Different ways to protect one’s source of electricity:

Well covered in a french train:

With duct tape at the airport in Brussels:

Why do I blog this? in a time where we have our pockets full of mobile devices that require electricity, it’s always an issue to find a power plug. This is even more important when you hang out in Marc Augé’s “non-places”. Most of time, it’s in these areas that owners of the infrastructures are trying to design different ways to prevent you from accessing it. Even when there are still plugs for vacuum cleaners or christmas trees, there are always some possibilities to show you that you’re not welcome to steal a bit of volts.

In Life in the Real-time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism, Anthony Townsend deals with the implications of new mobile communication on contemporary urbanization. Unlike preceding technologies such as automobiles or telephones, Townser argues that mobile phones may not results in “enormous physical upheavals” (such as suburbian low-rises or CBD skyscrapers). What may happen is rather that mobile communication may rewrite the rules of spatial/temporal communication turning decision-making in everyday life as something more complex and less predictable. This will eventually lead to more decentralization, more interactions… which will “speed the metabolism of urban systems” with more “activity and productivity”. Hence a situation where we have a “real-time city in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously”.

What are the consequences of this situation according to Townsend? Some excerpts:

“Mobile communications technologies reinforce the competitive advantage of central city business districts by making them more efficient, yet at the same time make megalopolitan automobile-based urban sprawl manageable and livable. This dramatically complicates emerging internal conflicts within the field of city planning on issues such as New Urbanism and urban sprawl by undermining the existing technological space-time regimes that have both driven the trends and framed debate.

Second, and far more importantly, massive decentralization of control and coordination of urban activities threatens the very foundations of city planning – a profession based upon the notion that technicians operating from a centralized agency can make the best decisions on resource allocation and management and act upon these decisions on a citywide basis. “

Why do I blog this? Townsend’s idea of the “intensification of interactions” as a consequence of mobile communication is interesting, and different form people who keeps advocating for a so-called “end of space/world is flat” motto. While some people are trying to find the material impacts of mobile phones on cities (new building forms, etc.), his insistence on a qualitative influence is interesting.

What is then pertinent in this paper is Townsend’s proposal for urbanists to go beyond classical tools (”the widespread bit-by-bit reconstruction of cities is going largely unnoticed by planners accustomed to visualizing cities through aerial photographs“). Classical tools are also problematic because of their centralized perspective approach, which will prevent urbanists to grasp the ever-increasing changes of city metabolism. Therefore, there is a need for new paradigms in urban planning such as more complex models of swarm intelligence (he mentions StarLogo but there might lots of other and more advanced models).

In this post, I mentioned this bike rental service called velo’v in Lyon (Paris has velib, Brussels has cyclocity, etc.). They’re managed by JCDecaux and you can read Re*Move for an analysis of this. What is interesting is to observe the side practices around these bikes. Two examples:

Look how here the saddle is rotated, which is a trick used by people to show that the bike does not work well (or a part is broken):

In the second example, a part of the bike has been painted in pink by ACTUP activitists (in paris they covered saddle with pink tissue):

Why do I blog this? going through some pictures I’ve taken recently, look at emerging patterns, observe what that means for urban computing. In these cases, it’s the “bottom-up innovation” aspect that I find intriguing and how the infrastructure that has been put in place by JCDecaux is apprehended, the creativity around it and what this means to rethink these artifacts in the city of the near future.

Certainly, material for a talk concerning “bottom-up innovation and urban computing”

Morning read in the train this morning was “A Framework of Place as a Tool for Designing Location-Based Applications” by Anna Vallgarda. The paper is about a “framework of place” defined through interviews with architects, that aims at informing the development of location-based applications. The author describes what are the structure and properties of place that are important for architects as potentially influencing the conception of “how human beings perceive their presence in place”.

The point is that developing applications based on context require the knowledge and meaning of the significant parameters of the place where it should work. That’s why she reviews different “location models” (aura model, nexus model, etc). TRying to summarize the framework she describes lead me to:

“To recapitulate, the concept of place refers to the physical order of objects; it is the physical boundaries within which we act. This framework is an account of what such boundaries contain (and their potential attributes).

