Modern & Im/material things: Crowdsourced Data and Impact Findings: Haiti

(bold text below is my emphasis - tricia)

modernandmaterialthings:

Christina Corbane and her team at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC) have come up with some interesting findings that prove otherwise. They used the reports mapped on the Ushahidi-Haiti platform to show that this crowdsourced data can help predict the spatial distribution of structural damage in Port-au-Prince.

Via OWNI

For the data geeks, this is pretty neat. As these research techniques develop, I think they’ll be used by across domestic and international emergency and public health groups. For those of us in social media marketing and advertising, this may create new opportunities to geotarget ads or create new hybrid digital or marketing strategies by location. But mostly, the data geek in me wants to rock out.

Can Architecture Affect User Behavior? Dan Lockton's Design with Intent Toolkit

Dear reader, this entire blogpost from Dan Lockton’s research on how architecture influences people’s behavior is a must read. I want to post an excerpt from it - but i’m having a hard time even choosing which part!

The last work I have read that has made me this excited about architecture and social interaction is sociologist, William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, where he explains how people make use of plazas in NYC.

Every section is full of gems. I esp love the discussion of Flusty’s  (1997, p. 48) “five species” of interdictory, stealthy, slipper, prickly, and jittery spaces. And so cool to learn about Don Normans and Chris Myhill’s work on “desire paths”

So I’m going to highlight Lockton’s  “implications for Designers” section with the caveat that you are missing the richness and depth of these implications if you don’t click through and read it the entire post! Though be warned, the literature review is quite thorough and will send you on many internet wormholes - be ready to browse! And there’s an awesome works cited list at the end.

Implications for designers

▶ Designed environments influence people’s behaviour in a variety of ways, and some have been designed expressly with this intention, often for political or crime prevention reasons

▶ This can range from high-level visions of influencing wider social or community behaviours, to very specific techniques applied to influence particular behaviours in a particular context; the use of patterns facilitates re-use of techniques wherever a similar problem recurs

▶ Most patterns involve either the physical arrangement of building elements—positioning, angling, splitting up, hiding, etc—or a change in material properties, either to change people’s perceptions of what behaviour is possible or appropriate, perhaps by reinforcing or embodying social norms, or to force certain behaviour to occur or not occur

▶ There are also patterns around aspects of surveillance—designing layouts which facilitate or prevent visibility of activity between groups of people

▶ In practice, patterns may be applied in combination to create different kinds of space with different effects on behaviour

▶ There is potential for ‘paving the cowpaths’ strategically through design, identifying the paths of particular users—perhaps a group which is already performing the desired behaviour—and then, by formalising this, making it easier or more salient or in some way obviously normative, encourage other users to follow suit

▶ By affecting so completely the way in which people spend their lives, political or police attempts to control behaviour through the design of environments can be controversial

▶ Some concepts related to influencing behaviour in the built environment may be transposed to other designed systems and contexts

Thank you to Mark Vanderbeeken for tweeting & blogging about this!

culturalbytes:

Dan Lockton’s blog post announcing his PhD, ‘Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change,” is super inspiring.

My PhD involves developing a ‘design pattern’ toolkit, called Design with Intent, to help designers create products,…

How to influence user behaviour through Architecture: Design with Intent

How to influence user behaviour: Design with Intent (Design for Persuasion, Brussels) View more presentations from Dan Lockton

The tunnel people of Las Vegas: How 1,000 live in flooded labyrinth under Sin City's shimmering strip

modernandmaterialthings:

It seems easy to read this article and feel pity for the article’s subjects: living in underground tunnels is hardly a charmed existence. Conversely, it seems a bit naive to suggest that these people have truly made the choice to live the way they do, or that they should be romanticized for living an unconventional life. 

While reading the article, I was reminded of Michel De Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and the chapter about walking through cities. Certau’s book makes a distinction between strategies and tactics, noting that everyday life requires us to use and negotiate the two. Strategies belong to institutions, governments and other bodies that create, in short, the rules of the game. Tactics belong to the individual; they are the means by which we find and exercise our personal power while “playing the game.”

