Tech- Architecture- Design- City

“How can architects relate to digital media?” TMC keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’

2010-02-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

(download as PDF >>)

How can architects relate to digital media?

The Mobile City keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’: outcomes and further thoughts

written by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal

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URBAN COMPUTING AND LOCATIVE MEDIA

2010-01-27T19:40:00.000-08:00

Anne Galloway, of Purse Lip Square Jaw, has published her PhD.

“The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage and research blogging, which are presented through experimental and recombinant textual strategies; and it contributes to the field of science and technology studies by bringing together actor-network theory with the sociology of expectations in order to empirically evaluate an area of cutting-edge design.”

Bio Mapping / Emotion Mapping

2009-12-20T21:10:00.000-08:00

by Christian Nold

2004 - ongoing

Bio Mapping is revolutionary methodology and tool for visualising people's reactions to the external world.

Over the last five years, over 2000 people have taken part in community mapping projects in over 25 cities across the globe. In structured workshops, participants re-explore their local area with the use of a unique device invented by Christian Nold which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. On their return, a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal.

The unique methodology of this project involves working with groups of people to interpret and analyse the data and adding annotating onto these individual emotion tracks. Through this process communal Emotion Maps of lots of people's emotion data are constructed which are packed full of personal observations and highlight the issues that people feel strongly about.

Over the last years Christian Nold has used this unique methodology and tool in many diverse contexts from art, community development, science research, architectural planning and large scale political consultations. Please get in touch if you would like to set a similar project in your area.

When we become aware of our own and each others unique body reactions to the environment we can create a better world!

Read Emotional Cartography edited by Christian Nold - free PDF download

Some examples:

Stockport Emotion Map

East Paris Emotion Map

San Francisco Emotion Map

Greenwich Emotion Map

Brentford Biopsy

Swords > Ploughshares > Swords

Unfortunately, in recent years there have been so many people, companies and institutions who have tried to copy or imitate the Bio Mapping device and use it for banal, exploitative or anti-social purposes.

For this reason I would like to make it clear that the Bio Mapping device and Emotion Mapping concept are Copyrighted and Trademarked!

For other work and more information please look at:

www.softhook.com

christian at softhook dot com

ME++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

2009-12-18T23:20:00.000-08:00

Sensing Space (Architecture Positioning) (Paperback)

2009-12-16T20:07:00.000-08:00

The incorporation of new technology into architecture continues to define our everyday lives, whether it be tiny sensors woven almost invisibly into materials, buildings which communicate with their surroundings via the facades, or "intelligent" houses that adapt to fit their inhabitants. Sensing Space investigates the potential of interactive technologies as an integral component of contemporary architecture.

Amazon

Appendix 3 - Sample of a Proposal for a Thesis or Dissertation

2009-12-16T20:02:00.001-08:00

Link

The Proposal Writing Guide: How to Write a Winning Thesis Proposal

2009-12-16T19:31:00.000-08:00

Excepts from an article about how to write a thesis proposal — written by Dr. Wendy Carter for FinishLine, the free monthly newsletter of TA-DA!™, which provides tips, tools, and techniques for completing a thesis or dissertation

LINK

Will ubiquitous wireless change the nature of urban spaces?

2009-12-11T16:24:00.000-08:00

Link

December 2, 2009 at 10:05 AM by Esme Vos

I am attending the Supernova Conference in San Francisco where the theme is “Change Networks” or how pervasive connectivity has changed how we relate to one another. We usually think of pervasive connectivity in the online context, but how does pervasive connectivity alter physical space, in particular, cities and the human experience the city? That was the subject of an intriguing talk entitled “Public Objects — Connected Things and Civic Responsibilities in the Networked City” by Adam Greenfield (Nokia).

Greenfield began his talk by pointing out that by the end of 2012, 20 percent of non-video Internet traffic will come from networked sensors, generating many of us call machine-to-machine communications, although these communications can also occur between buildings, bus shelters and other objects we do not usually refer to as machines.

Greenfield’s thesis is that networked objects – be they machines, buildings or other urban structures – are changing the way humans experience the urban space and act against the way cities have evolved. The move towards object-to-object communications seems inevitable given that IPv6 provides a seemingly infinite number of IP addresses so that urban space will soon be “addressable, queryable and scriptable.”

One example cited by Greenfield is London Tower Bridge which has its own Twitter account and tweets its status: if the bridge is open, closed, etc. Soon, every object will be alerting us, addressing us, and perhaps monitoring us as well. But where does this lead? Is this what are cities for?

Cities have traditionally been havens of refuge for people escaping the cloying intimacy of small towns and villages. They have always been places where people took on another identity to build a new life and create better opportunities for themselves. They have also been sanctuaries by people called “revolutionaries” and hunted down by those wielding power. In cities it has been easy for these people to blend in and “disappear”. What happens when there’s no place to hide?

But plausible deniability and anonymity are becoming more difficult, says Greenfield, and this is not what cities are for. Greenfield refers to Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” philosophy of urban planning where people are around watching out for their neighborhood, but not delving too much into the lives of their neighbors. He cites a small building in New York where residents knew one another via informal greetings in hallways and elevators. They lived together quite peacefully in that fashion until someone in the building decided to set up a forum/social network for the residents. Suddenly, the neighbors began finding out more intimate details about their neighbors and within six months, many of the residents moved out. The turnover of residents in this building rose dramatically. The key to living together in close quarters with so many people lies in not knowing too much about them.

Greenfield moved on to a more disturbing image of a city where the absence of anonymity infringes upon people’s rights to privacy and their ability to dissent from those who wield political and economic power. In a society where photos are indexable, taggable and uploaded to the Internet, your face can always be found and detected not just by humans, but by facial recognition software. This software is already being used in many cities’ wireless video surveillance projects. Greenfield argues that imposing the logic of networked sociality (e.g. of the Facebook and MySpace variety) onto a city destroys the urban experience.

A question we must ask is this: Who benefits from all this data gathering? Greenfield says that it is those who wield political and economic power who gain from the data that we generate through our movements, our photographic imprints, our own activity on networks, both social and physical. He urges that this data not be monopolized by a few companies, but that they be available for all to use via open source/creative commons licenses. Data should inspire local grassroots control, not control of people by a few who benefit disproportionately at the expense of the public.

SlideShare: Augmenting the City

2009-12-11T13:49:00.000-08:00

Alessandro Aurigi: Augmented Urban Spaces

View more presentations from Frederik Temmermans.

bluetoothDesktop: Bluetooth Library for Processing

2009-12-05T23:42:00.000-08:00

Link: extrapixel.ch

Reference

bluetoothDesktop allows Processing sketches to send and receive data via Bluetooth wireless networks. It is an adapted version of Mobile Processing bluetooth library, written by Francis Li. The code and documentation material (except the examples) are almost entirely his work. Classes and methods are almost the same as in Mobile Processing Bluetooth library.

bluetoothDesktop works great together with mobile phones using Mobile Processing and its bluetooth library, but should be able to communicate with any other Bluetooth enabled device.

Bluetooth is a radio standard for short-range "personal area networks." The standard includes communication protocols for discovering other devices and the software services running on those devices.

Using this library, a Processing sketch running on a computer with a JSR-82 implementation can connect to other Bluetooth devices as well as act as a service that other devices can connect to.

Excerpt from the book - Telecity : Information Technology and Its Impact on City Form

2009-12-02T21:02:00.001-08:00

• The physicalist perspective: The image of the city / Excerpt from the book - Telecity : Information Technology and Its Impact on City Form

• Designers and physical planners view the city through its materialistic time-space relationships within social symbolism. City form is the result of various configurations of these relationships expressed in everyday city life. Lynch(1960), who established the conceptual basis for the study of urban design, identified the five basic components of physical form. The visual analysis of a place is expressed in terms of paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks.

• Path accommodate mode and sense of movement. While moving through them, people observe the city (street patterns and transportation networks). Along them, other physical elements are arranged and related to interactions and social behavior. Urban patterns, generally referred to as paths, consist of the network of habitual or potential lines of movement through the urban complex and as such, are the most potent means of achieving an ordered whole. Nodes are strategic foci that are typically junctions of paths or places for important activity. Because directional decisions must be made at junction, people pay greater attention to such places and perceive nearby elements with more clarity than normal.

• Elements of the city form overlap and penetrate one another. None exists in isolation, but always in relation to its surroundings. These physical elements compose a "language" to understand and manipulate the urban environment. To understand a visual element, an object should exhibit a sense of oneness, structured with other elements, and have meaning to the city inhabitants. The perceived elements and their various structures construct in cognitive schema that identifies the city. City form is reflected in our minds as mental maps. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all.

• The image of the city is the collective overlapped images of individuals.

• Since the image of the city is temporal creation, the change of perception occurs with any new state, mood, or type of activity practiced by the city' inhabitants. Speed of action and purpose of movement may alter the observer's perception in gathering urban elements to create a modified image of the environment. A vivid example is the invention of cars.

• Nodes become the most important element in the image of telecity. The image will depend mainly on the experience of its population through places of interaction rather than through movement in city paths. Nodes become the main components in structuring the image on places of action. The image will be related to the perceived image of location according to the customized observer.

• To enhance the visual image of the city, it is crucial to concentrate activities in nodes and public spaces. Environmental interpretation is dominated by the perception of virtual location of teleactivities.

• The image of the telecity does not depend on physical path patterns or hierarchical nodes, but rather on versatile nodal structures analogy to neurological nodes in the brain. If some are blocked, an alternate exists.

myGlobe project:a navigation service based on cognitive maps

2009-12-02T13:26:00.000-08:00

myGlobe project:a navigation service based on cognitive maps from fumitaka ozaki on Vimeo.

bikeware

2009-12-02T13:24:00.000-08:00

bikeware from fumitaka ozaki on Vimeo.

Bikeware is a network bicycle that can enjoy road race with others who run there at different time.The datum of users will be recorded by GPS on the Bikeware.Using this Bikeware, users will be able to compete with other riders who use this device. The routine process of going to work turns into a road race with other riders in past and future.The rule of the race is very easy and simple. The first one to cross the goal line is the winner. Route to the goal is depended on each rider so you can choose any route to reach the goal. The secret route that only you know controls victory or defeat.

Cityware - Urban Design and Pervasive Systems

2009-12-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

The goal of Cityware is to develop theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape. While architecture has shaped the built environment to satisfy urban dwellers aesthetically and to accommodate their functional needs such as face-to-face interactions and travel, pervasive systems shape electronically mediated interactions in urban space, including use of both fixed and mobile displays and wireless communication. A major issue is space and its relationship with behaviour: how do we design the space created by fusing electronically created interaction space with architecturally created physical space? Another major issue is infrastructure: how do we provide interaction and interoperability that scales up to city-scale pervasive systems, while ensuring that they function appropriately and merge aesthetically with urban spaces, materials, forms and uses?

Cityware is a multidisciplinary research project, integrating the disciplines of architecture and urban design, human-computer interaction and distributed systems. Cityware is funded through the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s WINES programme, with support from the Cityware industrial partners. Cityware began in October 2005 and runs until March 2009.

