Last week, I participated to a Design Hub Barcelona (DHUB) session on “New Landscapes – Architecture Beyond Leisure. In my talk “people + technology + space“, I briefly presented the works, in relation to tourism, developed at UPF and MIT and featured at the Tourism. Spaces of fiction exhibition (i.e. Los Ojos del Mundo, Real-time Rome and WikiCity Rome). This exhibition focuses on tourism from planning, projection and design angles. The presence of an engineer+researcher was rather at odds with a parterre of architects and practitioners of the physical space. I am glad the curators Mario Ballesteros and Irene Hwang took the risk of exposing my different perspective coming from the study of hybrid cities. It got me to further grasp the degree of misunderstandings and differences of practices within the multiple actors that now touch the design of the public space (be it physical, hybrid or digital). The presentation I have seen had a very elaborated discourse on shaping the space for tourists and urban dwellers, but I expressed my doubts on the capacity of the current practitioners to engage in a design process that actually focus on people (for the sake of doing things right and to learn, see The end of temelessness). In contrast, architect Julien de Smedt described the work I presented as merely useless. A judgment I certainly understand coming from a practice that barely integrates the tourist as a human and discards the hybrid as part of the space.

A mix of old bricks and fresh bits announcing the DHUB session.

Thanks to Carlos Ipser, Mario Ballesteros and Irene Hwang for the invitation!

Last week I participated to the workshop “La Ciudad Híbrida” organized in Sevilla by José Luis de Vicente. The first 2 days, we used different theoretical lenses and practical references to explore the many different aspects of the hybrid city. Juan Freire engaged us with proposals for a participatory urbanism with the design of open processes and bottom-up solutions (see De la ciudad híbrida al urbanismo P2P: democracia 2.0, gestión local participativa y crowdsourcing). José Luis de Vicente stepped back and led us through the history influenced by urban theorist, architects and artist that have paved the way to the hybrid city of the 21st century, the dynamic city (see Una historia de la ciudad de software: arquitecturas dinamicas y sistemas digitales urbanos). An argumentation completed by Juan Martín Prada who covered the rich field of location media with a philosophic spin (co-existance men-thinks, men-animals, men-deads, the urbanization of the real-time city (networked city) vs. desurbanization of the real-space; the “Here” being replaced by the permanant “Now”.

Before Juan Martin, I played the role of “data cowboy” with a 90min talk (in Spanish) that looked at the contemporary hybrid city through the lenses of my research work augmented by some offline observations. In this intervention entitled “People as sensors; people as actors” (slides with annotations, video), I look at the integration of ubiquitous technologies (and soft infrastructures) and how they afford us new flexibility in conducting our daily activities with simultaneously providing the means to study our activities in time and space.

The other part of the workshop was dedicated to more hands-on activities in which groups had to define, sketch and prototype a citizen-led system or process that take advantage of open/public urban data. With a majority young architects, the focus was first based on “infrastructure”, “mobility”, “space”, but then rapidly also evolved around social issues and even political touching the Critical Cartography approach and critique. There was a lot to learn from the languages employed by participants with different practices (architects, social scientist, biologist, artist).

Finally, Sevilla provided an excellent context to ponder the hybrid city of the present. In addition to its rich history of mixed cultures, architectures and art, engineering work and south-european clichés, the city offers the vestiges of the techno-utopian Expo ‘92. The crumbling infrastructure at the Cartuja Island is source of fascinating sightseeing with an Ariane V on the loose and a monorail in advanced decomposition among other things. The theme for the Expo was “The Age of Discovery”. mmhmm.

Sevilla, a true hybrid city….

…with its real urban furnitures

Thanks José Luis for the invitation!

Related to my past project on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye and World’s Eyes, David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell have created global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites from photos uploaded on Flickr. They ran statistical analyses to identify the most important clusters of “”what the world is paying attention to”. Next they analysed the text tags added to photographs in those clusters, as well as key visual features from each image, to automatically find the world’s most interesting tourist sites. We find that visual and temporal features improve the ability to estimate the location of a photo, compared to using just textual features (slightly similar to IM2GPS: estimating geographic information from a single image). Their paper, Mapping the World’s Photos, recently presented at the WWW 2009 conference explains the process and results in more details.

