Over the years I have been investigating techniques and developing system that take advantage of soft infrastructures and their informational layers: triangulating WiFi signals as geolocation feature of a Pervasive Game (CatchBob!), processing GSM fingerprints to perform air-travel detection, analyzing georeferenced photos and aggregated cellular network traffic to develop attractiveness indicators or webscrapping activity data from bike-sharing infrastructure to simply visualize one dynamic of a city. These works encompass both the physical and the digital forms of the cityscape and their relationships with mobility and the use of space. Now at Lift Lab, I became further engaged with city governments, urban service providers and space managers who challenge me to transform my research into “operational” outcomes at best affecting their strategies at worst refining the understanding on mobility and occupancy levels.

These past months, I have been collaborating with BitCarrier, a company producing real-time traffic information. Their solution uses highly optimized Bluetooth scanners to estimate the speed of the traffic in urban areas as well as on highways. This information is crucial for the instantaneous management of incidents and traffic jams as well as for the improvement of traffic simulations algorithms necessary in urban planning and highway management.

In Wireless in the world as part of the Touch project, Timo Arnall makes visibible the objects sending and receiving radio signals.

Rationale
Our joint collaboration aims at exploiting their data as material for evidences on other dynamics of the city with indicators that can integrate and influence policies, strategies and design of multiple stakeholders (e.g. citizens, businesses, governments). Our work is tightly linked to the concepts of continuous post occupancy evaluation not limiting the evidences to the scrutiny of urbanism practices but rather opening them to multi-disciplinary colleges. The initial hypothesis is that, at an aggregated level, empirical evidences of car and pedestrian movements are exploitable material to improve the design and evaluation of space management strategies (e.g. wayfinding, usage of the space, hyper-congestion). This approach contrasts with current practices that are often based on the hunch and speculations with very little evidence, to the exception of a few projects (see for instance Intelligent Space and its path following survey).

Few methodologies have been using digital technologies to interrogate the dynamics of a space, and to investigate the presence or absence of people on the street. A central contribution is Space Syntax that is based on the spatial structure of the city and traditional surveys. The Cityware project aimed at “extending space syntax’s consideration of the architectural spaces created by the built environment to include the wireless interaction spaces created by Bluetooth devices“, However, to my knowledge, this academic work never translated into operational outcomes. As a consequence, unsurprisingly, leading solutions are being developed by hardware and software companies rather than academics and practitioners of the physical space. For instance Blip Systems a company that delivers information and services to mobile phone users, now also exploit their Bluetooth system to optimize passenger related processes and capacity in airports.

However, these exploitations of ubiquitous systems do not aim at developing urban indicators as material for strategy definition and evaluation, as I initiated with the NYC Waterfalls project at the MIT SENSEable City Lab.

The Bluetooth Spectrum
BitCarrier’s solution focuses on wireless interaction spaces of 5-30m of radius reserved to Bluetooth devices; an ideal range to capture movements on the street and other dense urban areas. Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices, when set to discoverable mode, emit a signal that enables them to interact with nearby devices. BitCarrier uses the scanning functionality of the Bluetooth protocol to detect the presence and speed of vehicles between specific areas of a city or a highway. Their optimized sensors scan at the frequency of multiple scans per second.

Fair use of aggregated, anonymized digital interactions
The detections of discoverable Bluetooth devices produces recordings that are pre-processed on each scanner with an asynchronous 128-bits encryption algorithm that prevent the storage of MAC address. The anonymized logs are then transmitted over a secured connection to a centralized server that aggregates the encrypted data over time, discarding any time period under a minimum amount of readings. Therefore it is necessary to generate enough collective interactions to give rise to a pattern of presence and movement reflecting the movements in the physical space itself. This combination of techniques to secure privacy is part of the discussions on the fair use of aggregated, anonymized behavioral data to both protect individuals right to privacy and extract value from data. The discussion of these techniques also responds to the necessity of applying transparent processes to make every stakeholder aware on the mechanisms to generate value from data. Other approaches, at a design level, include the use of signs to make obvious the purpose of the scanning of a wireless spectrum (see Dan Hill’s IxDA talk New Soft City). Making explicit the presence of wireless instruments is also part of public safety procedures with the necessity to guarantee and specify the use of wireless technologies that respect Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) level restrictions. For instance in the EU, according to International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards, the SAR limit for mobile devices is 2 W/kg averaged over 10 g of tissue (see IEC 62209-1 ed1.0).

Courtesy of Dan Hill. Making clear what is being sensed. Extracted from Dan Hill’s IxDA talk on New Soft City.

Empirical observations
In a first case study in collaboration with the Mobility Service of the City of Barcelona, we first wanted to find out the correlation factor between the movements captured from the mobile device detections and the actual rhythm of the flow of pedestrians in the public space.