LINK

Augmented Reality Library in Processing

2009-11-26T02:19:00.000-08:00

A very primitive and limited Processing library simpleARToolKit made as a wrapper from another open source project jARToolKitwhich is a Java port of the original ARToolKit. It only works with an OpenGL sketch in Windows. The download includes the following two example sketches.

Link

Augmented Reality ARToolkit for Processing

The ARToolkit has been ported to be used with Processing.

Augmented Reality and the base of the original ARToolkit has taken the flash world by storm with the FLARToolkit and really the speed updates of the AVM2 in Flash9 and Flash10 to be able to pull off the OpenCV calculations needed on the bitmap data from each frame of a camera. It has been around quite some time but now web based engines such as Flash and now Processing can take advantage of this awesome technology.

The Simple ARToolKit Library for Processing (PC) is just a basic port of single marker AR support and it currently only runs on windows.

Den Ivanov did some cool experiments with this kit but adding the capability to do multiple markers. In his videos the processing runtime seems to process the render pretty quickly. It seems that most Flash AR is around like 5-10 frames per second for the detection.

Link

'The Urban Question' and 'The Rise of the Network Society'

2009-11-22T14:12:00.000-08:00

This text was written in 1997 and revised in June 1999 as part of the theses project 'The Informational City and the Street as Urban Form'. It takes as its startings points two compiled groups of quotations from Castells' work in the 1970s and the 1990s respectively. The development of Castells' thinking through 20 years and the tensions between his early and later works are at the focus of this tentative overview.

Castells: 1972/1977:

'Urban Culture'...is neither a concept nor a theory. It is...a myth...(which)...provide the key-words of an ideology of modernity, assimilated, in an ethnocentric way, to the social forms of liberal capitalism ... it suggest the hypothesis of a production of social content (the urban) by a trans-historical form (the city) ...(but) the city creates nothing...The link between space, the urban and a certain system of behaviour regarded as typical of 'urban culture' has no other foundation than an ideological one ...From this point of view, the problem of the definition (or redefinition) of the urban does not even arise....Such a tendency helps to reinforce the strategic role of urbanism as a political ideology and as a professional practice. (Castells: The Urban Question, 1977: p 83, 89, 90, 431, 441, 463)

Castells: 1996:

The circuits of electronic impulses is the material foundation of the information age just as the city in the merchant society and the region in the industrial society...information is the key ingredient of our social organisation...it is the beginning of a new existence...marked by the autonomy of culture vis-à-vis the material basis... (Castells: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996: p 412, 477-78)

The urban question and my question

When Manuel Castells, in 'The Urban Question' said that 'urban culture' and 'urbanism' had no other foundation than an ideological one, what was his reasons, context and purpose - and can my project on 'urbanity' survive his critique?

If the urban' is purely ideological, my case will not hold. It is therefore of decesive importance to confront Castell's claims.

Here in the beginning it should also be mentioned that 'ideological' in this context has to be understood as a system of ideas, which justifies or legitimates the subordination of one group by another, i.e. knowledge and representations characteristic of or in the interest of a class. Castell's relates to a Marxist understanding of ideology that is related to false consciousness.

To read full content

Urban Space, Technology & Community

2009-11-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

Urban Space, Technology & Community

View more presentations from linda carroli.

The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments

2009-11-21T20:12:00.000-08:00

Winner of the 1994 Lewis Mumford Prize given by the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH).

Christine Boyer faces head-on the crisis of the city in the late twentieth century, taking us on a fascinating journey through theaters and museums, panoramas and maps, buildings and institutions that are used to construct a new reading of the city as a system of representation, a complex cultural entity. Boyer brings together elements and concepts from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature, and painting in a synthetic and readable work that is broad in its reach and original in its insights. What finally emerges is a sense of the city reinvigorated with richness and potential.

The City of Collective Memory describes a series of different visual and mental models by which the urban environment has been recognized, depicted, and planned. Boyer identifies three major "maps": one common to the traditional city—the city as a work of art; one characteristic of the modern city—the city as panorama; and one appropriate to the contemporary city—the city as spectacle. It is a richly illustrated and documented study that pays considerable attention to the normally hidden and unspoken codes that regulate the order imposed on and derived from the city. A wide range of secondary historical literature and theoretical work is considered, with evident debts to structuralist analysis of urban form represented by Aldo Rossi, as well to much post-structuralist criticism from Walter Benjamin to the present.

Processing Tutorial #4

2009-11-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

Learn how to use FFT and the minim plugin in Processing.

The fourth Processing tutorial from Andy Best.

Processing Tutorial #4 from Switchboard on Vimeo.

Urban Interaction Design

2009-11-16T19:08:00.000-08:00

Link

As a reaction to an increasingly information saturated environment, approaching the critisism and reaction 'real-world' physical design with the same language and criteria that we use describe 'virtual' media could help provide insights into both. The urban information space is, like all other media, mostly controlled by capitalism (advertisng or websites) and government (highway signage and government websites).

As the public becomes the user of these spaces, graphiti and flyposting can be seen as no different from leaving a comment on a blog or guestbook or partaking in a wiki. Some forms of hacking equate to media activism, and represent a revolutionary spirit, or even the transformation of pseudo-public space away from a meer information-market, into something approaching art (whilst others are little more than incoherent srawlings).

The Human experience of space and place

2009-11-14T23:44:00.000-08:00

Gestalt Psychology

2009-11-14T23:24:00.000-08:00

Wiki

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism (German: Gestalt - "form" or "whole") of the Berlin School is a theory of mind and brain positing that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies, or that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. The Gestalt effectrefers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves. In psychology, gestaltism is often opposed to structuralism and Wundt. Often, the phrase "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts" is used when explaining Gestalt theory.

How to Live in a City

2009-11-10T01:51:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered what makes some cities better than others? In public access television pioneer George C. Stoney's 'How to Live in a City,' the argument is that it all depends on the quality of the public space.

New York City folk singer and architectural critic Eugene Ruskin guides us through unique locales which illustrate the fine line between organic and sterile urban spaces. It all depends on a place's ability to attract and sustain, even if only momentarily, a sense of community.

And while some spaces succeed and others fail, one may wonder whether if it was designer's intention to drive people away, or not.

Aside from amusingly hep score and the nostalgic longing for Old New York that the film leaves you with, Stoney & Ruskin's How to Live in a City presents a considerably modern approach to documentary filmmaking, especially when compared to other productions of the time.

See more at:

http://www.weirdovideo.com

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces - Part 1

2009-11-10T00:37:00.001-08:00

This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don't. Beginning at New York's Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.

Full film episodes can be viewed on Youtube

Constructing a sense of place: architecture and the Zionist discourse

2009-11-09T01:44:00.000-08:00

p.247 Re-placing memory

The sense of space

2009-11-09T01:39:00.000-08:00

The rise of networked society

2009-11-08T21:12:00.000-08:00

The chapter: The space of flows

Since it was Manuel Castells who created the concept, will quote at length his definition of the space of flows. Castells (1996) writes:

Our societies are constructed around flows: flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interactions, flows of images, sounds and symbols. Flows are not just one element of social organization: they are the expression of the processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life. ... Thus, I propose the idea that there is a new spatial form characteristic of social practices that dominate and shape the network society: the space of flows. The space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows. By flows I understand purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors. (p.412)

Control Space

2009-11-03T13:37:00.000-08:00

Sze Tsung leong

Project on the city: shopping

Control space is the paradigm by which shopping understands and shapes the city. It forms the cognition of shopping, determines its vision, seeps into its subconscious. it is so basic as to be, simultaneously, shopping's assumed and uncritically deployed mode of operation, its instinctual reflex, its aspiration.
For retailer, control space is driven by the need to understand, quantify, record, regulate, manipulate, and coerce the processed, circumstances, and flows that influence and determine sales. It is a meticulously assembled apparatus employed to track, in as detailed and surreptitious a manner as possible, who buys what kind of product where and how often for how much under what conditions with what kind of stimulation. In order to make these processes intelligible and useful, it has apotheosized data. Control space inaugurates the triumph of the statistical.
For consumer, control space is conveniently packaged for accessibility, efficiency, entertainment, fun, spectacle, freedom of choice, security. It much appear benign. It thiis sense it's one of the most effective marketing tools ever invented. What could be more appealing than the promise of off-the-shelf, do-it-yourself omnipotence?
Space is evaluated through an entirely modernized vocabulary: no longer is it geometrically composed or visualized, but computed, calibrated, assessed, predicted, optimized.
How totalizing is control space? Since it is mainly engineered to optimize and maximize profits at minimum expense, at the most rapid rate, and under the most voraciously competitive conditions, its focus is inferently short lived, inherently desperate, inherently capricious. Control space is constantly searching for the next realm of exploitation, the next window of opportunity. In exacerbating instabilities for its own benefit, inf artificially accelerating the cycles of decline and obsolescence, and in constantly shifting its focus from one domain to another, control space inevitably produces gaps, contradictions, perhaps even moments of freedom situated not so much outside but along side and within control.

LAYAR AUGMENTED REALITY BROWSER FOR IPHONE NOW AVAILABLE IN APPLE APP STORE

2009-11-02T23:43:00.000-08:00

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

SPRXmobile announced Wednesday that the long-awaitediPhone version its Layar augmented reality browser is now available in the Apple App Store, free-of-charge (note: for background on the Layar platform--which leverages smartphones' integrated GPS and compass capabilities to display layers of interactive digital information on top of real-time video on those phones' camera screens, thus effectively transforming reality into a giant, clickable interactive video--see the articles published on itvt.com, June 17th, July 9th, August 18th and September 27th, and the interview with SPRXmobile co-founder, Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, published July 16th). The browser launched this spring on the Android platform: at the time, developers were unable to publish iPhone AR applications in the Apple App Store, because the iPhone SDK lacked public API's for manipulating live video, and the method that AR developers had found to work around this limitation--via a restricted tool called "Camera Viewer"--was not approved by Apple. This situation (which resulted in a number of AR developers launching a petition to Apple Developer Relations, asking the company to "provide a public API to access live video in real time, on the iPhone") was remedied by the launch last month of iPhone OS 3.1, which officially supports AR.

In other augmented reality news:

IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned restaurant information/recommendation service, Urbanspoon, has added AR functionality to its iPhone application. The new functionality, dubbed "Scope," is triggered when users aim their iPhone at the horizon. It presents them with icon overlays that provide basic information on nearby restaurants (type, distance, popularity, price) and that can be clicked/tapped in order to access more detailed information (including reviews). The further away a restaurant is, the smaller its icon, and the less popular it is, the grayer its icon. The app also allows users to adjust it to compensate for any shortcomings in its GPS positioning.
UK artist, Chris O'Shea, has created an augmented reality artwork, called "Hand from Above," on the BBC's Big Screen display in Liverpool. Pedestrians walking by the display see a giant hand poking, tickling, flicking and otherwise interfering with their video image. Video of the artwork, which was created using openFrameworks and openCV, is embedded above.