Representative images for the top landmark in each of the top 20 European cities. All parts of the figure, including the representative images, textual labels, and even the map itself were produced automatically from our corpus of geo-tagged photos. Image courtesy of David Crandall. More on the project’s web page.
Relation to my thesis: Similar to my work, Crandall et al. I have used the spatial distribution of where people take photos to define a relation between the photos that are taken at popular places. I have used similar representations of spatio-temporal traces to illustrate my techniques and finding. However, my motivations has not been to improve photo management and organization applications (see also Mor Namaan’s work). Similar to Currid and Williams’ work on Mapping the Cultural Buzz, I employed georeferenced photos as a proxy to “qualify” the space (e.g. its attractiveness). But rather than mapping and qualifying a timeless space (Currid and Williams talk about “buzz-worthy” without referring to when), I particularly explore the temporal aspect of the data (see The End of Timelessness). For instance, in my work on the NYC Waterfalls, I studies the evolution of the density of georeferenced photos and the flows of photographers to provide evidences of the evolution of the attractiveness of the space (journal paper still in submission).

The Visualization of photographer movement in Manhattan mapped by Crandall is particularly stiking:

To produce these figures, we plotted the geolocated coordinates of sequences of images taken by the same user, sorted by time, for which consecutive photos were no more than 30 minutes apart. Image courtesy of David Crandall

Writing the conclusion of my dissertation, there is one implication of my research work that I still have not completely gotten my brain around. I will try to layout my thoughts here. I believe that one contribution of my work has been to reveal the new aspects of time with our relation to space through ubiquitous technologies. For instance, I have studied the co-evolution of a community of early adopters with their navigation system, the timely capture of travelers experiences, the potentials of spatio-temporal data shadows such as measuring the evolution of the attractiveness of the space. Each study shows that our relation with geoinformation (and by extension space) has been altered from our interactions with mobile and wireless technologies. The information is accessible and generated ubiquitously, augmenting our roles of sensors and actors of the space. This presence of what Adam Greenfield would refer to, in a more articulate manner, as the Big Now creates an utilitarian fascination to the real-time or the predictability as instantiated in my case study on “Detecting air travel in real time” from a mobile phone implicit interaction wireless networks (in submission). This fascination overshadows the end of our ephemeral relation with space potentially leading to a new version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the presence of the hard/soft infrastructure design that does not take it into account.

I call it the end of timelessness. The end of the ephemeral, or what Adam Greenfield would describe as the Long Here, is mainly exposed in my work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye and related. The observations of the presence of the hard infrastructures that deny the Long Here took place around the NYC Waterfalls study and the novel opportunity to define of indicators of the evolution of attractiveness of the space. Similarly, the ubiquitous technologies of the present, fail to accommodate for the Long Here, the change in the city and the implication on the social practices. Wearing qualitative lenses with a taxi drivers in Barcelona, I could observe co-evolutive ballet with their navigation system and extract the implications of the soft infrastructure on the knowledge of the city.

The embedment of urban informatics into the urban fabrics makes the integration of the Long Here in integral part of the design of hard and soft infrastructures. I would argue that this kind of case studies sets stage to the end of the timelessness considerations of individuals interactions with urban infrastructures. A satellite navigation system does not perform the same service the first six months in the practices of a inexperienced taxi drivers compared to a user with 20 year of knowledge of the city. Moreover, they do not, over time, request the same granularity of geoinformation nor do they assess the quality of the information with the same experience of the technology and knowledge of the city. A different kind of “long here” evolution of the presence and practices of that can be analyzed through their interactions with soft infrastructures to assess the quality of the spatial settings. This longitudinal understanding of the evolution of the interaction can then be applied to the design of the urban informatics. For instance, we made sure that our mobile phone algorithm to detect air travel was not perfect, as our system takes advantage of false detections to keep the survey participants with a certain level of involvement.

The evolution of the people practices, interactions and frictions with the urban space can be compiled very informally as Nicolas and I compiled in Sliding Friction and related. This kind of approach helps highlighting the reality, its complex dynamics, its subtleties, and its situational particularities. My research work suggests the combinations of more formal data collection and analysis approaches. They took the form of quantitative (reality mining), qualitative (ethno-inspired), mixed research methods to a more active, utility-driven mode with design science research.