Bluetooth scanner deployed on traffic light at La Rambla

We retrieved a couple of months of records produced by 5 Bluetooth scanners, deployed by the Mobility Service of the city of Barcelona on light poles and traffic poles in the Barcelona city center in the Plaza Catalunya – Puerta del Angel – Rambla – Cathedral area. BitCarrier’s solution aggregated over 4 millions non-unique devices (about 1 million unique devices) into periods of 15 minutes, and we discarded the periods with less than 100 detected devices. The database provided a first understanding of the cyclical nature of passing Bluetooth traffic at the nodes and routes forming a connected graph of sensors.

The graph linking the observed areas is a fundamental concept of the analysis (similarities with Space Syntax “axial map” of the streets). This graph is analyzed according the weights and each node (i.e. aggregated substance of Bluetooth interactions) and route (e.g. average speed between two nodes), helping qualifying the space and its evolution over a period of time. Yet, the quality and representativeness of the data must be verified prior to any occupancy analysis.

Correlating Bluetooth interactions with actual physical activity
The Mobility Service of the City of Barcelona deployed one extra scanner in a metro station with turnstiles that aggregate by hours the number of entering passengers. Both metro and Bluetooth data suffer of noise generated by a) an amount of “wranglers” not paying their fare by jumping over turnstiles and b) the fluctuating range of the Bluetooth spectrum potentially interacting with devices of non-passengers. Nevertheless, with these imperfections taken into account it remains possible to determine the correlation factor between Bluetooth interactions and passengers movements. We applied the correlation for periods (hours) aggregating more than 200 detections of unique devices. The scattergram below correlating the device detection (horizontal axis) with the integration value of the metro station (vertical axis) reveals as large positive strength and direction of a linear relationship (+0.93). Note once again that no data or value on mobility is perfect. In this case, there is a certain bias in our approach because metro passengers represent a certain population that might be more in verse of carrying a Bluetooth-activated mobile phone than the general population. Similarly, other areas might reveal different correlation factors due to digital attractors. Nevertheless the large positive relationship we uncovered confirms that the actual physical activity conditions the activity on the Bluetooth spectrum.

Correlation of device detections (horizontal axis) with the integration value of the metro station (vertical axis) reveals as large positive strength and direction of a linear relationship (+0.93).

Measuring the ramification of an event
The empirical observations revealed the influence of the Winter Sales period over the general dynamic of the area we covered that hosts many shops. The Mobility Service of the City of Barcelona was particularly keen on obtaining indicators on the ramification of this phenomenon. Therefore, we compared the capture of absolute numbers of device detection of the average “eventless” period with the Winter Sale period, uncovering the areas that profited more of the Sales period than others. In a nutshell, the areas profiting the most from the increase of people are the Pelai area on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, la Rambla on Saturday around noon and Puerta del Angel with the Cathedral area only on Saturday afternoon. The novelty of the approach is the ability to measure the impact of the event. For instance our analysis of Portal del Angel reveals an average absolute increase around 14% of activity on the Bluetooth spectrum over the Sales period. This type of observation over time can lead to the development of indicators of mobility, occupancy levels and usage of the space.

Defining indicators
At this stage, a pre-aggregation processing of the Bluetooth trails is necessary to further characterize the urban space. Therefore, we developed algorithms to extract pedestrian from vehicle movements and infer resident, transient, business, and tourist flows. These variables form time series that represent the temporal signature for each observed area and street (see for instance the application of eigenvector analysis on temporal signatures of a GSM network). When analyzed, these temporal signatures can help define indicators of the evolution of movements and presence of people. We developed a variety of indicators defining the streets of Barcelona based on:

• Walkability: considering the ratio of pedestrians and vehicles and a fluidity indicator. This observation is complementary to the walk score based on the topology and infrastructures Walk Score and Space Syntax’s Pedestrian Routemap that focus on spatial layout in shaping patterns of human behavior, with the support of traditional surveys.
• Accessibility: considering the main flows and speed to define level of access from any node (i.e. Bluetooth scanner) of connected graph (shallow and deep) from by the Bluetooth scanners.
• Permeability: level of protection of an area from the main areas, considering closeness and speed of flows. Inspired by “qualities” defined in Responsive Environment, A Manual for Designers.
• Attractiveness: as already explored in the New York City Waterfalls project with the application of comparative relative strength and centrality index of visitor traffic.
• Vitality: considering the constancy and high-level flows of both resident and transient activity. Inspired by Lynch in Good City Form and he definition of the five basic “performance dimension for the spatial form of cities”: vitality, sense, fit, access and control.
• Durability: constancy of the temporal signatures indicating the resistance to change or the maintenance of a current state.

Communicating, evaluating and planning with indicators
The first step of defining space management strategies is to gain an understanding of how people use and move through urban areas and then develop indicators to evaluate the strategies and their evolution. This practice necessitates a visual language through which interlocutors from different domains can communicate, evaluate, plan and make predictions about the resulting impacts.

