is a recurrent theme in science-fiction and fantasy.
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Back in our world, the exaggerated mega-city is going through a bit of bad patch. The bling'd up ultraskyscraping and bespoke island-terraforming of Dubai is on hold until capitalism reboots, and changes in political fortune have nixed the futuristic, ubicomp'd-up Arup-designed ecotopia of Dongtan in China.
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"The Web and Beyond: Mobility (1) - Adam Greenfield" - The Mobile City » Blog Archive »
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.
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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.
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Add Sticky NoteArchitecture 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.
- - 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. - on 2008-05-26
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"Gandhi on Ubicomp," by Nat Torkington - O'Reilly Radar
In one paragraph, Tarkington uses Austin Williams's critique of "technology-driven products" that don't solve "more urgent urban problems ...such as the loss of social connections between city dwellers" as an example of criticism missing the point (or perhaps putting the cart in front of the horse?). Can't say I disagree, although Williams (who is technical editor of the Architects' Journal and director of a forum called Future Cities that "critically explores city issues") has a point if he is in part reacting to the hype that usually accompanies new technologies.
Torkington's riposte, on the other hand, is really worth noting: "I think Williams is wrong because he fails to allow for the rate that technology matures." But then of course, some of the people who hype the technology also focus way too much on its present state and don't take its rate of development (change) into account. This is why Torkington focuses on what he calls "the explorers," who one hopes are hype-resistant.
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For as long as I've known the term, ubiquitous computing has been largely ignored, written off as a scifi pipedream from the people who promised you AI and cars that would run on water. That's beginning to change, as hardware such as the Arduino and programmable mobile phone handsets enabling artists, researchers, and makers like Eric Paulos, Elizabeth Goodman, and Julian Bleecker to join the digital and physical worlds in new and interesting ways.
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The explorers I named would be the first to tell you they're not buliding products, things for wide deployment that are meant to be consumer-ready, shelf-demonstrable, and poised for their 30s spot after Leno's monologue.
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eGoodman
This is the portal page of Elizabeth Goodman, one of the "explorers" mentioned by Nat Torkington in his O'Reilly Radar article, "Ghandi on Ubicomp."
A League Book: Urban Computing and Its Discontents (pdf)
"The Situated Technologies Pamphlet series 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? Situated Technologies Pamphlets will be published in nine issues and will be edited by a rotating list of leading researchers and practitioners from architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media study, performance studies, and engineering."
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