humanscalecities:

Wow! How many times I needed one of this!

engenderandendear:

yokefellow:

All the tools are still there! Full marks for Brisbane!

Yay, Brisbane! 

designalenz:

Check out BBC’s series “How Big Really” to compare magnitudes to your own familiar places, e.g. the size of Rome under Augustus vs. your hometown!

humanscalecities:

From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen
Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement

(Source: urbaninformatics.net)

Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments

hautepop:

“Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders—every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.

Plummeting digital storage costs will soon make it possible for authoritarian regimes to not only monitor known dissidents, but to also store the complete set of digital data associated with everyone within their borders. These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine, enabling state security services to retroactively eavesdrop on people in the months and years before they were designated as surveillance targets. This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution.

"

The problem of course is that the “power” of big data to help answer challenging questions relies upon the quality of that underlying data. And by “quality,” I don’t simply mean whether the data is accurate (which we will see is a fraught term in itself), but instead I am concerned with what sorts of assumptions are present in the collection of that data, what’s being left out, and how does the process of data collection influence the results?

What I am trying to demonstrate is that data, like science, is not as purely objective as we typically think it is. By assuming the objectivity of the underlying data, we set ourselves up to make large-scale decisions without properly challenging them because they are based on data, and that data “can’t be wrong”. The solution however is not to rid the data of all subjective intrusions because at a certain point this is not possible. What I am advocating is to approach big data with a healthy skepticism and an awareness of the ways in which it is lacking or only presenting a part of the picture.

"

Massive, crucial point, beautifully expressed - and by an undergrad no less (by name of Evan Freedman).

Comment on The Limits of Big Data by Klint Finley on RWW, June 2011

(via hautepop)

"You know what I’d really like to see interaction design wrestle with? I would love to see a rigorous, no-holds-barred examination of the complexities of the self and its performance in everyday life, and how these condition our use of public space (and personal media in public space). I would love to see the development of ostensibly “social” platforms informed by some kind of reckoning with issues like vulnerability, dishonesty, the fact of power dynamics. In other words, before we deign to go about “helping” people, wouldn’t it be lovely if we understood what they perceived themselves as needing help with, and why?"

Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield | UgoTrade

Adam, this is why interaction designers need to work with sociologists! All we sociologists do is examine the self in everyday life and people’s needs/wants. 

Adam Greenfield’s reflections on Everyware

I love Adam Greenfield’s reflections on his first book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Adam wrote Everyware in 2006, and this interview, Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield, with Tish Shute was conducted in 2009. 

“So, first, I think it’s important to cop to all the places in Everyware where I just outright got things wrong. There’s a passage in Thesis 50, for example, where I unaccountably mock the idea that “the mobile phone…will do splendidly as a mediating artifact for the delivery of [ubiquitous] services.” OK, this was admittedly written in a pre-iPhone world – and was correct for that world – but you can really see my parochialism showing here. It took the iPhone to make the proposition as blazingly self-evident to me in North America as it had been for quite some time to folks in Europe and Asia.

Having said that, though, I think I’m justified in taking a little pride in what the book got right. The broader trends the book set out to discuss – the colonization of everyday life by information processing – well, take a good look around you. And so one of the points of departure for the new book is taking everything posited in Everyware as a given: the urban environment, and most everything in it as well, has been provisioned with the kind of abilities you mention. So what now?

How do you go about designing informatic systems so they don’t undermine the wonderful things about cities? How do you design cities so they can incorporate networked informatics to greatest advantage? How, especially, do you accomplish these things when the disciplinary communities involved barely speak the same language? And how do you keep everyone’s eyes on the prize, which is the ordinary human being asked to make sense of these new propositions? These are the questions The City Is Here For You To Use sets out to address.”

picture credit: from Dan Lockton’s wonderful review of Everyware

"What happens in our cities, simply put, matters more than what happens anywhere else. Cities are the world’s experimental laboratories and thus a metaphor for an uncertain age. They are both the cancer and the foundation of our networked world, both virus and antibody."

From Beyond City Limits

Via Foreign Policy Magazine

(via modernandmaterialthings)

modernandmaterialthings:

“GENTRIFICATION BATTLEFIELD
More and more young people and businesses are settling in Amsterdam North. This animation shows a simulated isometric real-time-strategy game where the old and new inhabitants are fighting over possession of the land.”

Via PSFK

modernandmaterialthings:

Roads of an atlas like the lines in the interior of the human body. Cartography is a line straight to my heart. 

I’m in love with this piece by nmr13 on Etsy