Urban design and planning traditionally use visual ‘diagnostics’ for analyzing a situation and manipulate maps to communicate plans. Yet the representations generally map the - relatively durable - physical and functional layout of cities. In contrast, the activity patterns of crowds detected with wireless sensors are more dynamic. A visual language must prevent mismatches in trying to understand relations between the static and the dynamic. (see Jeroen van Schaick’s paper Future Scenarios for the Relation between Advanced Tracking Research and Urban Design and Planning for a discussion on that topic). Nevertheless, the intuitive affiliation of practices dealing with the urban space to maps and diagnostic tools led us in prototyping dashboards to monitor and communicate the dynamic movements in the environment and their indicators.

Fast-prototyped interactive dashboard for the Barcelona City Center, mixing areal and temporal views of absolute values and indicators, plus flags to annotate particular event.

Current applications
Good local indicators and knowledge on their rhythm can become operational material for multiple domains to determine and evaluate the appropriate strategies to space and mobility management. For instance, we have been perfecting a system to measure hyper-congestion situations and evaluate space management strategies. Our colleagues at BitCarrier collaborate with Centre for Innovation in Transport (CENIT) in Barcelona work on generating Origin-Destination matrices key to the modeling and prediction of traffic. Similarly, Arup and the Centre for Real-Time Information Networks (CRIN) at UTS have been investigating the Bluetooth wireless spectrum to detect transit activity in real-time, complementing current transit data that are not scalable and does not uncover individual ‘multi-modal’ trips (see Sensing the city, update one: our approach) Their project has priority of keeping the great promise of cities as enabler of both anonymity and community – current applications work with that balancing act, not against it.

Future: Bridging the applicability gap
We are imagining how a “data deluge” – with all manner of data continuously permeating the streetscape – can improve cities, their design and their policies. Yet, only a few researchers and practitioner have been really active on the field. Nevertheless appropriating Dan Hill’s words it seems clear that a shift to empirical observations and real-time data decision-making in the fields dedicated to the design, planning and management of space is fundamental, and not without complexities, but will surely happen. Our collaboration with BitCarrier certainly aims at shaping that future with clients/pioneers sharing the vision.

The challenges do not solely stand on technology and ethics. Our work is fundamentally multidisciplinary and the innovation based on the exploitation of empirical observations must still address mismatches between knowledge domains and practices. Particularly architecture and urban planning are not primarily about understanding a past or present situation. They specifically display possible and/or desirable futures of the layout of physical space (see Future Scenarios for the Relation between Advanced Tracking Research and Urban Design and Planning for a discussion on that topic). In contrast, the information our solutions provide display the actual pattern of movement either in the past or real-time. Our clients are helping us figure out how can current practices appropriate our alternative or additional method of observation and analysis. However, even in light of the accuracy and amounts of data, to many practitioners it is still not trivial to adopt new techniques and understand if theses information are really what they need. Bridging this applicability gap is a difficult task we like to accept!

Why do I blog this: Solidifying a rationale and grounding my discourse on current projects using Bluetooth. Now wearing the farmer’s hat. Planting seeds and weeding and hope for harvest.

Next Wednesday (March 10, 2010), will take place a seminar on Mapping Contemporary Cities at Laboral in Gijón, Spain. The event will gather practitioners active in hard urban realities, soft urban infrastructures and information visualization. Beyond cross-disciplinary pollination, the aim will be to develop innovative work in understanding, representing, mapping, communicating metropolitan areas that gather all the indicators of a city without featuring a dense urban fabric. It is particularly the case of the polycentric urban area in Central Asturias, Spain formed by three mid-size cities acting as one metropolis with its specific patterns of mobility, high car use, increase of express bus and train lines, dense information networks, and new attraction points as shopping centers or industrial land. Being able to channel the strategies of several urban entities into one metropolis is a major challenge for politicians, decisions-makers, infrastructure owner and service providers.

I was inspired by a talk of Antoine Picon (Towards a City of Events: Digital Media and Urbanity) and the extensive work of Fermín Rodríguez Gutiérrez on Ciudad Astur to setup and frame the event:

Mapping Contemporary Cities (en español):

Urban mapping is a mean to lead us to explore further what is happening today in the urban realm. In the Renaissance, many maps were about presenting the portrait of the city, its physiognomy, like a person, and its main monuments. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, maps were more and more often about urban geometry. In the nineteenth century, maps conveyed notions about new dimensions of the city like its networks (e.g. sewer maps, state of traffic). Nowadays, with the complexity of cities and their invisible soft infrastructures, even their centers have become hard to understand using the traditional means of cartography.

Simultaneously, digital media is changing the city as we experience it but also as we understand it. Tools and crawlers can now absorb new vast amount of data and represent it again through maps. While these tools help engineers, planners, geographers, decision makers, civil servants, inhabitants capture the city at a glance, they also make us aware of the limitation and imperfection of the transformation of the information. Does the digital bring us cities that are move visible and cognitively understandable? Can it help reveal cities such as Ciudad Astur with no visible urban homogeneity but strong invisible indicators of a metropolitan area?