Link

Nokia Mixed Reality Demo

2009-11-02T18:57:00.000-08:00

Urban Digital Media

2009-11-02T15:25:00.000-08:00

Link

The Poetics of Augmented Space - Lev Manovitch

2009-10-26T11:15:00.001-07:00

In this article Lev Manovitch describes how spaces are transformed by the multimedia, dynamic information that fills them and how our perception of those places changes in accordance to the multimedia information. He describes the relationship between the space and the information, how it functions and how the information relates to the space. He calls these spaces augmented spaces as our perception of them goes beyond the actual space into the virtual dimension of information.
What struck me in this article was how much we actually interact with spaces like this without even realizing it, by using "media as extensions of self" (McLuhan), that is cell phones, PDAs, computer screens to interact with a place that beyond any of that might just as well be a box with a sign (as described in Learning from Las Vegas). The invisible layer of information transforms the box into a duck (ref. Learning from Las Vegas) offering us an augmented reality. An augmented space is in a constant change being continuously shaped by information, media, perception, people. At the same time is poses a very important architectural question: should architects just resume to having a box with a million signs, or should the space be immersive and present an innovative approach to the augmented space. I think a good example for this would be designs of new malls or theaters. A recently opened mall in the New York Area (http://www.tangeroutlet.com/deerpark) is designed as a small Italian city with street signs in Italian and Italian architecture while older designs from the same outlet chain (http://www.tangeroutlet.com/riverhead) are just boxes with signs that explain to people what is inside. Another mall that will soon open in Romania show how architects are choosing more and more designs that are self addressing and somehow support what is inside and the interaction that is expected there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cotroceni_park.jpg).
The new media is shaping the architecture in such a way that nothing can be experienced anymore without the influence of information technology or media and we are faced with a dilemma. If the actual space is already being shaped and altered so much by the virtual space, should we stop focusing on the "physical" architecture and focus more on the virtual architecture or should we blend them all together so that there is no actual difference between the real and the virtual, but everything is experienced as a whole?

Pablo Valbuena: Augmented space

2009-10-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

Building facade is augmented by digital technology.

Link

Responsive Environment

2009-10-17T22:11:00.001-07:00

Responsive Environment book

> Traditionally , architecture has been about hardware, about form and envlosure by means of floors, walls, and a roof. Designers such as Dunne+ Raby, whose FLIRT project used mobile telephones and software programs to investigate the relationship between digital communication and how people experience their environments, have radically departed from the traditional architectural notions of space.

> This book also focuses on the relationship between the physical and digital, an 'in-between' space. Architecture sets its own programmatic agenda, without becoming art, and becomes intelligent , cybernetic, like natural artefactss that are themselves able able to evolve and adapt to their environment, their inhabitants and other sensory stimuli.

> Artists such as James Turrell and Krzysztof Wodiczko were imaging new functions for urban objects and spaces.

> Technologically- mediated ecologies

> We are using the reality that contemporary environments are dense with data and pollution. Living with the consequences can be made into something positive.

> Considering future living in urban environments with an ever-increasing electronic component. Its electro-physical topography is defined by a number of design propositions for housing, employing 'noise farmers', and interactive ecosystem of interactive objects and sensor parks, areas of fenced off land with an array of monitoring and display system responding to the electro-physical flux of the environment. We are using the reality that contemporary environments are dense with data and pollution.

> Like Haque, Swiss architects Decosterd + Rahm have explores the unstable impact of environments on our metabolish, sensory states of being and perception of our temporality. They want to understand better our relationship between the material world, of which architecture is a part with its specific constructions, and our ambient environments, and do this by creating prototype and demostration spaces, as well as modifying control of water, light, and air. By bringing about a physiological dstortion and expression through biotechnological means, affecting temperature, humidity and light, they provoke reactions and confrontations by the body. Most of their installations to date have not been about form, size, colour of representation, like typical architecture, but about enlarging a sense of sensory information- or making, for their own means. a conscious lack of it, in the case of HORMONIUM.

>> In 1980's and 90's a good deal of cutting-edge architecture relied upon theory alone. Now it ironically risks becoming a screen-based medium in its adherence to imagery, with drawbacks as well as advantages. Art, meanwhile, has long since embraced the idea of the event. The very nature of responsive environments, involving functioning through interfaces that facilitate interaction, is a form of of mediation between the inner world of the self and the outside world, and it presupposes some kind of event that is not wholly pre-programmed. Input from the real world received vis sensors is essential, as are output devices in the form of actuators(mechanisms that transform an electrical input signal into motions ), display or other sensory phenomena to engage with users. THat engagement is multi-modal across all the senses.

The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space

2009-10-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

Editorial Reviews

Review

'If only more new media commentators had this level of historical-critical reference, engaging, good stories, and a degree of wonder at what media and windows bring to the city, to life...' - John Hutnyk, Academic Director, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London

'Just when you thought the last word had been said about cities and media, along comes Scott McQuire to breathe new life into the debate. When revisiting existing pathways, his always ingenious eyes produce startling and original insights. When striking out into new territory, he opens up before us inspiring new vistas. I love this book' - James Donald, Professor of Film Studies, University of New South Wales

'A book that contains sometimes audacious segues, that crams into a single chapter more insights and illustrations than seems feasible, yet which ties all threads together through a consistent, theoretically rich analysis of the interplay of media and city... Writing with effusiveness uncharacteristic of back-cover blurbs on academic tomes, James Donald says "I love this book". But I will end by echoing his praise, and make a promise to readers: you will love The Media City, too' - European Journal of Communication

'Compared to the urban studies literature of say David Harvey or Ed Soja, McQuire writes with a much greater architectural sensibility. His argument is that we move from a rather centred space of the classical renaissance city to a 'relational space' where past and future are juxtaposed not in simple Newtonian chronology but in complex relation to present. Such a transformed urbanism and media (compared with say Renaissance and Beaux Arts perspective) moves from what might be seen as the panoptic to a serial succession of photographic shots, of film frames, of movements along vistas at speed.

At stake is a city that is continually redefined by the media and understood along the lines of McQuire's quite novel media theory. At stake is a vision of media, which are too ubiquitous in the multiplication of screens, surveillance and other devices/interfaces in private and public space to primarily function any more as representations. Media in this (McQuire's) context are no longer primarily a set of representations, but constitute the very substance and fabric of urban public and private space' - Scott Lash, Goldsmiths, University of London

'…refreshingly clear, getting to grips with some of the key concepts of urban sociology in a way that moves beyond the wistful evocation and splatter of undigested terms that characterises so much academic writing on culture and cities… a clear historical and theoretically informed look at the city over the last 200 years… give us one of the most cogent accounts we have had for some time' - Media, Culture & Society

Product Description

Offering social commentary at the deepest levels of historical and critical reference, The Media City links Myspace to Howard Hughes; trams to cinema; security cameras to exploding buildings; reality TV to Marx; and Lenin on privacy to Kracauer on the mass ornament. Wide-ranging and richly illustrated, it intersects disciplines and connects phenomena which are too often left isolated from each other to propose a new way of understanding public and private space and social life in contemporary cities.

The Informational City: Economic Restructuring and Urban Development

2009-10-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

The cities and the regions of the world are being transformed under the combined impact of a restructuring of the capitalist system and a technological revolution. This is the thesis of this book, now in paperback. Castells not only brings together an impressive array of evidence to support it but puts forward a new body of theory to explain it. He analyzes the interaction between information technology, economic restructuring and socio-spatial change through the empirical observation of contemporary national, urban and regional processes in the capitalist world, with emphasis on the United States. The author summarizes a very wide range of evidence of urban and regional development, and isolates the causes and consequences of the processes and trends that may be observed.

CUD Seoul - Smart Transportation Program

2009-10-09T19:09:00.001-07:00

CUD Seoul - Smart Transportation Program

View more presentations from Shane Mitchell.

Intel Lab Seattle

2009-10-09T18:10:00.000-07:00

Link

Stephen Graham - Sentient Cities

2009-10-07T23:30:00.001-07:00

Stephen Graham - Sentient Cities

View more presentations from mobilecity2008.

Autodesk Announces Incheon, Korea as Digital City

2009-10-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

5th November 2008 — Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), a leader of design innovation software and technologies, today announced it is working with the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) and the Incheon Urban Development Corporation (IUDC) to cooperate in the creation of Asia’s first Digital City for Incheon, Korea—the ‘Tomorrow City’ in Song-do City. Autodesk has designated Incheon as the second pilot city of its Digital City initiative, after announcing Salzburg, Austria in July.

Autodesk, IFEZ, and IUDC will work together to develop a Digital City--a collaborative environment created around a detailed 3D city model that allows users from the public, city government, construction and business communities to leverage technology solutions so they can visualise, analyse, and simulate real-world city scenarios to improve decision making and provide a common environment for sharing information. The objective of today’s announcement is to help the Tomorrow City research a state-of-the-art city management system.

Another goal of this pilot program is for Incheon to be able to bring together 3D models of above and below ground features in an open technology platform that supports the secure and robust integration of CAD, building information modelling (BIM), geospatial, civil engineering, and infrastructure data over a wide geographic area. By combining that data with Autodesk’s realistic visualisation and simulation tools, the city of Incheon would deliver an intuitive and compelling way for its citizens to experience and understand the design and management of a city’s construction, environment and traffic.

The IFEZ and the IUDC will collaborate with Autodesk to explore the full potential of U-GIS (ubiquitous GIS), possibly one of the most advanced applications of ubiquitous technology in the world. At the same time, the parties expect that the Digital City project will help promote Incheon City as a leading ‘u-city’ (a city of ubiquitous information technology). The Korean government’s u-cities initiative aims to establish a repeatable way to plan, build, and manage large urban development projects that incorporate innovative technology and design. Incheon City can serve as a future model for subsequent urban development programs in Korea and abroad.

“Partnering with Autodesk will help us realise our vision to build a Digital City and transform Incheon into an international business hub of the Northeast Asian region--that will lead in education, finance, commerce and retail,” said Lee Heon-Seok, CEO of IFEZ. “Autodesk’s technology will also help us in our planning and hosting of important upcoming events, such as the 2009 World City Expo and the 2014 Asian Games. All in all, the Autodesk Digital Cities initiative will help make our ambitious dream come true.”

Autodesk and the IUDC have worked together for many years, and Autodesk’s acknowledged expertise and credibility in engineering, data sets and visualisation technologies will provide Incheon with an in-depth understanding of how to visualise design at a city-wide scale.

Kim Dong-Kee, president of IUDC said, “As 3D modelling technology will be implemented from planning to construction phase, the Digital City project makes it not only possible to save costs but also to develop high-quality city development.”

“We are pleased to work with two leading agencies in Korea--IFEZ and the IUDC--on this groundbreaking project to help Incheon become a world-class city,” said Nahm Ki-Hwan, CEO of Autodesk Korea.

“Our Digital City technology can help the city and communities of Incheon to communicate, collaborate, and deliver projects in a more effective—and sustainable — way,” said Lisa Campbell, vice president, Autodesk Geospatial. “Today’s announcement builds on the work we are doing with our first pilot city, Salzburg, to create a business tool that will help cities plan and operate sustainable development essential for tomorrow’s high-performance cities and economies.”

