Digital urbanisms: being urban is being online

Pasta&Vinegar » Representing the city as it’s lived: livelihoods

Sat, 05 May 2012 15:02:15 -0400

Pasta&Vinegar » Representing the city as it’s lived: livelihoods:

reblogged from Nicolas Nova’s Pasta & Vinegar:

It’s been few days that I’m following the the livehoods.org/ and it’s quite interesting.

The project is defined as follows:

“Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people’s checkin patterns at places across the city, we create a mapping of the different dynamic areas that comprise it. Each Livehood tells a different story of the people and places that shape it.
(…)
The hypothesis underlying our work is that the character of an urban area is defined not just by the the types of places found there, but also by the people who make the area part of their daily routine. To explore this hypothesis, given data from over 18 million foursquarecheck-ins, we introduce a model that groups nearby venues into areas based on patterns in the set of people who check-in to them. By examining patterns in these check-ins, we can learn about the different areas that comprise the city, allowing us to study the social dynamics, structure, and character of cities on a large scale.“

Why do I blog this? Working on a similar topic, I quite enjoy this kind of research work. The idea that social media data can be employed to understand areas as lived by people is fascinating and highly intriguing to test. It’s somehow what one can call a “social map” and we now have more and more data to see how it would look like.

Quadrigram: a new tool that brings data alive For anyone working...

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:21:00 -0400

Quadrigram: a new tool that brings data alive

For anyone working with data, cities, or people - which I assume is almost everyone who reads Digital Urbanisms, here’s a preview of Quadrigram, a new software that will become super important. Quadrigran us “a solution for any individual or organization that works intensively with information. It provides tools to formulate and answer questions with a wide variety of datasets and visual means.”

Excerpt from the vide:

“…you’ve got tools to gather data, and tools to write about it, and now Quadrigram brings you the tools to treat it like a living material... The world doesn’t need more data, it needs better ideas of what it all means.”

I like that Quadrigram allows the user to flexibly manipulate multiple data sets and output visualization. I can’t wait to work on a project where we get to use Quadrigram! Quadragram is in beta, but it looks like you can sign up to try it out in their site!

I first learned of Quadrigram from Fabien Girardin’s talk at the O’Reilly Strata Conference, which I highly suggest everyone to read!

And can we all just appreciate the wonderful job that Bravo Buro did on the video?

Fabien Girardin on "Sketching with Data"

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:00:17 -0400

Fabien Girardin’s presentation on data sketching from his talk at O’Reilly Strata Conference is now online! I really love this talk because it walks us through how “sketching” as a method reveals:

the different ways stakeholders approach a set of data from their own fields
how sketching can help stakeholders of varying backgrounds better understand the diversity of approaches to a set of data

His talk underscores that data is not neutral; it can be interpreted in multiple ways depending on the viewer.

You can download the entire PDF to his talk here.

Sketching With Data

Since the early days of the data deluge, Lift Lab has been helping many actors of the ‘smart city’ in transforming the accumulation of network data (e.g. cellular network activity, aggregated credit card transactions, real-time traffic information, user-generated content) into products or services. Due to their innovative and transversal incline, our projects generally involve a wide variety of professionals from physicist and engineers to lawyers, decision makers and strategists.

Our innovation methods embark these different stakeholders with fast prototyped tools that promote the processing, recompilation, interpretation, and reinterpretation of insights. For instance, our experience shows that the multiple perspectives extracted from the use of exploratory data visualizations is crucial to quickly answer some basic questions and provoke many better ones. Moreover, the ability to quickly sketch an interactive system or dashboard is a way to develop a common language amongst varied and different stakeholders. It allows them to focus on tangible opportunities of product or service that are hidden within their data. In this form of rapid visual business intelligence, an analysis and its visualization are not the results, but rather the supporting elements of a co-creation process to extract value from data.

We will exemplify our methods with tools that help engage a wide spectrum of professionals to the innovation path in data science. These tools are based on a flexible data platform and visual programming environment that permit to go beyond the limited design possibilities industry standards. Additionally they reduce the prototyping time necessary to sketch interactive visualizations that allow the different stakeholder of an organization to take an active part in the design of services or products.

A bit about Fabien:

Fabien Girardin (PhD) is the co-founder of Lift Lab, a research agency that helps companies and institutions understand, foresee and prepare for changes triggered by technological and social evolutions. He is particularly active in the domains of user experience, data science and urban informatics. His research mixes qualitative observations with quantitative data analysis to gain insights from the integration and appropriation of technologies in urban environments. Subsequently, he exploits the gained knowledge with engineering techniques to prototype and evaluate concepts and solutions for mobile network operators, urban and location-based services providers, city planners and decision makers.

Check out Fabien’s wonderful blog,7.5th Floor, that covers everything from cities to research methods,

futurejournalismproject: Country Codes of the World Via...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:53:07 -0500

futurejournalismproject:

Country Codes of the World

Via ByteLevel.

Alan Wiig's blog: everyday structures, a study of hertzian space in urban landscape

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:16:33 -0500

When I saw this recommendation for Alan Wiig’s blog, everyday structures, I became very excited. Another great blog to add to the Digital Urbanism reading list! Alan Wiig captures a lot of what I talk about in the concept of Digital Urbanism, but from a totally different and exciting perspective. I love the words he uses - feels very de Landa-ish.

Thanks kenyatta cheese for the post!

from mammoth:

Recommended reading: Alan Wiig’s “everyday structures”, a blog “explor[ing] the place of infrastructure in the urban landscape”, with a particular focus on “Hertzian space” and digital communications infrastructure. Wiig is studying geography at Temple University, so his blog most typically deals with landscapes in Philadelphia or its surrounds. Like many of mammoth‘s favorite things at the moment, “everyday structures” deals with the quotidian material conditions of landscape, posting both readings from Sanford Kwinter or Henri Lefebvre and snapshots ofPelton wheels or a homeless camp juxtaposed with broadband lines. In a recent conversation with a couple other landscape architects, I noted that I think geographers are, in many ways, doing a better job of conceptualizing landscape than landscape architects, particularly with relation to infrastructural conditions in the networked city — Wiig’s blog is an excellent example of that.[Image at top is from the post “fiber along the road” on “everyday structures”.

Wiig captions — and I quote the full caption because it is the combination of image and caption that makes the typical snapshot on “everyday structures” fascinating —

“Automobiles turning, the fiber optic cable runs parallel to the road. Marlton Pike West, in the Garden State. That little white and orange marker in front of the “SO Cornell Ave —>” and “ALL TURNS —>” signs indicates the Internet and other forms of digital communication are flowing alongside the automotive and pedestrian traffic on this route.”

CITY BREATHS: Definition of a City #2

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 12:33:43 -0500

CITY BREATHS: Definition of a City #2:

citybreaths:

Ghangzhou - Small Alleys Near Shamian Island ©Beschty

“A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the…

alexainslie: new-aesthetic: “How do robots see the world? How...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 11:38:54 -0500

alexainslie:

new-aesthetic: “How do robots see the world? How do they gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? This is an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye.” Timo is the New Aesthetic.

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