To explore these questions, this seminar gathers practitioners active in the hard urban reality, digital cities and information visualization.

An effort of mapping “invisible cities”, here the work of CeCodet on Ciudad Astur in the book “El área metropolitana de Asturias. Ciudad Astur: el nacimiento de una estrella urbana en Europa“.

Thanks to LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial for generously supporting this event.

John Tolva wrote an short essay “Data: our second city” condensing a year of conferences and talks informed by IBM’s Smarter Cities perspective all with a Chicago bent. Certainly also inspired by the texts and talks of Dan Hill and Adam Greenfield, he starts with the observation of the data that now continuously permeates the streetscape (i.e. similar to my new urban actors slide) to propose discuss the near-future opportunities of their presence:

Visualization as to engage the dialogue: “our city planners and citizenry need to be at least as conversant with the language of information architecture as we are, at a basic level, about physical architecture. Call it an aesthetics of data. This is as much a matter of becoming aware of what’s happening around us, of figuring out the most elegant ways of making the unseen felt, of thinking of our urban spaces as I described the interactions at Michigan and Congress“. Our work in Florence is an example of the use of visualization to integrate citizen into the discussion.

Data to empower: “Our plan for a networked urbanism should seek above all to be maximally enfranchising, lowering barriers to commerce and community.”

For this to happen, John suggests that:

We must take up this mantle and be active participants in the design of this networked urbanism. We must make our voice heard. From educating our elected representatives about the opportunities before us, to encouraging our youth — who increasingly live in a world of data — to think critically about their role in the urban fabric, we must embrace this challenge with the same passion embodied in our historical tradition of remarkable plans for Chicago.

However, John could have further suggested that we will need current processes to integrating evaluation tools/techniques/methods/procedures to ensure that our digital infrastructure avoids the mistakes of our physical infrastructure. An urban environment will make the envy not just of building architects but of information architects.
In addition, any strategy should take into consideration the imperfection of the software infrastructure; the kind of “potholes in the urban Information landscape” John describes:

But fissures in a city’s data infrastructure are as consequential as potholes. They are structural failings of a city at the most basic level, in a way that a busted piece of street art would never be.

Think of cell phone outages — “dark zones” — as potholes in the urban information landscape. Or consider GPS brownouts, such as cause error in bus-tracking when the CTA enters the satellite-blocking skyscraper canyon of the Loop. But these examples are minor compared to the real issue before us: how do we proactively build a city of information that is inclusionary, robust but flexible, and reflective of a city’s unique character?

Turn right, … or not. A classic pothole in the urban information landscape

Why do I blog this: Further collecting thoughts for future talks and essays; as well as linking other people’s work with my endeavors. The necessity to educate elected representatives, decision makers, companies and citizens are part of ongoing projects at Lift lab. Beyond developing visualization and workshops to educate and open dialogue between the different stakeholders of the urban space, we develop tools that enable to evaluate urban strategies.

Jonathan Raper, who chaired yesterday’s London set for information revolution during which London’ mayor announced the city’s open data project (see London datastore) explained why policies towards information has evolved in the UK from Thatcher’s ‘user pays’ principle to the opening governmental agencies datastores due to recent ‘digital transition’, ‘mobile revolution’ and ‘open source movements’; and warns that a lot of work has to be achieved to make this promised future happen:

However, this is only the beginning of the process:
- we have to unwind some of the commercial partnerships government has in place to manage its information to ensure that it is released without conditions;
- we have to remove provisions like limitations on ‘derived data’ products when new opendata services want to use government data as a framework;
- we must look for ways to ensure that the innovations to be created are offered to all with full accessibility;
- we must ensure that the legitimate privacy expectations of the citizen are not compromised by information releases.

Why do I blog this: The conditions and limitations on ‘derived data’ products is often overlooked in open interface/data initiatives, and developers/analysts/entrepreneur must often act in grey areas. At what point are data derived enough to lose their open/public/free status?

Earlier last year, the FING, as part the the Villes 2.0 program, conducted a set of interviews on the development research in social and human sciences that study the relation between the information/communication technologies and the urban environment. Thierry Marcou and Sylvain Allemand asked french-speaking researchers in the domains of social sciences, urbansim, geography and information sciences (including myself) to reflect on the digital evolutions cities face; such as access and use of urban services, the approaches strategies and methods to understand the evolution and innovate with new urban services. The initial observation of their report entitled “La recherche urbaine à l’heure de la Ville 2.0“, highlight the necessity to consider the relation between ICTs and the urban environment beyond the infrastructures (e.g. politic to guarantee optimal coverage of a territory in high-speed Internet) and start to think about the implication in the urban context. In fact, these current strategies that aim at bringing infrastructure into the age of network culture still remain far from the goal of urban planning to arrange harmoniously people and activities in a territory (see Victory Gardens, or the Impact of the Financial Crisis on Architecture for some provoking thoughts).