Song-Do as the Pilot Project

For the initial phase of the Digital City initiative, “Tomorrow City (T-City)” - a 100-billion-KRW-invested mini city, located in New Song-do City, off the coast of Incheon, has been selected as the pilot project.

Scheduled to be opened in August 2009, “T-City” is a six-story, mini u-city urban development project (with the total plot area of 31,697m2) that will feature diverse, futuristic u-services, including u-traffic and u-shopping. In this pilot program, the IFEZ will examine every potential benefit of the new 3D city management system, which will cover the whole process of the city development project ranging from design, construction, and operation to maintenance of the city after the construction.

Benefits of the Digital City

As the 3D city modelling can be used to make better informed decisions based on real data, the IFEZ will be able to communicate those decisions and options to a wide range of stakeholders. Moreover, the city government can minimise impact of the development projects over millions of its citizens and provide better administrative services to them, as the collaborative environment created around a detailed 3D model can allow IFEZ to simulate and understand the impact of plans and proposals throughout the planning and development process.

About IFEZ

The Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) consists of three different Incheon City districts with a total of 51,739 acres: Songdo, Yeongjong and Cheongna. Its goal is to transform these areas into the logistics, international business and leisure and tourism hub of the Northeast Asian region.

The term “Free Economic Zone” (FEZ) refers to a geographic area designed by the Government of Korea to create a globally competitive business and living environment that will attract foreign investment and international companies. IFEZ was established as Korea’s first FEZ in August 2003. The Government of Korea fully supports free international business and the standards of corporate management demanded by today’s global market.

About IUDC

The IUDC is a public corporation established by the Incheon metropolitan city government in 2003. The IUDC facilitates development in the region by engaging in various construction projects including land development, residential apartment complex construction, tourist complex construction, and urban town redevelopment. For more information on the IUDC, visit its web site at www.iudc.co.kr

For more information visit:

Autodesk

Experience Ubiquitous Seoul at Cheonggyecheon event

2009-10-01T14:57:00.001-07:00

Experience a rush of high-tech cyberspace and nature in one central-Seoul spot.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced Monday (Nov. 26) that it would launch a ubiquitous service along the city's reclaimed stream Cheonggyechon from Tuesday to Friday (Nov. 27 -30). Dubbed "U-Cheonggyecheon Test bed," the event is co-hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communication and will provide samples of future technology.

In the information both, visitors can interact with the Media Board and Free Board. The former promises a Hollywood-like experience in a three-dimensional virtual reality, while the latter will provide the means for people to make their own photo albums and create UCC to e-mail friends and relatives. Visitors will also be able to sign a digital guest book.

Then there's a GPS-based, multilingual history tour that visitors can access from a mobile phone. The handset will automatically perceive one's position and provide an account of the location and history of the area where the tourist is standing.

Lampposts equipped with LED lights will light up the area, adding even more colors to Cheonggyecheon Fountain. The lampposts will also hold cameras and speakers to provide multifunctional service.

Meanwhile other high-tech video and electronic equipment around Cheonggyecheon will monitor its purity and water and pollution levels.

The latest event, which is strictly a test bed for future applications, is expected to serve as the core of an eventual citywide infrastructure someday.

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon and officials from the Ministry of Information and Communication and the National Information Society Agency will attend Tuesday's opening ceremony.

"The high-tech products which will be displayed at the Cheonggyecheon test bed event will serve as a standard model and guide for other ubiquitous projects, including the U-city and digital media center," a Seoul Metropolitan official said. "This is one example of how we are taking steps toward making Seoul the World's IT capital."

Seoul: World's Most Wired Megacity Gets More So

2009-10-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

In the sprawling, densely populated capital city of South Korea, Lee Hye-young and her husband Kim Soon-kyo are nothing if not typical citizens. Which is to say, even the most mundane, everyday aspects of their lives are carried out at technology's leading edge.

Full article link

DIYcity: How do you want to reinvent your city?

2009-09-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

Our cities today are relics from a time before the Internet. Services and infrastructure, created and operated by the government, are centrally managed, non-participatory and closed. And while this was once the best (and only) way for cities to operate, today it leads to a system that is inefficient, increasingly expensive to maintain, and slow to change.

What is needed right now is a new type of city: a city that is like the Internet in its openness, participation, distributed nature and rapid, organic evolution - a city that is not centrally operated, but that is created, operated and improved upon by all - a DIY City.

This is the DIYcity Challenge: can we, working together, define and build a version 1.0 of the Do-It-Yourself City, a city that operates on open data flowing through decentralized, open source tools, that actively engages residents not only as users but as participants and owners of the system?

Can we build this not only for our own individual cities, but for cities everywhere? Can we build an open toolset that any city, anywhere in the world, can access, modify to suit their needs, and deploy on their own terms?

Can we build this in one year? In six months? In three months?

link

Future Store (Smart Dressing Room)

2009-09-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

IBM RFID Commercial - The Future Market

2009-09-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

Future Store Tönisvorst

2009-09-29T21:06:00.001-07:00

Store of the Future

2009-09-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

new technology for future

2009-09-29T20:55:00.001-07:00

The Future of Shopping Malls: An Image Essay

2009-09-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

By Morgan Greenseth

Mall culture in the United States -- at least as we know it -- is coming to an end. Last month, the fall of Steve & Barry's became the next addition to a series of recent retailer bankruptcies we've been witnessing across the nation. This trend is likely to continue, as the U.S. economic downturn causes people to reduce their trips to stores and to shop less, forcing more shops to close and leaving malls deserted.

According to an article that ran in The Economist at the end of 2007:

In the past half century ... [malls] have transformed shopping habits, urban economies and teenage speech. America now has some 1,100 enclosed shopping malls, according to the International Council of Shopping Centres. Clones have appeared from Chennai to Martinique. Yet the mall's story is far from triumphal. Invented by a European socialist who hated cars and came to deride his own creation, it has a murky future. While malls continue to multiply outside America, they are gradually dying in the country that pioneered them.

Deadmalls, a site dedicated to these failing malls, tracks closings and developments, and even allows you to locate malls that are dying in your own town. Around Seattle, casualties include the Blue Mountain Mall, Totem Lake Mall, Factoria and Everett (Crossroads was once pronounced dead, but has been revived.)

As malls across the country start to fade into obsolescence, what is to become of these massive structures? After spending some time searching out the most creative alternatives to abandonment and massive landfilling of these former monuments to chain-store consumerism, I've found that the future of shopping malls is hopeful and creative:

The Factoria Mall in Bellevue is currently losing many stores, but redevelopment will begin soon in the hopes of creating a more useful, long-term multipurpose community space. The new Marketplace @ Factoria will still house retailers, but the redesign will add pedestrian walkways, outdoor dining, and even residential units.

The Factoria mall today. (Credit: Brian Lutz)

Rendering of planned Pedestrian Plaza (Credit: Kimco Redevelopment Group)

Residential Plaza (Credit: Kimco Redevelopment Group)

Factoria is one of a number of older malls being redesigned as mixed-use centers that include housing as a main feature. The development group General Growth Properties (not associated with Factoria) has become a leader in mall renovation, re-imagining them as town centers to reflect their awareness of "changing living patterns and widespread opposition to sprawl," according to an article in New Urban News. The article continues, describing one renovation of a mall in Columbia, Md.:

The tactics would include walkways and streets connecting the mall to Columbia Town Center’s lakefront district, which abut one another but have never been connected from a pedestrian point of view…. Other sides of the mall would have their own connections to streetscapes.” Parking lots would be replaced by structured parking. Residential, office, and retail space would be added. A hotel may be built, too. The Howard County government had Design Collective, a new urbanist firm in Baltimore, devise a 30-year plan through a public charrette process.

My belief is that this is going to be a long-term trend extending over at least the next twenty years, so much so that people will become as familiar with a mall conversion protocol as they are with a prototypical new urbanist residential neighborhood…. It will start out slow as people learn the new ‘formulas’ and pick up speed once they have got them down.
We are paying close attention to the quality of the buildings and to the quality of the spaces between the buildings,"

Credit: GGP

These mixed-use centers reflect the principles of New Urbanism, a movement that formed as a reaction to sprawl. New Urbanists promote the creation ofhuman-scale, walkable communities with reduced reliance on parking lots, emphasized access to public transit, and public spaces designed to invite and benefit the community. At the Rochester Hills Mall, pictured below, a central commons area acts as a meeting point and playground, and a spot to host festivals throughout the year.

The non-profit group Congress for New Urbanism summarized their experience with six case studies in the document "Malls to Main Streets", intended as a manual for developers, planners and community leaders facing the issue of abandoned malls. This group claims that when a project is done correctly, the mixed-use redevelopment can actually relieve traffic, help reduce pollution and provide residents with a downtown.

CNU insists that redeveloping malls, can reverse the process of urban sprawl. Malls, surrounded by parking lots and located far from residential neighborhoods, once encouraged the expansion of car culture. Now thesegreyfields present the opportunity to revive neighborhoods in suburbs around a central location. The challenge is to find an appropriate solution for each unique situation.

More ideas for what's to become of the malls and suburbia were expressed in an art show entitled "Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes". Architects along with artists submitted realistic proposals ranging from indoor beer gardens to drive-in theaters in the parking lots. And the opportunity to revive the suburbs isn't limited to shopping malls alone. Another creative idea: turn the inside spaces of cloverleaf on-off ramps into pocket parks. Big box retailers can become a healthier part of the community with proper planning. Colleges, churches and even a Spam museum have all found their way into abandoned buildings. Julia Christensen has documented big box reuse and how it can accommodate different communities in various ways.

Credit: Walker Art

Credit: Julia Christensen

In some instances however, abandoned malls aren't able to be redeveloped. Whether it is caused by new owners or existing poor construction, some must be demolished. Here in the Northwest, most materials get recycled. An alternative -- and still resourceful -- solution is deconstruction.

Credit: Heather Beal

For No Name Exhibitions in Minneapolis, this was the perfect solution to create their multi-use center for the arts. A total of $85,000 worth of material, including Italian marble tile, wrought iron benches and mop sinks, was salvaged from a luxury shopping center that was to be torn down. No Name used the materials to renovate a 19th century former soap factory to create the Soap Factory. Any materials not used for the art center were donated.

Credit: Heather Beal

Whether an interior renovation, a community redevelopment or reconstruction happens to an abandoned mall, outcomes target the needs of the community. Instead of viewing these boxes as dead wastelands, we can imagine the various possibilities in which they can be transformed to become new cultural centers.

The future of shopping

2009-09-29T19:44:00.000-07:00

Few industries can match retailing for cut-throat competition. Jostling for the attention of consumers, Tesco, Wal-Mart and other giant retailers are working hard to fine-tune their store formats.

Veggie Vision: Scales recognises produce by sight

Now hi-tech emerges as a tool to build market share. BBC News Online visited the "Future Store" in Rheinberg, Germany, set up by the world's fifth-largest retail group, Metro.