New use of Bowling Green, the oldest public park in New York City

Now these approaches strongly contrast with the practice of architecture and urban design that almost utterly ignore this notion of time. For instance, from my understanding, there exist limited methods to capture and evaluate the user experience and the use of the built space. That makes me wonder wether since Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn (video of the BBC TV series inspired by the book) any progress has been made to integrate the complexifying intertwinement of hard infrastructures, soft infrastructures and individual/social practices into their design practices. 15 years ago, Frank Duffy explained that “architects have been slow to join the evaluation bandwagon, It’s got somewhat trapped in the academic field, I am afraid“. When considering the hybrid space with real-time elements, asynchronous communications and its logging capabilities of soft infrastrcture, it seems that the human/social elements with their evolution and adaptability find little consideration when in competition with aesthetic.

A bench to relax or work or both? between an ATM and a defibrillator at the cramped part of Logan airport

In consequence, as Steward Brand explains, “More often than not, the pull to conduct evaluations has come from client organizations, not from the architects themselves” also suggesting to collect feedback from facility manager to grasp the dimensions of time and use into building. In contrast, in the digital world, there is a greater tradition of analysing breadcrums to improve the design of web sites. Of course, nowadays, who and where are the facility managers in hybrid spaces?

The lack of consideration of the human in current practices of the designer of the hard infrastructures is particularly striking with the traditional aseptic graphics and medium to communicate them. But the competences to learn from the evolution of the infrastructure do not only require interpretative methods for human and social dynamics, but also for technological/intrastructural counterparts. For instance, 4 years ago, the analysis the players space-time trails in our pervasive game CatchBob! with a custom made “replay tool” necessitated technical knowledge to extract the technological issues of the ubiquitious infrastructures and its evolution. I would not expect this to be otherwise nowadays. This to exemplify that the ability to understand and properly bend the hard infrastructure will naturally come from cross-disciplinary teams that consider time in their practice. For instance, software engineering has been evolving in its practice to check the quality assurance throughout the life of a software (see Software that makes software better). The techniques aim at preventing from the software to break without running it (statistic analysis tools) and also detect when it breaks (dynamic analysis tools).

Consequence of unproper blackbox testing… Maybe an error caused by a 64 bit floating point number relating to the outdoor temperature respect to the wind conditions converted to a 16 bit signed integer

Relation to my thesis: Extract some contribution of my PhD thesis (the end of timelessness) to consider their implications on the evaluation of the evolution of the relation between the hard, the soft and the human in hybrid environments. From my experience, a mix of methods are necessary to grasp a world of fast-moving technology. This methods go beyond the current limited approaches of practitioners of the built space, to the exception of Post-occupency evaluations that introduce the dimensions of time and use into building. On the other hand, the practices of practitioners of the soft and digital world are evolving to take time and evolution into consideration. Of course that should lead to an improvement in: reliability, life-cycle behavior, environmental impact and user acceptance.

My research work sets the stage for tools and techniques to reveal evolution or repetitions, with observations and measures of expectation, initial frustration and delight, adjustment, and long-term adaptivity. I examply some elements in my taxi drivers study, the application of metrics as in new york and the collection of evidences “sliding frictions”.

On Tuesday, my work was presented in two different venue, in Hamburg at the GeoViz workshop on the Contribution of Geovisualization to the concept of the Digital City (thanks to Ayman Moghnieh for replacing me at the last minute!) and in Barcelona at Globalgeo in a forum on geoinformation and participation for sustainability (slides of the presentation). I stayed in Barcelona to meet some of the founders of the Vespucci Initiative and understand how my work integrates into the current trends and challenges in of geographic information science. Besides the acknowledgment of volunteer-generated information, it is still a very techno-driven field, that starts with technological capabilities of to collect, process and visualize data and after a few years having conference session with the title “So what?”. No doubt that this is one what that innovation happens, but I am always fascinated by the GIS community quest of the details (e.g. the perfect 3d models of a city) without much human perspective on “how good is good enough” and “for whom and what for”. Current concerns are rather on better organize the existing geospatial data (following the EU Inspire Directive), migrate them to Internet-based environments, make them ready for spatial analysis and visualization. In relation to that, spatial data should be considered as a medium, not a message. So far the community has overlooked the maintenance of the medium, for instance in failing in archiving data (e.g. we lack of the digital data from 10 years while we still still have analog data). In addition, there is paradigm shift that drives spatial analysis to show what is happening, not what it is, implying the development of 4d spatial analysis and visualizations systems.