Atmosphere:
Light: northern, southern, artificial or strong/weak or direct/indirect
Color: cold/warm or strong/pale or red, yellow, blue
Materials: concrete, tree, glass, stone, clay, tile or rough/soft
Proportions: human scale or large industry building
Shape: circular, square, blurred
Vertical position: floor or altitude
Temperature: Celsius or Fahrenheit
Air/wind: clean air or wind speed
Sound: machine, animal, human or high/low

Activities:
Entrances: bodily, visual, audible or mediated/direct or easy/difficult
Functionality: bathroom, kitchen, playground
Resources: power, water, gas, WiFi

Hierarchies:
Social: home – community garden – town-hall square (enables social navigation)
Proportion: house – apartment building – industrial area (enables physical/social navigation)
Indoor/Outdoor; bed room – balcony – plaza (enables physical/social navigation)

Infrastructures:
Type Modalities Measures Enables
Bodily: foot, car etc. (measure: meters, miles) (enables movement, overview, social interactions)
Visual: direct, mediated (measure: clarity) (enables: visual contact, overview, social interactions)
Audible: direct, mediated (measure: decibel) (enables: audible contact, social interactions)
Material: water, power etc. (measure: liters, voltage) (enables: various activities)“

Why do I blog this? as I am interested in the UX of location-based application, this sort of framework is interesting as it aims at “establishing a more nuanced notion of location”, which is often a problem (as location is often limited to a dot on a map without any thoughts about granularity or contextual problems). As the author mentions,it would be good to complement it with environmental psychology, cultural geography, and anthropology.

It’s also limited to indoor locations, I may find interesting to repeat this work and complement the model at the city level, with urban planners or transport/infrastructure practitioners for example.

Reading “Urban Computing and Its Discontents” by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard was a good move, as I am currently cobbling some notes about locative media and urban implications. This book is part of as a series called “Architecture and Situated Technologies Pamphlet” which addresses the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism.

I won’t go into all the aspects of this pamphlet and will rather focus on the elements I found relevant for my own research and activities. I found it very insightful with regards to (1) the implications/impacts of urban computing on architecture/urban environment, (2) the methodological discussion about how architects, “technologists” and user experience researchers can benefit from each others.

So how Greenfield and Shepard describes the implications of ubicomp/everyware/ambient informatics? I spotted 6 types as these excerpts show:

“

1. These projects [locative media] share a common interest in altering how we locate and orient ourselves within cities, and subsequently navigate through them. (…) it suggests a shift from material/tangible cues (streets, squares, rivers, monuments, transportation hubs) to immaterial/ambient ones through which we form our mental maps. [other cues to be added to what Kevin Lynch described in “The Image of the City”]
2. location-based services (…) operate on the scale of individual patterns of movement. What about information that has the potential to affect larger patterns of movement and activity within the city? (…) dynamic signs that correlated data gathered from throughout the local area, that inferred higher-level fact patterns from this data, and then everted them, made them public in that larger-than-life way
3. expand the reach of signage and advertising in dense urban spaces. (…) What happens when mobile and pervasive technologies are used to subtract this kind of information from the physical world, reducing rather than adding to the visual field of the street? (…) “Every extension is also an amputation.” [McLuhan] (…) So what happens when all that crashes—as it surely will from time to time? (…) What happens when you’ve got a generation of people who are used to following these ambient cues around, and the cues go away?
4. redefines surveillance (…) the ability to correlate disparate datapoints, to draw inferences about probable patterns of behavior, to anticipate emergent phenomena
5. You’ve got privacy issues: do you tell people that you’re gathering information from them? If so—and I hope you do—how do you inform them in a way that lets them make a meaningful choice as to whether or not they want to be in this place?
6. You’ve got issues like deconfliction and precedence to consider: whose orders have priority in this space?

“

Another aspect of interest here is the discussion about where architects and technologists sit. Adam advances that architects are “further along in imagining what cities look and feel like under the condition of ambient informatics than technologists are“. To which, Shepard agrees by claiming how architecture is indeed one of the oldest “situated” technologies since buildings have long been designed to adapt to different sites, climates, or cultures over time. However, he thoughtfully criticizes the way mainstream work treat “interactive” architecture by focusing on a limited mode of interaction in which system only responds to input. Referring to Cedric Price, he details how “designing truly responsive
systems entails more than the technical manifestation of a one-to-one reaction between input and output (simple goals). Higher-level interactions involve conversations between people and buildings that are capable of mutually learning patterns of activity and adapting to changing intentions (complex goals)“.

Mark goes on by explaining how our experience of the city is not only shaped by urban form but by various media and ICT. The challenge is then not to oppose the virtual and the actual as a “strict dichotomy” but rather a continuity or a gradient. This argument is very close to a talk by Christophe Guignard I’ve attended last summer, in which he compared technologies with the light spectrum.

A last quote I found fundamental concerns the methodology Mark Shepard suggest to move forward:

“it would open new sites of practice to the architectural imagination. By studying the complex set of spatial practices people engage with (and through) computing in urban environments, architects would be better positioned to ascertain which aspects of the built environment are truly relevant today, and which need to be completely reimagined.”“

Why do I blog this? currently working on writings and talks about how ubicomp affect the urban environments, this material is close to things I already noted, so it’s good to see some resonance. The notion of locative media as cues to be integrated in Kevin Lynch’s typology seems now very common as I stumbled into it few times this week.

