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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.

Tags: adam_greenfield, mobile_city, ubiquitous, ubicom, technology on 2008-05-26 -All Annotations (2) -About

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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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- - 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.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-26
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.
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.

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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.

Tags: ubicom, ubiquitous, cities, technology on 2008-05-15 -All Annotations (0) -About

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