The intelligent scale doesn't like our bunch of bananas.

When we had put tomatoes on the scale, its digital camera took just a split second to recognise the produce, weigh it and print a bar-coded price tag.

No wait at a checkout to have them weighed. No need to find "tomatoes" on a 50-button display.

TECHNOLOGY TESTBED

Intelligent Scales

Information terminals

Personal Shopping Assistants (tablet computers)

Electronic price labels

Electronic advertising displays

Smart shelves

Smart self check-outs

Staff PDAs

RFID supply-chain management

But now the scale is baffled, and offers four choices: Are we weighing bananas, chicory salad, long beans or avocados?

Touching the banana logo on the screen solves the slip-up. "The bunch of bananas was probably too large for the camera," says an apologetic shop assistant.

Welcome to Metro's Future Store.

New and old

At first glance the supermarket looks disappointingly normal.

Tablet computers on the trolley help shoppers to find their way around the store

Yes, to German shoppers the layout may be revolutionary, with wide "freshness aisles" right at the entrance, offering a vast and pleasantly displayed array of fresh fish, meats, vegetables, and the mouth-watering smell of freshly baked bread and donuts.

Nothing new here for many French and UK shoppers.

The real revolution, though, lies with nifty machines like the Intelligent Scales using IBM's Veggie Vision software.

The machines, so the claim goes, can identify most produce by sight, regardless of whether it is packed in a plastic bag or not.

Marketing the easy way

The good people of Rheinberg a town of 30,000 in the west of Germany are willing participants in this hi-tech experiment in retailing.

Not sure what to buy? In key sections - multimedia, baby care, hair colours, wine, meat, and fruit and vegetables - touchscreen terminals give in-depth information.

Infoterminals bring information - and a sales pitch

How a particular wine tastes, which food to have with it, and a smattering of the wine region's history - in colour, interactive, and on demand as a print-out.

Learn how to cook asparagus and skin tomatoes. Get recipes for the meat and veg available and in season (courtesy of Nestle, whose products just happen to crop up in some of the recipes).

Above the aisles, large flat screens show still pictures and videos of special offers and promotions.

"Customers buy more when we have two screens next to each other showing the same product," says Metro's Holger Schneidewindt.

A quick scan of a product barcode, a few taps on a handheld computer, and the wireless network changes the display on the large flat screen above a shelf groaning with bottles of vodka and schnapps.

For managers of the 4,000 square metre store, it is marketing the easy way.

Don't scream for ice cream

Personal Shopping Assistants (PSA) are the clincher, though - small Wincor Nixdorf tablet computers clipped to shopping trolleys and activated with a loyalty card.

Personal Shopping Assistants cut down on waiting time at the checkout

Want some ice cream but don't know where to find it? Type "ice cream" on the touch screen and you are directed to the correct aisle - floor plan included.

Regular purchases show up on a favourites list, with price and location. Special offers are flagged up as you move from section to section.

Write your shopping list online - at home or work - and soon it will be automatically downloaded to the PSA.

The integrated scanner gives you both a running total of your shopping and fast-track treatment at the check-out.

Smart logistics

The shop's shelves sport 30,000 wireless electronic price labels that can be changed at the push of a button.

Smart self-scan check-outs, meanwhile, tackle fraud by comparing the weight of your shopping bag with the items you scanned and prevent underage drinking by prompting staff to check out customers scanning alcoholic products.

RFID EXPLAINED

RFID: Radio Frequency Identification

Tag: tiny microchip with unique ID number attached to small antenna

Reader: Tags going past readers are read in split second and reported to data base

Talking barcodes that change our lifes

Q&A: RFID explained

The Future Store's biggest potential, though, is its use of RFID tags, a kind of "talking barcodes".

With the help of software from business process expert SAP, Metro now knows in detail how supplies move from the Essen distribution centre on to trucks, into the Rheinberg store room, and on to the shop floor.

The result: the inventory is always up-to-date, shelves are rarely empty, and losses are down.

At its most revolutionary, smart shelves using RFID - currently tested on Gilette razor blades, Pantene shampoo and Philadelphia cream cheese - alert staff when the shop's shelves are getting empty or cheese packs are past their sell-by date.

Are Rheinbergers geeks?

Smart shelves use radio tags to control stocks

One year into the experiment, the people of Rheinberg have taken to the store with gusto.

"Customers come to the store more frequently, store loyalty is up and sales are up 30%," says Metro spokesman Albrecht von Truchsess.

To a large part that is due to the store's new "fresh and easy" format.

But more than 70% of customers have used the various technologies at least once, and a hard core of regular users (21% for PSAs, 53% for the scales) is growing strongly.

And it is the over-60s, not just the geeks of this rural area, who are among the keenest to use the new technology.

Looking past the bottom line

But does the Future Store make a profit?

Not in the traditional sense. Ultimately, it is just a large laboratory, using customised bleeding-edge technology.

Customers can wipe clean the RFID tags on their goods

"One can't talk about return on investment for such a store," says Metro's Mr von Truchsess.

And anyway, for Metro's 45 technology partners, this is a giant "Bring Your Own Technology" party, where each partner's costs are neither disclosed nor added up.

For Metro, meanwhile, it is an opportunity to find out whether better service and a streamlined supply chain can help it compete with Germany's ultra-cheap grocery discounters like Lidl and Aldi.

But it is also a way to identify potential trouble, for example to see whether radio interference can trip over large RFID systems.

There is just one problem. Surveys suggest that some customers dazzled by the snazzy technology think prices must be higher as well.

Not so, says Metro's Mr von Truchsess.

But he admits: "There will always be certain areas where customers will not accept a high-technology store".

Sustainable Information Technology for Global Sustainability

2009-09-29T19:36:00.000-07:00

abstract

Information technology is used in many application areas as a means to support environmental sustainability, among them the various Digital Earth projects. Many of these initiatives are quite te chnology intensive, requiring sophisticated special purpose software and hardware. Other projects rely heavily on complex coordination of contributions from a large number of organizations. The authors are of the opinion that technology for supporting global sustainability in it self should be sustainable, or in other words, capable of being kept in existence over a sufficiently long span of time. We present some cases of both sustainable and non-sustainable systems and propose a set of criteria for analyzing and classifying the sustainability of a given technological framework and it’s components. On this backdrop we present Project OneMap, which has been designed with longevity, accessibility, simplicity and other aspects of sustainable technology in mind. The main objective of this project is to provide free online access to a large, global map. The map will be incrementally build by seamlessly integrating a large number of independent and uncoordinated contributions of geodata. A sufficient level of quality and consistency is assured by applying a peer review process to all submissions. In many ways the project will be a grass root effort, thus orthogonal to many other more centralized mapping projects. We highlight some sustainable aspects of Project OneMap.

Link

Visualize Urban Complexity

2009-09-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

Urban Sensing

2009-09-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

personalized estimates of environmental exposure and impact PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report, is a new kind of online tool that allows you to use your mobile phone to explore and share how you impact the environment and how the environment impacts you. What's unique about PEIR? Taking a step ...

Urban sensing website

Intelligent cities: innovation, knowledge systems, and digital spaces

2009-09-20T20:37:00.000-07:00

Book overview

Author: Nicos Komninos

At the turn of the century some cities and regions in Europe, Japan and the USA, displayed an exceptional capacity to incubate and develop new knowledge and innovations. The favourable environment for research, technology and innovation created in these areas was not immediately obvious, yet it was of great significance for a development based on knowledge, learning, and innovation.Intelligent Citiesfocuses on these environments of innovation, and the major models (technopoles, innovating regions, intelligent cities) for creating an environment-supporting technology, innovation, learning, and knowledge-based development. The introduction and the first chapter deal with innovation as an environmental condition, and with the geography and typology of islands of innovation. The next three parts focus on the theoretical paradigms and the planning models of the 'industrial district', the innovating region', and the 'intelligent city', which offer three alternative ways to create an environment ofinnovation.

Google books

Interactive Model of Lower Manhattan

2009-09-20T19:51:00.000-07:00

Pentagram designed this interactive model of Lower Manhattan for Wall Street Rising's Downtown Information Center. Design: Lisa Strausfeld, Nina Boesch.

Augmented Architecture

2009-09-20T19:46:00.000-07:00

Application of Augmented Reality in Architecture and Urban Space - Architecture thesis project in Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture Paris Oct 2005 by Quck Zhong Yi, with help from Alexandre Pachiaudi (Pico), Anny Galanou, Gaetan Kohler, Nicolas Trouillard, and Leila.

Muscle room- an interactive hotel room design

2009-09-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

concept

The Muscle Room envisions a concept where the user can alter his surroundings to suit his every needs. When the room is entered it is completely empty. One big, open space. By interacting with the room the user can get a different layout or appearance. The walls can be shaped into furniture, doors, spaces to allow the guest a new sensation of freedom. Also the appearance, light, sound and climate can be influenced to create the perfect room.

On the client-side the concept also allows the hotel-operator to maximize the possibilities of a single space and to be able to exploit his hotel in dense areas.

Project link

CyberCities: visual perception in the age of electronic communication

2009-09-20T19:38:00.000-07:00

Urban historian M. Christine Boyer turns to the new frontier - cybercities - in this compelling new book. Boyer argues that the computer is to contemporary society what the machine was to modernism, and that this new metaphor profoundly affects the way we think, imagine, and ultimately grasp reality. But there is, she believes, an inherent danger here; that as cyberspace pulls us into its electronic grasp, we withdraw from the world. Transferred, plugged in, and down-loaded, reality becomes increasingly immaterial. Frozen to one side of our terminal's screen, Boyer concludes, we risk becoming incapable of action in a real city plagued by crime, hatred, disease, unemployment, and under-education. In a series of polemical essays, Boyer examines cyberspace, virtual reality, disembodiment, and cyborgs, drawing on a wide range of sources from Walter Benjamin to William Gibson. In the end, Boyer issues a clarion call to reinstall a social agenda in the midst of these technological innovations.

The Cybercities Reader

2009-09-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

Stephen Graham (ed.)

abstract

For too long Information and Communications Technologies (or ICTs) have been lazily portrayed as means to simply escape into a parallel world - to withdraw from the body, or the city, in some utopian, or dystopian, stampede online. Such perspectives deny the fact that the so-called 'information society' is an increasingly urban society. They ignore the ways in which new technologies now mediate every aspect of everyday urban life. And they obscure a key question: how do the multifaceted realities of city regions interrelate in practice with new technologies in different ways in different places.

The Cybercities Reader explores this question. It is the most comprehensive, international and interdisciplinary analysis yet of the relationships between cities, urban life and new technologies. The book incorporates:

- Thirty-one of the best published writings in the field with thirty-two specially commissioned pieces.

- The work of writers from thirteen nations and twelve disciplines.

- Detailed discussions of cybercity history, theory, economic processes, mobilities, physical forms, social and cultural worlds, digital divides, public domains, strategies, politics and futures.

- Analyses of postmodern technoculture, virtual reality and the body, global city economies, urban surveillance, 'intelligent' transportation, e-commerce, teleworking, community informatics, digital architecture, urban technology strategies, and the role of cities and new technologies in the 'war on terrorism'.