The whole pamphlet is very valuable and the confrontation (well it’s not that much of a confrontation) of Adam and Mark’s ideas is very insightful. More importantly, the discussion about technological determinism at the end is a topic that would need to be more investigated as it often lead to dramatic issues, especially in the press with conclusion such as “the end of space” or “X and Y technology will modify the shape of our cities” without any nuance. I’ll blog a paper by Antony Townsend about this later on.

Door entry seen in Brussels:

As the communication system is destroyed, people write their name directly on the wall… and one can see how names are updated over time. It’s then possible to read the “history” of the building by looking at who lived there (and make assumptions based on the ethnicity of names). I would be curious to know (and see) who shade the previous names. What does that mean for urban computing?

(I removed the building number on the street, and some other information to avoid finding where this is located).

This morning in the french news, a story of furious commuters, unhappy with the delay of their trains who stopped a high-speed train (TGV) in France. After few weeks of transport strikes and regular delay, the commuters on this line were so edgy that they warn the station manager that they would stop the TGV. As the article says, it’s about “TGV hitch-hiking”, a very discreet practice.

Why do I blog this? in terms of (sub) computing urban or mobility applications would there be some interesting applications for transport regulation to think about based on this sort of practice?

Had a glance this morning at Eric Kabisch’s Masters Thesis called “Landscape Denatured: Digitizing the Wild“. He basically describe 4 technologically enabled artworks that explore ways in which digital technologies impact society and culture, focusing particularly on the impacts of information technologies on physical and cultural geography: Datascape, Sonic Panoramas, Unexceptional.net network visualizer and SignalPlay.

What I found interesting is the framework provided for analyzing these works of art:

“To develop a framework for investigation of the processes by which digital technologies, their affordances and their artifacts shape and embed themselves in the world, I will break the process into three stages: the measuring and capturing of natural processes (sensing); the mining, analysis and representation of captured observations and models (narrative); and the introduction of these models into the world through physical or methodological means (propagation).

This framework is useful because it successfully corresponds to many of the individual cyclical and triadic frameworks that inspired the individual artworks composing the body of this thesis work. (…) It parallels notions of geographic information gathering, map production, and map-based decision-making. And it is congruent with Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the functional cycle (or Funktionskreis) whereby an organism’s subjective environment is continuously constructed through its sensing of the environment, processing of the information, and continued engagement and action within the world.“

Why do I blog this? It’s interesting wrt what I discussed here and what Fabien’s reactions. See for instance the parallel between Funktionskreis and wiki city.

Besides, I quite liked this part of the conclusion:

“Our digitization of the world thus far is coarse, leading to gaps and pixelation. As we fill in those gaps through models and assumptions we blur certain details, while artifacts of the process are categorized as anomalies. In geographic information systems, this grey area is referred to as “uncertainty” and is not often reflected in end- user representations such as maps. The wild, ultimately, is that which we cannot record, understand, represent or control“

The ACM technews recently reported on a study about an intriguing experiment in Second Life (presented at the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents):

“University College London researchers are using an automated avatar in Second Life to study the psychology of Second Life users. The automated avatar, called SL-bot, has been used to see if Second Life users expect other avatars to give their avatar the same amount of personal space as is normally expected in real life. In one experiment, SL-bot searched for avatars that were alone. When an isolated avatar was found, SL-bot would approach the avatar, greet the avatar by name, wait two seconds, and then move to within the virtual equivalent of 1.2 meters. SL-bot then recorded the other avatar’s reaction for 10 seconds and sent the data back to the researchers. Out of the 28 avatars approached in this manner, 12 moved away and 20 also responded with text chat. Another experiment observed pairs of avatars as they interacted and found that users are, on average, six times more likely to shift position when someone comes within 1.2 meters. The findings show that people value their virtual personal space much like people value their real personal space. During an experiment where undergraduate students with scripts interacted with subject avatars, it was found that female avatars protect their personal space less than male avatars, reflecting real world behavior.“

Why do I blog this? apart form the ethical discussion about the use of virtual test subjects, this study is interesting in terms of digital space usage. Result are actually very close to what Jeffrey, P., & Mark, G. described in “Constructing Social Spaces in Virtual Environments: A Study of Navigation and Interaction” (In K. Höök, A. Munro, D. Benyon, (Eds.) Personalized and Social Navigation in Information Space, March 16-17, 1998, Stockholm (SICS Technical Report T98:02) 1998) , Stockholm: Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), pp. 24-38). These authors found studied a 3D virtual world and showed that proxemics can be maintained in virtual environments. Even there, a certain social distance is kept between participants’ avatars. They noticed how spatial invasions produced anxiety-arousing behavior (like verbal responses, discomfort and overt signs of stress) with attempts to re-establish a preferred physical distance similar to the distance obverted in the physical world.