A few concepts thoughts extracted from the report particularly caught my interest. Particularly the interview of geographer Jacques Levy who downplays the role of technologies to empower citizens:

“La ville n’est pas seulement gérée par les systèmes d’ingénierie, mais aussi par les habitants qui se rendent capables de maîtriser et de faire évoluer cet immense environnement qu’est une ville. Ils sont donc tous techniciens, en gérant des informations multiples sur les lieux ou en construisant des stratégies de mobilité”. Des citadins, rappelle Jacques Lévy, qui n’ont pas attendu l’internet pour devenir des acteurs, et par exemple, au travers de la civilité, « reconstruire la ville à chaque instant dans l’espace public ».

This notion of civility particularly important not to reduce the use of Internet technologies for radical ways to manage the urban (e.g. emerging urbanism), but also how they can contribute to the renewal of current models. For instant Levy discusses the necessity of decision makers to, from now on, deal with the “micro-arbitration” of citizens.

Sailors navigating the Barcelona subway system. They have not waited the Internet to become technicians, managing multiple spatial information and developing their mobility strategies.

My interview was conducted in early 2009, freshly out of my stay at MIT SENSEable City Lab. It highlights some of the contributions I try to make in the domain of research in urban informatics. Some of my thoughts have evolved since, but the core reminds intact. This is a good opportunity to recap what I believe are my main contributions:

Research contributions
Information/Communication/Location technologies, rather than have not dissolved the city; space is still predominant with altered experience (see CatchBob!) and appropriation with practices, ecosystem of artifacts and cultures as driving factors of co-evolution (see Taxi drivers) .

Implicit engagement, with citizens acting as sensors (see Tracing the Visitor’s eye) generating data as sources of new types of urban indicators (see NYC Waterfalls) to evaluate urban strategies.

Research approaches
The necessity of hybrid researchers: “Autrement dit à ces chercheurs et lieux de recherche et d’étude qu’on pourra qualifier d’« hybrides », au sens où ils procèdent à partir de recherche action, sur la base de partenariats public/privé, en développant des méthodologies entre recherche fondamentale et appliquée, voire entre sciences et arts.” […] “Ce serait un chercheur qui ne craint pas de côtoyer les différents mondes (académique, élus, entreprise…) ni de pratiquer les langages des différents parties prenantes“. (see on hybrid forums and the kind of research I am).

Communication beyond a certain community as an integral part of the research process: “Au-delà d’une ouverture sur les autres disciplines et pratiques professionnelles, le chercheur idéal se préoccupe aussi de la manière dont il communique le fruit de son travail auprès des gens ordinaires. Communiquer au-delà de la communauté scientifique devrait faire partie intégrante de la démarche du chercheur en technologies urbaines“. (see Below the Tip of the Urban Data Iceberg and for instance Les Audiences dans la Ville and L’MIT di Boston Digitalizza la Vita Dei Turista a Firenze).

Human as a focal point at the intersection of technologies and urban spaces: “Aussi curieux que cela puisse être, le contexte urbain est encore peu concerné par les pratiques de co-conception que l’on observe dans le secteur de l’informatique et du numérique. Pour ma part, je ne conçois pas d’imaginer des dispositifs sans analyse de ses usages et usagers Ces intersections de pratiques permettent de définir un nouvelle approche qui prend en compte l’Homme dans l’intégration des technologies dans l’espace urbain“. (see post-occupancy evaluations).

Feed from provocation for instance through design fiction and artist works: “Oui, tout à fait. Les artistes en particulier jouent un rôle majeur, en amont des recherches académiques.“

Feed from urban scouting (see sliding friction)

Research methods
Mixed research and use of probes: “A objet d’études original, moyens spécifiques : nous allons jusqu’à concevoir nous-mêmes des outils particuliers, comme ces « mouchards » placés dans les téléphones pour collecter des données quantitatives qui supportent les observations sur le terrain“. (see CatchBob! and Flight detection)

Rapid prototyping to create potent provocative ideas and feed larger investigation: “Au sens du mot anglais « hack», qui veut dire « détourner », sous entendu pour trouver des portes auxquelles on ne pense pas, en n’hésitant pas à tester des solutions” (see Velib / Bicing).

Visualization as a starting point, not an end: “Bricoler, cela peut consister, par exemple, à mettre des données sur des cartes et noter des comportements émergents, pour établir des corrélations ou dégager une dynamique spatiotemporelle qui aide à une première compréhension des données. Elle ne parlera pas forcément au commun des mortels, mais au moins permettra-t-elle de nourrir l’imaginaire du chercheur, d’amorcer une discussion au sein de son équipe. Les réactions que cela suscite sont souvent instructives“. (see the World’s Eyes)

Why do I blog this: Gathering thoughts for upcoming essays and talks.