- Detailed case studies of 'virtual cities' in Amsterdam, Internet cabins in Lima, back offices in Jamaica, 'smart' highways in Melbourne, technopoles in New York, mobiles in Helsinki, e-commerce convenience stores in Tokyo, high-tech business parks in Bangalore, public spaces in Mexico City, and urban ICT strategies in Kuala Lumpur, California and Singapore.

- Editor's introductions, guides to further reading for each theme and piece.

- Over fifty plates, tables, and diagrams.

The Cybercities Reader is essential reading for anyone interested in how cities and new technologies are helping to remake each other at the start of this quintessentially urban digital century.

keywords

Cybercities, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), information society, technoculture, virtual cities, virtual reality

Shootball::New Sports in Ubiquitous Computing

2009-09-20T18:48:00.000-07:00

SITUATED COMPUTING- A New Paradigm for Design Computing

2009-09-20T17:59:00.000-07:00

JOHN S. GERO

Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition

University of Sydney

Abstract.

This paper introduces the concepts of situatedness and constructive memory as the foundations of situated computing. The difference is between encoding all knowledge prior to its use and allowing the knowledge to be developed and grounded in the interaction between the external world and the designer/tool. The paper elaborates these concepts and concludes with a discussion of the implication of situated computing on computational models of designing and on the development of adaptive design tools.

Introduction

Design computing involves all facets of the use of computers to support the acts of designing. Much of the research in design computing has been focused on modeling and representing designed objects, whether for the individual designer or for teams of designers using the World Wide Web.

There has continued to be an interest in computational aids that support designing more directly and in producing different design environments. Amongst the former are evolutionary systems and amongst the latter are virtual environments. All of this work is based a paradigm of computing that assumes that the underlying programs are unchanged by their use and certainly the underlying programs are not affected by where or how they are used. This is one of the foundations of objective knowledge: it is independent of who uses and what is done with it. We expect this of our objective knowledge. Objective knowledge is knowledge about the structure of the world. Thus, we expect that an object in a CAD model is unchanged by the view we present of it; that the algorithm that calculates shadows is unchanged by whomever uses it; and that the evolutionary algorithm used in a layout program is unchanged by using it on different types of problems.

Full paper

A Foundational Framework for Situated Computing

2009-09-20T17:11:00.000-07:00

Paul Dourish

Computer Science Laboratory

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

INTRODUCTION

“Context” has become the word of the moment. Contextaware computing is a hot topic, the focus of research grants, workshops, conferences, development programs and a stream of publications. Systems that take advantage of context in different ways are seen as the natural solution to the information explosion, as ways to smooth interaction with an increasingly complicated information infrastructure, and as a way to build service and brand loyalty in commercial information operations. Technically, the incorporation of context into interactive software systems may take many different forms. Contextual information can be exploited in many different ways – e.g. by capturing contextual information for later recall and review, by exploiting contextual factors to customise the interactive experience, by sharing contextual information between collaborators, or by storing context along with data to help disambiguate it at a later date. Similarly, my own work on context has also taken many different forms, from explorations of the role of physical context in multimedia communication [2, 6], to the role of context in information interpretation [1], and most recently the role of context to solve specific problems in collaborative information management [3, 4].

Full paper

PILEUS: Internet Umbrella by Takashi Matsumoto

2009-09-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

Pileus is an interactive medium of an umbrella to make city-exploring fun. Pileus has a big screen on its inside surface, and a camera and embedded sensors on its grip. Then it provides natural embodied interaction with web services to make city walking more interactive.

The current prototype has two main functions: photo-sharing and 3D map navigation. The photo-sharing function is connected to Flickr, then a user can share their finding (e.g. new shops, beautiful scenes) in a city with his/her friends taking a picture by the camera. The screen also shows beautiful photo-streams retrieved from shared-pictures in a Flickr community. The photo-function is operated by a simple action on the umbrella with a motion sensor without any complicated operations.

Fig: Flickr photo stream on Pileus

The user also can switch the service to a map. Pileus automatically detects user's location and shows bird-eyes view of a map around to give a sense of the place in mixed reality. The map is automatically updated by user's position by GPS and a digital compass.

Fig: 3D map on Pileus

Project link

Interferences - an interactive installation

2009-09-19T19:22:00.000-07:00

Interferences ... is an interactive installation created by Matteo Sisti Sette and Maribel Pozo which consists of a back projection screen showing an artificial life system which is sensitive to electromagnetic waves emitted by users mobile phones.

In its natural state, image and sound are in constant evolution, moving and growing as if alive. Their growth and evolution is altered in the presence of electromagnetic waves.

This work tries to draw attention to a phenomenon whose physical and material relevance we tend to ignore. Little is known about the effect these radiations produce on human body. Maybe they are not dangerous. Many elements of our environment are not, yet they concern us because of their aspect or noise or odour. If we couls [sic] see, or hear the amount of energy which is carried by electromagnetic waves and which passes through our body, would we behave the same way as we do?

The installation is created with Pure Data and Processing.

New heritage: new media and cultural heritage

2009-09-19T18:44:00.000-07:00

About the Book

The use of new media in the service of cultural heritage is a fast growing field, known variously as virtual or digital heritage. New Heritage, under this denomination, broadens the definition of the field to address the complexity of cultural heritage such as the related social, political and economic issues. This book is a collection of 20 key essays, of authors from 11 countries, representing a wide range of professions including architecture, philosophy, history, cultural heritage management, new media, museology and computer science, which examine the application of new media to cultural heritage from a different points of view. Issues surrounding heritage interpretation to the public and the attempts to capture the essence of both tangible (buildings, monuments) and intangible (customs, rituals) cultural heritage are investigated in a series of innovative case studies.

Link

Map trends in the future: First-Person View of Geography

2009-09-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

Targeted information embedded in place turns each location into a personal space. Watch for schools, malls, and neighborhoods to become digitally tagged for learning.

Real World Application

The community becomes the classroom

Ubiquitous computing and wireless connectivity, embedded in physical environments, will turn physical places into aware contexts—environments that recognize people, information, and activities, and then respond appropriately. As place-based information becomes more accessible, educational services will be customized to place, making learning increasingly visible in the community.

Public places become personal spaces

This decade will become the decade of information in place— geocoded data will be linked through the Internet and accessible through a variety of mobile tools from cell phones and PDAs to augmented-reality devices (like eyeglasses). The result will be an increasingly first-person view of places, where rich streams of personalized media “redraw” streets, storefronts, schools, and community locations. Educational content and curriculum will become context-specific, aligning personal learning needs with places.

Urban Probes-Interventions in Urban Life

2009-09-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

Recall that a probe is an instrument that allows measurement of an unknown – returning hopefully useful or interesting data. While probes can fail, their use is often used early on in fields where broad and rapid data is desired. Technology is emerging in urban landscapes where our complex social roles in urban communities, our movement and traces through cities, and our interactions with place and public artifacts intersect. We argue that these conditions are ideal for probes.

An Urban Probe is a fail-fast approach for asking early questions about urban computing in order to focus and influence future urban research and application choices. It is also a useful methodology for conducting rapid urban application discovery and evaluation metrics.

Urban Probes employ a series of lightweight provocative urban proto-tasks to inspire direct discussion from people about their current and emerging public urban landscape. These tasks involve physical construction of simple, functional artifacts and accouterments that are introduced into the urban landscape. These are not paper prototypes, but working models of potential systems. Contrary to traditional methodologies surrounding large scale research projects, each Urban Probe is designed to bypass many classical design approaches – opting instead for rapid, nimble, often intentional encroachments on urban places rather than following a series of typical design iteration cycles.

Urban Probes must capture provocative elements of urban computing questions while incorporating opportunities for play, Happenings, and various Situationists themes such as détournement (rerouting of events and images), and dérive (the urban flow of acts and encounters). Similarly, Urban Probes exploit methods of deep observation coupled with experimentation and concrete interventions in urbanism. In practice, Urban Probes develop and deploy novel physical artifacts into everyday urban settings.

Urban Probes draw large inspiration from the work of several leading researchers in developing technology probes and domestic probes. Such probes combine the social science goal of collecting information about the use and the users of the technology in a real world setting, the engineering goal of field-testing the technology, and the design goal of inspiring users and designers to imagine new kinds of technology to support their needs and desires.

Urban Probes complements these bodies of work by addressing similar themes with respect to urban life. As technology moves from office to home to street, we want to avoid bringing along with it “workplace” values such as efficiency and productivity at the expense of other possibilities. Urban Probes provide methods that aid researchers in gathering fragmentary glimpses into the rich texture of people’s daily urban street life.

Link

Citizen Science

2009-09-19T17:07:00.000-07:00

In this research we highlight an important new shift in mobile phone usage – from communication tool to "networked mobile personal measurement instrument". We explore how these new “personal measurement instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of mobile computing usage called citizen science. Through the use of sensors paired with personal mobile phones, everyday people are invited to participate in collecting and sharing measurements of their everyday environment that matter to them.

Our research hypothesis is that this new usage model for mobile phones will:

improve the science literacy of everyday citizens through active participation in basic scientific principles
provide professional scientists with access to richer, finer-grain data sets for modeling and analysis
create new experiences and usage models for the mobile phone as a tool for grassroots participation in government and policy making
by choice of sensors and software create a deeper and more informed understanding and concern for our climate and environment - hopefully effecting positive societal change

Mobile phones are rapidly becoming the computer platform of choice in developed and developing nations. These mobile phones already shape our culture – collapsing space and time by enabling us to reach out to contact others at a distance, to perform just-in-time coordination of events, and to purchase, play, and game “on-the-go”. While there is a growing research space around sensor based activity inferencing and a wealth of existing location applications in the market, we claim that our mobile phones still fall short in their ability to enable us to measure and understand the real world around us.

To read more about this project

Site Visit by Situated Visualization

2009-09-19T09:24:00.000-07:00

abstract

We propose a critical review of existing tools and practices typically used to execute the proverbial site visit, followed by focused invention and development of new tools and practices. We argue that conventional methods to study, document and interact with a site are ill suited to capturing seen and unseen aspects that may remain hidden without enhanced aids to observation and visualization. By extension, these methods fundamentally distort the character and context of the design locus, and constrict the role that visualization can have for the duration of the design process.

Thrust by advancements in geo-spatial analysis, simulation modeling and mobile computing, our team of researchers and practitioners will collectively explore and test new practices for site visit, by developing situated visualizations — dynamic visual representations that are spatially relevant to the place in which they are displayed. The team’s transdisciplinary collaboration — from the fields of architecture, urban design, geography, planning, ethnography, industrial design and computer science — will be hands on, gaining insight into the notion of site and extending the role of visualization beyond initial documentation or final presentation in the design process.

Our research activities will focus on a 17-acre industrial district of New York City known as Manhattanville, in which rezoning efforts are raising disputes over land use, economic development, socio-cultural diversity and environmental stewardship. This area has also been declared the “site” for Columbia University’s campus expansion, for which preliminary design propositions have been publicized using various visualization strategies.