The move into this Next Generation Digital Earth goes through the embracement of bottom-up spatial data infrastructures. Michael Goodchild made an effort in comparing the differences in quality, trust, timeliness and risks of volunteer generated information vs. authoritative information. He particularly talked about the contrast in the quality of the top-down (authority) data where inaccuracies are guaranteed and the bottom-up (assertion) data that tend to be more accurate in popular places (e.g. similar to Wikipedia). Therefore, authorities information must be verified through a process that can be slow. On the other hand, asserted information are generated in timely manner and people are willing to accept the false positive they generate (an angle that I could have explored in CatchBob). Through several examples (e.g. fire management in Santa Barbara), Goodchild showed the necessity to consider both accurate top-down information mixed with timely volunteer generation information (e.g. such as in Zagat). My work in New York certainly goes into that direction.

IFTF’s Anthony Townsend wrote an article that takes the New York City Waterfalls as context and the study I led on the evolution of the attractiveness of the waterfront as example of locative media, combined with the social media outlets of the web as enablers of public participation in public art (also see “Editer l’espace public” in Chronos).

Augmenting Public Space and Authoring Public Art: The Role of Locative Media (web - pdf)

Abstract: Locative media remain a useful frame for understanding how collaborative sensing will broadly empower groups to author alternative narratives of urban public space. The case of Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls is used to describe this process in the context of a recent large public art work.

Anthony has some provoking thoughts that go right up to my alley in considering locative media provide a solid basis for investigating the larger implications of collaborative sensing and sensemaking. The example of the Waterfalls indicate that, in the future, artists will need to rethink how they engage the public as co-producers of public art and public. It implies the development of techniques and observations from both on passive activity sensing and pools of user-generated data (or as Anthony would say “the interplay between top-down systems of command and control versus bottom-up systems for collective action“). I would argue that this example with public art could extended to any kind of practice that touches the public spaces.

Relation to my thesis: “locative media will also extend our awareness of the urban condition” and “the next step of urban computing will be the development of platforms for making sense of these pools of user-generated data, and visualizing them in place.”

I was in Barcelona this week to present an extensive overview of my research work in the domain of people-centric sensing at the weekly 1-hour seminar of the local Yahoo! Research lab.

People-centric sensing in the city of the near future (slides)

Abstract. Technological advances in sensing, computation, storage, and communications is turning people as sensors of their own environment. Indeed, the increasing deployment of wireless and mobile devices produce new types of dynamic urban data that people generate by passively and actively interacting with these ubiquitous technologies. In this talk, I will illustrate through a few examples how the analysis and visualization of these data gives the ability to show previously invisible urban dynamics resulting in opportunities to inform the urban design, planning and management processes. Moreover, the increasing integration of these technologies into the fabrics of our lives could create more responsive cities in which authorities, service providers and citizens can monitor urban processes and react to events in real-time. Finally, I will ponder these opportunities by highlighting the complex socio-technical assemblage that challenges researchers and practitioners in designing the integration of these new dynamic urban information into people’s daily life.

Thanks to Ricardo Baeza-Yates for the invitation

The exhibition Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City aims at imagining alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York, it will open in September 2009 with 5 commissioned projects that examine the broader social, cultural, environmental and political issues within which the development of urban ubiquitous/pervasive computing is itself situated. One of them, Trash Track, proposed by the MIT SENSEable City Lab (led by Eugenio Morello) will explore how pervasive technologies can help expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability:

Trash Track is inspired by the NYC Green Initiative, which aims to increase the rate of waste recycling in the city to almost 100% by 2030. The project considers how pervasive technologies can help expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. Trash Track will tag different types of waste and follow these through the city’s waste management system to reveal the end-of-life journey of our everyday objects. Whereas most focus in the economic system is on the supply chain, Trash Track will help underscore the environmental impact of consumer waste by visualizing the waste chain, revealing the ultimate destination of the things we throw away.