FING has been leading an active investigation in France, acting both as a think-tank and make-tank in the domain of digital cities. I am not aware of any initiatives at that scale in other countries. Chapeau! They investigate and consult beyond academia, relying on other observer of the digitization of urban, more of the hybrid researchers type. Indeed they are often as very capable to capture, treat the issues and communicate on the domain. For instance, marine biologist and entrepreneur Juan Freire offers a unique sensitivity translating the experience in his domain to the context of the city (see Urbanismo emergente, pro-común y tecnología).

The recent fiasco of PG&E smart grid installation in California provides some valuable insights on the integration of real-time meters of urban activities and people’s appropriation of the information fed back to them. Indeed, one of the advantages of a smart grid is that the two way flow of information communicates home energy consumption information and in return allows utilities to alert customers to real-time electricity pricing (see ‘Smart meters’: some thoughts from a design point of view). Yet, it seems that this mechanism failed in Bakersfield, CA, residents complaining that meters are logging far more kilowatt hours than they believe they are using. It is potentially due to technical reasons and certainly for the lack of transparency in the design of the system.

First, there is a lag between the installation of smart meters and the deployment of the in-home network that provides value to the consumer. The lag is so great that that the consumer started to feel disenfranchised. Indeed, “currently there are no in-home energy management displays or dashboards accompanying the new smart meters. Customers have no way to know how much their energy usage is costing in real time and… the utility does have plans to install these in the future” (see PG&E smart meter problem a PR nightmare).

Then, the system does not communicate its new rules. If customers do not shift demand to off-peak times when rates are lower, as argued by PG&E (see PG&E smart meter communication failure – lessons for the rest of us), then it means that the system fails to communicate the value of shifting demand or the time when rates are lower.

Finally, the rolled-out system is opaque in communicating its state. As exemplified in this tweet the design does not integrate failures and user inquiries: “I’m waited for PG&E to put up the daily usage numbers, I won’t get those until next month for some unexplained reason“.

A near-future evolution of smart grids, in a perfect internet of things world, is that consumers can “set and forget” to constantly monitor anything. Appliance makers such as General Electric and Whirlpool are developing smart appliances capable of doing the monitoring on the behalf of their owners. At what level will this extra layer of automation disenfranchise or empower us? How will the practice of organizations controlling hard infrastructure integrate the specificities of soft infrastructures.

Why do I blog this: Fascinated by the fact the roll-out of “smart grid” system, meant to empower both energy consumers and producers, led to people feel disenfranchised. The organizations that have controlled hard infrastructure for decades have still a lot to learn from designing their newly, internet-of-things-powered soft infrastructures. More than communicating accurate data, they are requested to design and make their overall process (e.g. data collection and handling) more transparent. The Bakersfield fiasco is an example of the new frictions PG&E and the likes will learn from as their are getting closer to people, metering their consumption on an hourly basis and feeding them back information in real-time. What kind of friction will occur when a governmental institution gets similarly more deeply involved in soft infrastructures, such as vehicle tracking initiative in Holland?

An armless erroneous temperature reading

Mirablau at the bottom of Tibidabo offers a spectacular view over Barcelona. At sunset, the lights are soften to contemplate the change of colors of the city.

Why do I blog this: Working on a text on data cities and visualization. I communicate my work with visualization to play with this fascination of the macro views on city dynamics. Most cities offer their observation decks, being it natural or man made. They complement the citizens mundane micro observations of atomic level city dynamics (e.g. planes, road traffic, construction sites, …)

The increasing presence of soft infrastructures embedded with the urban fabric is altering our experience of the city. Simultaneously, the manipulation and processing of the underlying data generated by networked and sentient systems offers new possibilities for architecture. Yet, there seems to be a gap in the practice of designing buildings and spaces in concert with their informational membrane; a practices that understands what makes good cities tick and knows the roles informatics can (and cannot) play; a practice between architecture of construct, architecture of information and industrial/experience/interaction design. The gap seems so wide that large software and hardware corporations are the sole actors that attempt projecting their visions and deploy their case studies of smarter/sentient/responsive cities. This year’s Toward the Sentient City organized by the Architectural League of New York has been an attempt of to fill the void and look at the possible future trajectory for architecture at the time of urban informatics. In his constructive criticism of the show, Dan Hill highlighted how far architecture has to go to stay relevant in the development of ’sentient cities’:

Architecture and urban design should be in this debate, no doubt, but its entire practice, sensibility and economic model may need redressing (as with many other fields, of course.) Given their previous predilections, the lack of technical and conceptual understanding – never mind an apparently congenital inability to design a decent website – the profession has a long way to go before it can demand a seat at the table. An admittedly fading tradition of thinking of itself as the ‘master builder’ needs to be entirely excoriated once and for all.