Experiments by members of our team have been conducted on this site using augmented reality (AR) techniques and Census datasets in order to generate situated visualizations about Manhattanville’s population. This past spring, these new practices were further explored in a workshop co-taught by architectural and computer science faculty.

Phase One of our proposed research will review and evaluate typical practices used for site visits and site analysis. Phase Two will illustrate the potential of new methods and technologies for collecting, curating and creating information as tools for site visualization. Phase Three will include developing and testing these methods against Manhattanville’s complex landscape. Phase Four will prepare a comprehensive account of innovative visualization tools for site visit and site analysis as important facilitators of the design process.

Team: Petia Morozov, Sean White, and Sarah Williams, all of whom have practices in our respective fields, and all of whom have an affiliation with Columbia University.

Project Wiki

CAADRIA 2010

2009-09-18T21:28:00.000-07:00

NEW FRONTIERS

We are facing unprecedented challenges in our natural & human-made, cultural, social & built environments. Working at the intersection of human needs, creative innovation, education, critical thinking, computing, science, design & technology, CAAD practitioners & researchers are uniquely placed to engage with these challenges & frontiers.

Especially our Asian context, with its philosophical richness & its rising influence on the world stage, offers NEW FRONTIERS to develop relevant discourses and, possibly, appropriate cures.

CAADRIA2010 now calls for Papers, Round-table seminars, Posters, Exhibitions, Workshops & Postgraduate Students' research that address these NEW FRONTIERS:

Intelligence & Cognition

Research & Practice

Human & Computer

Theory & Philosophy

Education & Learning

Culture & Heritage

Ubiquity & Environment

Collaboration & Community

Computation & Information

Generative & Parametric

Modelling & Process

Visualization & Animation

Simulation & Testing

Virtuality & Reality

We cordially invite you to submit your contributions to the 15th CAADRIA Conference NEW FRONTIERS 7-10 April 2010 that is co-hosted by the School of Architecture & Institute of Space & Earth Information Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Link

Million Story Building

2009-09-18T20:15:00.000-07:00

Location-specific ambient storytelling

If a building could talk, what would it say? How would it “feel” about the comings and goings of the people who use it every day? Would it be affected by their moods and desires? What kind of relationship would it have with its occupants if it could communicate with them somehow, and how would they respond? Perhaps most importantly, would such a feeling-and-talking building even be desirable?

In attempting to answer these whimsical questions, the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab (MEML) at the University of Southern California conceived of Million Story Building, an experimental design project exploring how location-specific mobile technology can add playful, imaginative and practical new layers to the relationship between a structure and its inhabitants.

Using the newly-constructed School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) Building as a test bed, the MEML team has designed a location-sensitive iPhone application (see video) that enables students and faculty to engage with their workplace in a variety of exciting new ways, from scanning Quick Response (QR) code glyphs mounted next to posters in the hallways in order to access and tag video clips from a central database, to leaving virtual messages for others to read in an Augmented Reality view of the building’s central courtyard.

Functions such as these, working together with networks of sensors, interactive plasma screens and web-based social media profiles, made it possible for iPhone-carrying building occupants to learn about SCA history, discover events and activities, share stories and updates of their own, enrich the school’s media archive, and participate in an Alternate Reality Game.

Furthermore, and crucially, users could come to expect increasingly customized communications, behaviors and interaction opportunities as a profile concerning their preferences, habits and interests was generated based on their usage of the system. The end result was a prototype for a personalized and self-renewing “ambient story” experience co-constructed by the collaboration between the occupants of a building and the building itself.

Background

At its heart, Million Story Building is an effort to mobilize a range of storytelling and interaction tactics such that the occupants of the SCA building can experience a deeper and richer connection with their workspace and co-workers. Such an effort is not unique in the history of design; indeed, the practice of embedding story and play in physical space is almost as old as civilization itself – one recalls the Catholic Via dolorosa (Stations of the Cross), the Shingon Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku or the transit to the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

More recently, what Jill Walker-Renberg calls “distributed narratives” have manifested themselves in public and institutional space through sticker art, coordinated graffiti campaigns, flash mobs and other interventions. Million Story Building emerges at the nexus of these practices and the new potentialities unleashed by the recent blossoming of mobile and ubiquitous computational technologies.

More Information

The Million Story Building series archive is an effort to gather together, enframe and contextualize key planning documents from the first phase of the project’s development. By browsing proposals, demo descriptions, annotated meeting notes and other development documents, readers can get a sense of the key concerns from which the project arose and the various components of the prototype application, both implemented and imagined.

Project Link

'Memory of Water,' 535 Mission St.

2009-09-18T20:00:00.001-07:00

Sebastapol artist Ned Kahn would turn an empty construction site at 535 Mission St., now covered by gravel, into what he calls "Memory of Water" -- a lakebed of sorts, created by shimmering metal discs. This is an aerial view from the roof of 560 Mission.

Photo: SEE SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS / Ned Kahn

City Ubiquitous- Place, communication, and the rise of omnitopia

2009-09-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

City Ubiquitous is for students and scholars of the built environment, but it is also meant for anyone who recognizes the odd and frightening pleasures of urbanity. Flowing from airport to hotel to coffee shop to chain restaurant, we glimpse the alienation and fascination of looking, consuming, and communicating in the staccato rhythms of contemporary life. City Ubiquitous investigates this structure and perception of omnitopia, investigating its origins in Parisian arcades, world’s fairs, and military-industrial superslabs; its manifestations in airports, hotels, and shopping malls; and its potential undoing through performance, placelessness, and reverence.

Exploring Shopping Mall Environment for Ubiquitous Computing

2009-09-18T19:19:00.000-07:00

Abstract—

Mobile ad-hoc sensor networks are very beneficial in

many ubiquitous computing applications and situations such as military operations, construction sites, stadiums, convention centers, emergency services, inhospitable physical environments, music festivals, automobile race tracks, trade fair and shopping mall. Validation of mobile ad-hoc and delay tolerant network protocols for such environments is problematic. It relies almost exclusively on simulations which make use of movement models.

Furthermore, each scenario is characterized by its own distinctive mobility model. It is very difficult collecting real mobility data and in the recent years many efforts have been made aiming to build realistic mobility models. In order to conduct informed and realistic design of forwarding policies and algorithms for mobile ad-hoc sensor networks, it is important to gather real human mobility data. In this paper we study human mobility in a shopping mall environment. From this we make recommendations for the design of opportunistic forwarding algorithms for such environments.

Full paper link

Locative Media And Responsive Environments

2009-09-18T17:31:00.000-07:00

Locative Media And Responsive Environments

View more presentations from University of Southern California.

This presentation explores the evolution and trajectory of ubiquitous computing technologies that enable designers to embed media artifacts and computational systems in physical space. By placing custom bar code glyphs, GPS/Google Earth markers, sensor systems or other smart-phone-readable triggers in physical locations, designers can create hyperlinks connecting real-world objects or places with a wide variety of media — from video, audio and text content to dynamic data feeds and opportunities for interactions with both human and non-human agencies. Crucially, however, this layering practice does not stop at the level of the hyperlink or the traditional notion of Augmented Reality. Rather, designers are beginning to perceive opportunities for embedding responsive computational power in physical space, enabling environments to track, profile and communicate with their inhabitants, providing customized, adaptive and anticipatory user experiences.

Resource and link

Urban Computing / BitTorrent servers project

2009-09-18T16:23:00.001-07:00

Urban Computing / BitTorrent servers project

View more documents from Adam Simon.

Challenging The Internet Of The Future With Urban Computing at OneSpace - FIS2008

2009-09-18T16:10:00.000-07:00

Challenging The Internet Of The Future With Urban Computing at OneSpace - FIS2008

View more presentations from Emanuele Della Valle.

Public Space As A Catalyst For Change

2009-09-18T13:55:00.000-07:00

Public Space As A Catalyst For Change

View more documents from amandake.

Helle Juul, creative director, Ph.D & Kristine Samson, Industrial Ph.D.

Performative Aesthetics in Urban Space JUULFROST Architects

Public Space as a Catalyst for Change covers how can be approached as a catalyst for the development of 'the good city', both architecturally, socially and culturally. The project includes both theoretical studies and practice-oriented methods.

Objective

An interdisciplinary dialogue between architects, geographers, sociologists, ethnologists and planners is a prerequisite for an innovate development of public spaces and cities.

The project’s research and analysis will be founded in seminars where cross-disciplinary scholars and practitioners offer their specific views and knowledge.

Discription

A 3.5 million DKK grant from Realdania launches “Public Spaces as a Catalyst for Change” – a research project that seeks to qualify the practical and theoretical work regarding the development of the Danish city spaces. The project will run until the spring of 2009 and is lead by Helle Juul, PhD., Architect MAA, with John Pløger, Associate Professor at Roskilde University, as academic partner. The blossoming of the experience economy and the knowledge society has established new premises for city development. All over the Denmark ideas about creativity, diversity and “the sparkling life” sets the agenda in the effort to draw citizens, labour and attention to the cities. This cultural and experience orientated strategy raises the risk for a development where each city’s unique characteristic vanishes. The similarity between the strategies that the municipalities use makes it hard to distinguish one city from another. “Public Spaces as a Catalyst for Change” covers how public space as a strategy for the development and transformation of cities can be approached as a catalyst for the development of “the good city” – architecturally, socially and culturally. The project focuses on both theoretic studies and practical tools and addresses municipalities, researchers and students working in the field of city development. “Public Spaces as a Catalyst for Change” focuses on the development of new types of urban public spaces and city life as it takes place in new urban contexts. Using a cross-disciplinary approach, the purpose of the project is to carry out empirical and theoretical analyses of the qualities of the city communities and spaces. The overall aim of the project is to create new knowledge to be used in Danish city planning and education within the field of city spaces.

Update: House of Arts and Culture Beirut Competition

2009-09-17T23:27:00.000-07:00

In April 2009, Bustler reported that Milan-based practice Teknoarch had won the international competition for the new House of Arts and Culture in Beirut, Lebanon. Representatives of Teknoarch are in Lebanon this week to meet

with their local partners and to present the most recent developments of their project to the Minister of Culture.

The competition organizers also updated us that all entered projects have been uploaded and are now visible on their website www.darbayrut.org.

These are the three competition-winning projects: (Click pics to enlarge and see the designer)

1st PRIZE: Teknoarch

2nd PRIZE: STAR strategies + architecture

3rd PRIZE: Project Meganom

Honorable Mention: DORELL GHOTMEH TANE, Architects, Paris, France in collaboration with Joumana Al-Jabri, Dubai & Klaas De Rycke/BOLLINGIER + GROHMANN SARL, France

Honorable Mention: Spiridon Kakavas, Dimitris Giannisis, Eleni Klonizaki, Kostanti Stamataki, Georgia Nikolakopoulou, Athens, Greece

Honorable Mention: poly.m.ur (Chris Yoo, Homin Kim, Heekyung Mun), London, UK

Honorable Mention: Format 21, Frankfurt, Germany

Honorable Mention: Atelier 2/3/4, Paris France

Honorable Mention: BOARD, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

DnB NOR headquarters by MVRDV

2009-09-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

The international Norwegian financial institution DnB NOR decided to concentrate their twenty office locations currently dispersed over the city in the Barcode. In 2007, the master plan team was commissioned by developer OSU to design the urban concept. A new cluster of three volumes and a common basement with a 3,000m2 underground concourse, which interlinks the three buildings of the bank, was developed. MVRDV was commissioned as architect for the central building and co-responsible for the concourse.