In other words, the goal of this project is to reveal the “removal-chain” of our everyday objects and waste with a citizen science approach. This approach raise the concerns of using technologies to solve the very problems they have created, as recently discussed by Anne Galloway in “The Rise of Sensor Citizen“:

For example, projects in this domain rarely, if ever, question the environmental or political impacts of the technologies they seek to employ for environmental and political activism. For example, the United Nations now estimates that almost 50 million tonnes of electronic waste are discarded each year. While the environmental costs of toxic e-waste are substantial and can be added to the environmental impact of manufacturing new electronics, the problem is exacerbated by a variety of related practices that disadvantage developing nations. While all of the projects discussed above advocate using technologies for socially, politically and environmentally positive ends, they also implicitly support existing consumption practices in the developed world, and hide the role that technological progress has played in creating the very problems they seek to improve.

Relation to my thesis: The brainstorm session to develop the Trash Track proposal were an excellent learning experience to understand designers, architects, engineers, urbanists concerns and practices, as well as cultural differences in the approach of people as sensors and urban sustainability. I could not help raising the ambivalence of using dust networks that transforms into e-waste to reduce dust. It will be the fascinating challenge of Track Trash to give a counter example to these concerns. I imagined a scenario that solely focuses on the design of pervasive electronic devices that highlight their own removal-chain and help their recycling.

E-waste removal-chain in contemporary cities

Last week at Visualizar’08, I presented the long version of my talk From Sentient to Responsive Cities (slides with notes, video). This talk compiles many of the thoughts and works I produced over these past couple of years. It is divided into three parts:

Microscopes and telescopes
I discuss the dynamic data we generate when actively or passively interacting with new urban actors such as wireless networks or RFID systems. The mapping of these data reveal many invisible dynamics of the city and this often in real-time (with Bicing, Velib or Flickr as data sources). Research in that domain have produced beautiful microscopes and telescopes to visualize urban dynamics. Besides their utility in stretching the imagination of stakeholders in the city, they do not allow to understand “what we see”.

Mapping new urban actors

Evidence and loops
New techniques are being developed to transform the massive amount of dynamic urban data into evidences and information that can be acted upon; moving from purely Sentient to Responsive cities. From the dynamic census of a city from its cellular network activity to the definition of indicators to measure the evolution of the attractiveness of places, there are potential to create a new type of urbanism based evidences generated with the analysis of digital footprints actors of a place leave behind them. These evidences can transform the evaluation of urban design and digital urban services with post-occupency evaluations often overlooked in the practice of architecture and urban design. Similarly the communication of the information generated back to actors of the urban space could create a feedback loop in which the analysis of the data impact the activity of people that create new data and so on.

The evolution of the flows of photographers in Lower Manhattan in Summers of 2006, 2007 and 2008.

Taxi drivers
But how to integrate this type of mechanism by taking into consideration the complex socio-technical assemblage of cities? A set of answers can come from the observation of current deployment of ubiquitous technologies in the city. Therefore, I studied of the integration of satellite navigation system into the practice of taxi drivers describes the co-evolution people have with technologies: how they adapt to it and how they adapt it to their practice. The observations reveal the necessity to have a large knowledge of the city judge the quality of the information provided by sat-nav system. Novice taxi drivers were often not trusting system and access the paper street guide and maps to support their navigation and wayfinding; the satnav system becoming a tool among a large eco-system of artifacts.

A taxi driver mixing the use of a satnav and the official street guide of Barcelona.

Relation to my thesis: An attempt to find a coherence in my multiple works. I might have found a good line of thoughts in describing the potentials to transform urban data into evidences and information that can be acted upon. (Paco Gonzalez produced a summary in Spanish)

This week, I am Visualizar08 Database City Workshop at Media Lab Prado in Madrid. The program of this 2-weeks workshop mixes theoretical seminars with hands-on development of 9 selected projects of data visualization applied to the urban context. Today I gave the long version of my “From sentient to responsive cities” talk in which I laid out many aspects of my research including the mix of quantitative urban data analysis and qualitative observations (taxi drivers). More on that later.

Other lecturers include Juan Freire (Visualizing Urban Spaces’ Digital Skin. How? Why?), Andrés Ortiz from Bestiario (What’s that good for?) and Adam Greenfield with his opus The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tales of the networked city.

Relation to my thesis: A unique event that covers my thoughts and instantiation discussed here. I used my talk as an experiment to find a coherent line of thought for the outline of my dissertation.