In a recent keynote address entitled “How can architects relate to digital media?” Mobile City’s Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal urged a parterre of young architects to “relate to digital media in a new way, beyond merely using them as instruments, to represent their spatial logic in design, or to design for virtual worlds“. They layout a couple of new directions in the evolution of architecture as a practice:

First, we already witness that the profession is flexibly adapting itself to new circumstances. Architecture is moving in the direction of what has been called ‘service design’. This means that a client hires a ‘designer’ not to just build him a beautiful building, but to shape a particular process or ‘customer (or ‘citizen’) experience’ from start to end. The question is how can these two structures – physical situations and media practices – be combined to design for urban experiences in meaningful ways? Surely this question cannot be solved by architects alone.

Second, architects harness spatial expertise that can steer future directions of new media. Digital media developments are increasingly being integrated with geographical space, physical context, and the material world (labelled geo-spatial web, locative media, the internet of things, and so on). We think it is important that architects play a role in the debate about the values that are implied in such media designs.

Architects can contribute crucial insights particularly on the non-digital modes of design for human experience (see Responsive Environments), the kind of insights based on historical context that other practices fail to grasp. For instance, Adam Greenfield recently discussed the ahistoricity of interaction design:

Let’s face it: brighter and more sensitive people than us have been thinking about issues like public versus private realms, or which elements of a system are hard to reconfigure and which more open to user specification, for many hundreds of years. Medieval Islamic urbanism, for example, had some notions about how to demarcate transitional spaces between public and fully private that might still usefully inform the design of digital applications and services. By contrast, the level of sophistication with which those of us engaged in such design generally handle these issues is risible (and here I’m pointing a finger at just about the entire UX “community” and the technology industry that supports it).

Why do I blog this: Currently helping setting up an event that look at the new roles of architecture and urbanism in the networked cities landscape. I am particularly fascinated by the gap formed by the lack of technical and conceptual understanding of many architects and the little presence of historical context and acquaintance non-digital modes of design in the designers/engineers practices. A serious need for more T-shaped people?

Barcelona has long and unique urban tradition often described as the “Modelo Barcelona” (see El Modelo Barcelona: un examen crítico) that features a capacity to treat and revitalize central urban space with interventions at the scale of streets and places; mixing with large urban projects that favor the density and compactness of urban form (see Barcelona: The Urban Evolution of a Compact City and the Barcelona Regeneration Model)and affect the city as a whole. The most apparent trace of its application are the garden city expansion of 520 street blocks planned as long ago as 1859 by Ildefons Cerdà (Plan Cerdà) now forming the Eixample district and the use of the Olympic Games as a vehicle for city-wide reforms over four neglected urban areas. In the past decade, Barcelona has undergone a new wave of major transformation with the 22@ innovation area and the Diagonal Mar hyper-community constructed on coastal brownfield and reclaimed land. These evolutions have faced major criticisms to the points of wondering whether Barcelona was losing touch with its model that beyond strict urban planning is also associated with focus on civil society as the leading dynamic in the city’s evolution. For instance, Josep Lluis Mateo of the newly created Barcelona Institute of Architecture (BIArch) claims that the history of the practice of architecture in Barcelona is more advanced than the “Modelo Barcelona” and its recent use of iconic architecture, suggesting that forms matter less than space, material, light, sensations and logic (see “Reinventaremos el modelo Barcelona“).

While in the past architects and city planners might have argued and developed the model of Barcelona, new actors are emerging as driving forces of the evolution of the city, its infrastructure and quality of life. For instance, the innovation and eGovernment Department at Barcelona City Council has unveiled their “Smart City” model for using information and communication technologies to improve its residents’ quality of life and ensure more efficient and sustainable maintenance and management of big cities. Even if their “formula” is still fresh and goes through constant evolution it has reached enough maturity to contrast with very developed discourses on networked cities in Asia (with New Songdo as showcase) and the recent fascination of North America for open data initiatives (some carrying a similar tone of naiveness of the first wave of “Muni WiFi” projects).

In his presentation “Barcelona Smart City” (slides), Joan Batlle highlights the articulation of the four major connected elements of their model:

• Ubiquitous infrastructures: city network, citizens’ access network (communicate and create information). Examples: Muni WiFi mesh network (680 nodes, 20 services, 500 free hotspots)
  Information: sensors, digital footprints, citizens’ information (raw material of the innovation factories). Examples: BitCarrier’s real-time traffic monitoring system, my visualizations of Bicing and Flickr data, aggregated mobile network traffic data. Joan rightfully questions “Can we use Directive 2006/24/EC to devolve citizens’ information to citizens? …and allow them to make services for the citizens (from the citizens)?“
  Living labs, open innovation: citizens, companies, universities, city council. Example: Urban labs at 22@ as testing space for innovative enterprises, Living labs with its Media-TIC building.
  Smart Services: municipal advanced services, services for citizens from citizens. Example: iBicing for iPhone, and the Urban Mediator, one “click” services.