Stigmergic Collaboration is a model for the self-organisation of ants, artificial life and swarm intelligence. Wikipedia defines it as “a method of indirect communication in a self-organizing emergent system where its individual parts communicate with one another by modifying their local environment”. It emerges from the work of a french biologist who coined the term in conjunction with his research o termites behavior.

As described by Mark Elliott:

“Pierre-Paul Grasse first coined the term stigmergy in the 1950s in conjunction with his research on termites. Grasse showed that a particular configuration of a termite’s environment (as in the case of building and maintaining a nest) triggered a response in a termite to modify its environment, with the resulting modification in turn stimulating the response of the original or a second worker to further transform its environment. Thus the regulation and coordination of the building and maintaining of a nest was dependent upon stimulation provided by the nest, as opposed to an inherent knowledge of nest building on the individual termite’s part.“

Why do I blog this? Although I won’t enter in the big debate about how this model can be translated to human/behavior (ants/termites =! human beings), I think that stigmergic collaboration is a very interesting notion to understand the future of urban computing. Coordination is explained through the use and production of artefacts by the individuals, for example collective nest building, or the production of chemical traces. What is interesting is the notion of “artefact production”, humans do not leave and rely so much on chemical traces BUT their activity in the environment leaves traces… especially if you think about mobile phone/bluetooth/wifi interactions.

Seen last week in Paris, near République:

A piece of street art (made out of stickers) that indicates cardinal directions.
I know it’s not meant to be an urban sign but it’s a curious user-generated/DIY city elements. Standing around it for half an hour (I was waiting for a friend there), it was funny to see people avoiding walking on it: the status of the sign was higher than expected.

Two other uses of podotactiles encountered recently, two possible affordances:

Cuieng thanks to podotactiles experienced this morning in Paris, France:

These thin podotactiles literally pave the way to a shop when exiting from the subway at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie.

Another affordance of podotactiles is to use to avoid having stickers on certain surface, it’s less common and it’s exactly the same model as the one used to pedestrians stops on sidewalk edges.

Why do I blog this? From the spatial/design perspective, collecting and analyzing these elements is interesting, especially when you observe people’s behavior (rubbing sneakers). It seems that I start having quite a bunch of examples like this, it’s interesting IMO to note the different affordances as well characteristics such as shapes (thing, round), length (short and discrete, or continuous).

The complexity of indications on street pavement in Geneva:
- Green is to represent tram paths but the information is for pedestrians, cars and bikes since the tram pilot knows obviously that he/she only go straight.
- Red is to represent bike paths: useful for cars and pedestrians to know where NOT to go since it’s actually the portion of bike lanes near cross-roads
- White is to represent road/street boundaries for cars, bikes and trams (stop/do not cross the line)
- Yellow on the street is for pedestrians (to cross the road + to show the limits of the bike lanes)
- not present on the picture is also the podotactiles on the sidewalk, for pedestrians.

Why do I blog this? I find intriguing how the use of such signs for cueing behavior is more and more complex. See also the subway platform example.

In Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space , Bell and Dourish addresses the different layering of infrastructures in any urban environments: it’s physical (topologies), historical and cultural. On top of that, ubiquitous computing adds new infrastructural layers. This is made apparent by activities such as wandering around to find a Wifi or cell phone signal, or locate Mecca through mobile services.

The central argument of this short workshop paper lies in what follows:

“spaces have structure and meaning for us in terms of our relationship to a variety of infrastructures of action and interpretation.
(…)
space is organized not just physically but culturally; cultural understandings provide a frame for encountering space as meaningful and coherent, and for relating it to human activities. Cross-cultural explorations of urban experience can draw attention to these issues.
(…)
architecture is all about boundaries and transitions and their intersection with human and social practice. (…) We need to think architecturally about the mobile and wireless technologies that we develop and deploy, the human side of infrastructures.
(…)
new technologies inherently cause people to re-encounter spaces. This isn’t a question of mediation, but rather one of simultaneous layering. (…) we are creating not a virtual but a thoroughly physical infrastructure, and we need to think about it as one that is interwoven with the existing physical structure of space.
(…)
there is already a complex interaction between space, infrastructure, culture, and experience. The spaces into which new technologies are deployed are not stable, not uniform, and not given. Technology can destabilize and transform these interactions, but will only ever be one part of the mix.“

Why do I blog this? although very short, this article summarizes the main points about urban computing issues. They do set the trends that they will develop in further papers and it’s relevant to see the main highlights here with concrete call for research actions. I am personnaly very intrigued by “the human side of infrastructures” and the hybridation of these spaces.

Bell, G. and Dourish, P. 2004. Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing on the Urban Frontier (Ubicomp 2004, Nottingham, UK.)

Knitting as a the 21st way to hack the city. A phenomenon I documented here (see also Metropolis here and there).

Gentle and sweet. Seen last week-end in Paris near Gare du Nord.