Certau’s point about walking through cities is that although the planners designed them with certain efficiencies or routes in mind, individuals navigate them differently and in ways that are outside the intended design of the city. Whatever their intended purpose was, these people are certainly navigating and using the tunnels in unconventional ways. Tactics in tunnels…

"When you build things for people to live and work and play around, people are the context. And if you don’t do context, your innovations will never be more than formal, aesthetic, theoretical. You may make it onto the postcards, but you won’t live on in people’s memories. No matter how impressive your form, no one will want to linger in such an ugly place. And places, not buildings, are what cities are made of."

What makes a building ugly? The failure to become a place | MNN - Mother Nature Network

What a beautiful metaphor — Robert Moses= facebook,  Jane Jacobs = BBS! The urban theorist geek in me is so happy to read this. And the Jane Jacobs in me is happy with this comparison.

I think the equivalent in China would be:

Robert Moses = RenRen

Jane Jacobs = QQ, Weibo, Douban, Online Games

hautepop:

“If urban history can be applied to virtual space and the evolution of the Web, the unruly and twisted message boards are Jane Jacobs. They were built for people, and without much regard to profit. How else do you get crowds of not especially lucrative demographics like flashlight buffs (candlepowerforums.com), feminists (bust.com) and jazz aficionados (forums.allaboutjazz.com)? By contrast, the Web 2.0 juggernauts like Facebook and YouTube are driven by metrics and supported by ads and data mining. They’re networks, and super-fast — but not communities, which are inefficient, emotive and comfortable. Facebook — with its clean lines and social expressways — is Robert Moses par excellence.”

Best internet metaphor ever

The Old Internet Neighborhoods by Virginia Heffernan, Sunday 10th July, NYTimes.

"If you’ll forgive a momentary lapse into jargon, ultimately our project at Urbanscale is to alter the subjectivity of contemporary citizenship. We want to use networks and sensing and computation and visualization to help people understand the power they already have over the circumstances of their lives, and to enhance that power. That’s at pretty significant variance from the model of “the smart city” inscribed in, say, Cisco’s promotional material — which treats these technologies as tools for city managers, and ordinary people as, at best, individual data points — and has a lot more to do with what you’re up to at Pachube."

Pachube :: blog: YOU are the “Smart City”

hautepop:

mierenneuken:

landoascadd:

The City was an Endless Building.

In Çatal Höyük, there used to be no streets or pathways. Instead, façade walls touched each other without any gap in-between. With a single opening on the roof, each dwelling’s chimney functioned as lighting window as well as entrance door.

Discovered in Turkish Anatolia close to the Syrian border ca. 6,000 BC, it is one of the best-preserved Neolithic settlements. Contiguous constructions made people use rooftops as a very lively public space. The city was an endless building. Dwellers should climb up a timber ladder to get onto the roofs topography; walk along and above their neighbours’ homes, until they found the hole from where to climb down through another ladder into their own.

Every mud brick dwelling provided a piece of public space for people to meet or simply pass by, safe from wild animals. Çatal Höyük was also a sort of fortress or vantage point to watch the surrounding territory. These man-made vertical caves provided optimal environmental conditions throughout the year. Ecology already started with the up to 18 layers of recycled rubble from previously collapsed buildings that configured the foundations of every new house. In addition, there was an open site for collective waste dumping.

Absolutely incredible. But are there more contemporary topographies of this contiguous, streetless type?

* Kowloon Walled City?

* the Paris catacombs?

* Eyal Weizman on the Israeli Defence Force Walking Through Walls in Nablus, 2002 - “During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure.”

“La planificación urbana es politica, tiene que haber alternativas.” 

Me da mucho inspiracion ver esta presentacion de Onesimo Flores de CiudadPosible. Me gusta su energia y sus ideas. El futuro de ciudades en Mexico necesita lideres como el. - tricia

Pase Usted: Onésimo Flores (by elpaseusted)

"(West considers urban theory to be a field without principles, comparing it to physics before Kepler pioneered the laws of planetary motion in the 17th century.)"

A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com

Jonah Lehrer says that West compares urban theory to pre-Kepler period in astronomical sciences. I love that West totally disses urban theory.  - tricia