Digital urbanisms: being urban is being online

When I look at Eric Fisher’s twitter visualization,...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:31:08 -0500

When I look at Eric Fisher’s twitter visualization, I’m thinking of the article Kenyatta forwarded on about random quantum walks at sub-atomic speeds in photosynthesis, olfactory processing, and human information processing:

“Art map master Eric Fischer is back to make cartographic sense of all that location data you’re giving away for free on Twitter. This is New York, with New Yorkers’ trips routed and their geotag density mapped out in “10000 points, 30000 vectors.”” From Animal New York

fred-wilson:

this is amazing.

nevver:

Twitter Traffic

Visualizing the Costs of Incarceration in the US

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:44:32 -0500

“It cost 17 million dollars to imprison 109 People from these 17 blocks in 2003. We call these million dollar blocks. On a financial scale prisons are becoming the predominant governing institution in the neighborhood.”

Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams in Metropolis, Jan. 2012

From Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab: Million Dollar Blocks

“The United States currently has more than 2 million people locked up in jails and prisons. A disproportionate number of them come from a very few neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. In many places the concentration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of single city blocks. When these people are released and reenter their communities, roughly forty percent do not stay more than three years before they are reincarcerated.

Using rarely accessible data from the criminal justice system, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center have created maps of these “million dollar blocks” and of the city-prison-city-prison migration flow for five of the nation’s cities. The maps suggest that the criminal justice system has become the predominant government institution in these communities and that public investment in this system has resulted in significant costs to other elements of our civic infrastructure — education, housing, health, and family. Prisons and jails form the distant exostructure of many American cities today.

The project continues to present ongoing work on criminal justice statistics to make visible the geography of incarceration and return in New York, Phoenix, New Orleans, and Wichita, prompting new ways of understanding the spatial dimension of an area of public policy with profound implications for American cities.

Million Dollar Blocks is the first of a series of projects to be undertaken by SIDL, as part of a two year research and development project on Graphical Innovation in Justice Mapping. The project, generously supported by the JEHT Foundation and by the Open Society Institute activates a partnership between the Justice Mapping Center (JMC), the JFA Institute (JFA), and the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (GSAPP).

This unique partnership enables the Justice Mapping Center to refine analytical and graphical techniques within the research and teaching environment of the Spatial Information Design Lab, which can then be applied to real life policy initiatives through work with the JFA Institute. Reciprocally, input from state and local leaders is then brought back to the Design Lab for further development. This feedback loop is a valuable tool resulting in new methods of spatial analyses and ways of visually presenting them that reveal previously unseen dimensions of criminal justice and related government policies in states across the United States.

The results of this collaboration have transformed the project into multiple formats and forums for exhibition.

A Review of several theoretical bases for Smart Cities

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:53:58 -0500

reblogggged from Nicolas Nova, Pasta & Vinegar: Theoretical bases for Smart Cities:

A theory of smart cities” by Colin Harrison and Ian Abbott Donnelly offers an overview of the different theoretical bases for the “Smart Cities” trope. As the author mentions, “the current ad hoc approaches of Smart Cities to the improvement of cities are reminiscent of pre-scientific medicine. They may do good, but we have little detailed understanding of why“.

After a quick introduction in which they describe what is hidden behind this term (use of digital sensors, penetration of networks that allow such sensors and systems to be connected, computing power and new algorithms that allow these flows of information to be analyzed in near “real-time”), they highlight two theoretical approaches:

“One of these is work in scaling laws going back to Zipf, but enormously enriched in recent years by theoreticians such as West and Batty to name but two. (…) This body of work provides evidence that although many behaviours of complex systems are emergent or adaptive, nonetheless there are patterns or consistent behaviour at the level of macro observation.
(…)
The second body of work considers cities as complex systems. (…) This approach introduces concepts such as interconnection, feedback, adaptation, and self-organization in order to provide understanding of the almost organic growth, operation, decline, and evolution of cities.“

Why do I blog this? I’m preparing a speech that I’ll deliver at the “Beyond Smart Cities” event in Madrid next week at the BBVA innovation center. My aim is to give a critique of the prediction trope in Smart Cities projects. The aforementioned article offer a relevant starting point for this top happen, even though their perspective is quite partial in terms of academic references. The paper is also interesting to understand the kind of assumptions IBM make when addressing these issues (as attested by the partial list of references).

humanscalecities: Wow! How many times I needed one of...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:06:10 -0500

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...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:02:21 -0500

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 CitizenUrban...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:55:16 -0500

humanscalecities:

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

Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:32:59 -0500

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..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:31:53 -0500

“

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..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:28:31 -0500

“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

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:53:56 -0500

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..."

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:05 -0500

“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 BATTLEFIELDMore and...

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 00:14:05 -0400

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...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:31:05 -0400

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

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

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:07:06 -0400

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

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:41:37 -0400

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

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:54:23 -0400

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

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:06 -0400

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..."

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:49:03 -0400

“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...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:00:06 -0400

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..."

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:40:26 -0400

“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”