It will certainly be interesting to participate in the integration and interplay of this kind of Networked City model (extended by other initiatives such as Citilab) within the urban planning history of “Modelo Barcelona” that shows how the city has overcome major contradictions. Barcelona has the opportunity to be a leading city in that domain, with a sensitivity for its citizens, civil society and networks (a legacy of Manuel Castells?) over the concrete and the forms. It contrasts with many other European cities such as Paris and its famous Greater Paris design competition and Christian de Portzamparc’s project on efficiency and speed featuring some sort of paleo-futuristic Monorail.

Why do I blog this: My presence in Barcelona is partially the fruit of the 22@ urban project, because I preferred to pursue a PhD within the living lab and messy aspect of Barcelona rather than the green alleys of traditional university campuses. In return, my research projects are now presented as ground for potential future of the city. This is utterly rewarding and of course it incites me in intensifying my investigation in Barcelona.

I consider cities as being “smart” by default (isn’t it the human’s greatest invention?), so I do not support the contemporary discourse that information technologies and infrastructures will make them any smarter, also considering that IQ tests for cities still need to be developed. However I do believe they can help, with the support of proper models and processes, in making a city an even better place to inhabit.

Recently the First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information, organized by the MIT SENSEable City Lab, gathered many stakeholders from multiple disciplines to share on the issues surrounding the application and management of personal electronic information:

The goal of this forum is to explore the novel applications for electronic data and address the risks, concerns, and consumer opinions associated with the use of this data. In addition, it will include discussions on techniques and standards for both protecting and extracting value from this information from several points of view: what techniques and standards currently exist, and what are their strengths and limitations? What holistic approaches to protecting and extracting value from data would we take if we were given a blank slate?

Luckily, many of the position papers and presentations are now online.

Several contributions look at other field such as health care to draw best practices of personal logs storage and mining. Particularly, in Engineering a Common Good: Fair Use of Aggregated, Anonymized Behavioral Data, Nathan Eagle argues for the necessity of a set of standardized protocols for behavioral data acquisition and usage to preserve both individual privacy and value of the community. Nathan has been analyzing behavioral data from mobile phone operators to help epidemiologists modeling human movement to support the allocation of malaria eradication resources in Kenya. With similar data, he supported planners of Kigali in quantifying the dynamics of slums and the social impact of previous policy decisions ranging from road construction to the placement of latrines (see Artificial Intelligence for Development). Still there are two major issues in the use of these data even if anonymized and aggregated:

• Deductive disclosure: the nature of behavioral data is such that very few observations are required to deduce the identity of an individual. An issue that is overcome to some extent by strict data sharing protocols that ensure the data cannot be released to the general public. Other strategies my apply to some extend as well (see On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever and Jon Reades’ Using Finite State Machines to preserve privacy while data mining the cellular phone network)
• Data retention and erasure: the inability of individuals to remove their data from these aggregate datasets. Good practices can be gained from the medical community that pushes for legislation enabling individuals to own their personal health records to prevent this type of exploitation. Similarly, there is also pressure for legislation on the ownership of personal behavioral data, providing individuals with the right to access and remove their data from corporate databases enabling them to ’opt-out’ from any type of analysis. This leave me wondering to what extend the opt-out impairs the quality of tha data?

Despite the necessity of rigorous data-sharing protocols, Eagle also considers of intellectual property of data can be considered as a form of intellectual property.

The behavioral IP of an individual should be owned by that individual, and licensed to third-parties for a fee if desired. The behavioral IP of a society should be considered as a valuable public good.

This certainly opens new interrogations on the applicability of this proposal (e.g. who determines the fees, who has access for free and who does not?, how to finance the efforts that transform data into valuable public good? are the developed algorithms also a public good?). In addition to discussing the IP of the data, I often argue on the necessity to apply transparent processes in which everybody is aware on the mechanisms to generate the information (see my World Information City Doggie Bag).

On that very aspect of data process (and its transparency), I was intrigued by Trevor Hughes’ (Executive Director, International Association of Privacy Professionals) intervention on “Data Environmentalism” that argues that we should focus less on “notice and choice (fair information practices) and actually put our efforts in in securing data, data flows, and legitimate use, to the point of developing Indicators of trust Transparency.

Another aspect on the exploitation of personal electronic information lies around the notion of dream of the perfect technology and the myth of the perfect power (see Stephen Graham at World Information City). It is one of the theme that Aguiton et al. cover in their contribution Living Maps: New Data, New Uses, New Problems quoting Bruno Latour in Paris: Invisible City:

Megalomaniacs confuse the map and the territory and think they can dominate all of Paris just because they do, indeed, have all of Paris before their eyes. Paranoiacs confuse the territory and the map and think they are dominated, observed, watched, just because a blind person absent-mindedly looks at some obscure signs in a four-by-eight meter room in a secret place.

On the application front per se, it is very well worth checking the recent research of Skyhook Wireless on their own data (Aggregated Location Requests) to perform time/space based analysis, frequency/phase domain extraction and baseline/anomaly detection.