The development of a new headquarter cluster is a strategic operation aiming for synergy and a clear identity. The objective was to translate the social and democratic character of the organisation into a building with excellent working conditions and spatial qualities. The structure is conceived as a steel 『rack' which permits adaptation to the flexible nature of the organisation.

The steel rack is wrapped in a stone skin, which adopts Norwegian environmental standards. It appears as a rock, a strong shape within the boundaries of the Barcode. The niches of this rock provide space for vegetation growth: the positioning of the pixels creates roof gardens or outside areas for every floor.

The generic office floors recline and are recessed in various places to reflect the urban context and to create communal indoor and outdoor areas and outstanding daylight conditions. At street level the building volume is opened by sheltered entrance zones, and intersected by a public passage leading to the Oslo Central Station. The pixelated design allows this specific response whilst being highly efficient and flexible. As a result, every floor of the building is both unique and generic: the pixelated volume makes the generic specific.

Besides more than 2,000 flexible work spaces the building contains a panoramic 140 seat canteen on the top level, the executive lounge with a view over the fjord, the board room, in the heart of the volume, DnB NOR's trading room with 250 work stations, and the main entrance with a reception and access to the concourse. These collective elements are connected by a staggered continuous internal route of terraces, encouraging informal meetings and communication between employees.

The route meanders from the reception upwards through the building, connecting all office levels with the communal areas. A series of wooden stairs and bridges allow employees to switch levels or even to walk the 17 levels up to the canteen on one side of the building and down on the other side. The route accommodates communal areas to the office floors and is made homely with a series of pantries, informal meeting areas and fire places. It gives access to the various outdoor terraces and roof gardens. All these collective spaces are designed as glass pixels allowing views over the surroundings and transparency from the exterior. The route is naturally ventilated and has a high performance glass fit for the cold Norwegian winter.

On behalf of OSU, MVRDV collaborates with Norwegian co-architect DARK Arkitekter AS and various Norwegian engineering firms. Project management is executed by Norwegian firm Vedal Project AS. The second building of the DnB NOR cluster is designed by A-lab and the third building by Dark Arkitekter, all within the overall master plan and the Barcode urban master plan by MVRDV / DARK / a-lab. DnB NOR is the largest financial services group in Norway. The Group consists of brands such as DnB NOR, Vital, Nordlandsbanken, Cresco, Postbanken, DnB NORD and Carlson.

–

MVRDV was set up in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. MVRDV produces designs and studies in the fields of architecture, urbanism and landscape design. Early projects such as the headquarters for the Dutch Public Broadcaster VPRO and housing for elderly WoZoCo in Amsterdam lead to international acclaim. MVRDV develops its work in a conceptual way, the changing condition is visualised and discussed through designs, sometimes literally through the design and construction of a diagram.

The office continues to pursue its fascination and methodical research on density using a method of shaping space through complex amounts of data that accompany contemporary building and design processes. MVRDV first published a cross section of these study results in FARMAX (1998), followed by a.o. MetaCity/Datatown (1999), Costa Iberica (2000), Regionmaker (2002), 5 Minutes City (2003), KM3 (2005), which contains Pig City and more recently Spacefighter (2007) and Skycar City (2007), the latter two will be exhibited at the 2008 Biennale of Venice. MVRDV deals with global ecological issues in large scale studies like Pig City as well as in small scale solutions for flooded areas of New Orleans.

Current projects include various housing projects in the Netherlands, Spain, China, France, Austria, the United Kingdom, USA, India, Korea and other countries, a television centre in Zürich, a public library for Spijkenisse (Netherlands), a central market hall for Rotterdam, a culture plaza in Nanjing, China, large scale urban masterplans in Oslo, Norway and in Tirana, Albania, a masterplan for an eco-city in Logroño, Spain and an urban vision for the doubling in size of Almere, Netherlands.

The work of MVRDV is exhibited and published world wide and receives international awards. The 60 architects, designers and staff members conceive projects in a multi-disciplinary collaborative design process and apply highest technological and sustainable standards.

tuioZones- multitouch library for Processing

2009-09-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

tuioZones Library Demonstration from jLyst on Vimeo.

Website

Programming Interactivity - A Designer's Guide to Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks

2009-09-17T18:28:00.001-07:00

Joshua Noble "Programming Interactivity - A Designer's Guide to Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks"
July 2009 | English | ISBN-13: 978-0-596-15414-1 | 736 Pages

If you're interested in using electronics and programming to create rich interactive experiences with your artwork, designs, or prototypes, Programming Interactivity is the place to start. You'll explore common themes in interactive art and design, like 2D and 3D graphics, sound, physical interaction, computer vision, circuit bending, geo-location and more. This book explains programming and electrical engineering basics, and introduces three freely available tools created specifically for artists and designers:

* Processing, a Java-based programming language and environment for building projects on the desktop, Web, or mobile phones

* Arduino, a system that integrates a microcomputer prototyping board, IDE, and programming language for creating your own hardware and controls

* OpenFrameworks, a coding framework simplified for designers and artists, using the powerful C++ programming language

You'll get working code samples you can use right away, along with the background and technical information you need to design, program, build, and troubleshoot your own projects. Programming Interactivity also examines cutting-edge design techniques, and includes discussions with leading artists and designers on projects and theory.

LINK

Elderly People and the City- An Investigation with GPS Methodology

2009-09-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

Elderly People and the City- An Investigation with GPS Methodology by Noam Shoval

View more documents from amandake.

Algorithmic Architecture

2009-09-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

As architecture enters the new era of digital representation, geometrical theories and processes are being implemented, tested, and pushed to their limits. Recent theories of form in architecture have focused on computational methods of formal exploration and expression. From topological geometry and hypersurfaces to blobs and folds, there is a clear tendency to seek and explore formal properties as sources of ordering systems. For the last two decades, designers have been concerned with the use of computational mechanisms for the exploration of formal systems. These practices have attempted to readdress formal issues using new techniques and methods. Computational tools are central protagonists in this exploration.     The dominant mode of utilizing computers in architecture today is that of computerization; entities or processes that are already conceptualized in the designer's mind are entered, manipulated, or stored on a computer system. In contrast, computation or computing, as a computer-based design tool, is generally limited. While research and development of software involves extensive computational techniques, mouse-based manipulations of 3D computer models are not necessarily acts of computation.     Presently, an alternative choice is being formulated: algorithmic architecture. It involves the designation of software programs to generate space and form from the rule-based logic inherent in architectural programs, typologies, building code, and language itself. Instead of direct programming, the codification of design intention using scripting languages available in 3D packages (i.e. Maya Embedded Language MEL, 3DMaxScript, and FormZ 4.0) can build consistency, structure, coherency, traceability, and intelligence into computerized 3D form. By using scripting languages designers can go beyond the mouse, transcending the factory-set limitations of current 3D software.  

Source: GSD 2309 course description, Prof. Terzidis

Michael Hansmeyer

GSD work

theverymany

follymorph.blogspot.com

Michael Hansmeyer

object-e.blogspot.com

evolo- algorithmic skyscraper competition

Design for responsive communities by Christian Nold

2009-09-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

Design for responsive communities

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Designing for Place-Based Social Interaction of Urban Residents in Mexico, South Africa and Australia

2009-09-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

PDF Paper download

Abstract

The design of technology to facilitate social interaction of urban residents is increasingly important for many countries around the world. México and South Africa are particularly prone to issues that stem from urban densification and a lack of adequate affordable housing. Governments look to ICT to take on a mediating and facilitating role. This paper reports on research-in-progress of a tri-continental study. The external factors and aims of this pilot project identifying local case studies to prepare for a larger and longer term international comparison of local community networking approaches are examined. It is argued that by careful attention to cultural and social assets in the community, innovations will be engendered which enhance economic and social development. Preliminary design implications for the support of neighbourhood interactions across different socio-cultural contexts are presented.

Collective Intelligence in Design

2009-09-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

Editorial Reviews

Editor: Christopher Hight, Chris Perry

Product Description

Exploring how today’s most compelling architecture is emerging from new forms of collaborative practice, this title of AD engages three predominant phenomena: architecture’s relationship with digital and telecommunication technology; the media; and economies of globalisation. The articles in the issue explore the relationship between these readings and examine, for the first time, the implications of these phenomena upon forms of architectural invention and production. While much attention has been focused upon the influence of digital media on architectural form and technique, little has examined its far broader implications for forms of architectural practice. Yet, as with modernism and the professionalization of architecture at the end of the 19^th century and the rise of architectural corporations in the mid-20^th century, the future of architectural design will inevitably depend upon reconfigurations of architectural authorship.

From the Back Cover

Exploring how today;s most compelling design is emerging from new forms of collaborative practice and modes of collective intelligence, this title of AD engages two predominant phenomena: design's relationship with new information and telecommunication technologies, and new economies of globalisation. With the shift from the second machine age to the age of information, the network has replaced the assembly line as a pre-eminent model of organisation. With this shift has come the assembly line as a pre-eminent model of organisation. With this shift has come the introduction of numerous alternative modes of social, economic and political organisation in the form of peer-to-peer networks and open-source communities. this has radically altered conventional models of collective invention, as well as challenging received notions of individual authorship and agency, questioning the way in which traditional disciplines organise themselves. This reorganisation is apparent with in architectural practice, as well as within its participation in a greater cultural context of increasing interdisciplinarity. For the design disciplines, this includes the emergence of new forms of collective intelligence in a number of different fields including architecture, software and interaction design, gaming, motion typography and product design.

Collective Intelligence in Design takes in contributions from: AlUm Studio, CONTINUUM (working with the Smart Geometry Group and Bentley Systems), Servo, Hernan Diaz-Alonso and Benjamin Bratton, Open Source Architecture, MIT's Media Lab and United Architects. Additionally, the issue features essays from a diverse pool of academics and designer,s including Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Michael Hensel, Therese Tierney, Pia Ednie-Brown and Brett Steele, as well as an extensive interview with Michael Hardt, an influential thinker on the subject of contemporary globalisation.

Amazon

4dsocial: Interactive Design Environments (Architectural Design)

2009-09-17T12:47:00.000-07:00

Editorial Reviews

Review
"features the work of leading designers" (worldchanging.com, Monday 8th October 2007)

Description
A new breed of public interactive installations is taking root that overturns the traditional approach to artistic experience. Architects, artists and designers are now creating real-time interactive projects at very different scales and in many different guises. Some dominate public squares or transform a building’s façade – others are more intimate, like wearable computing. All, though, share in common the ability to draw in users to become active participants and co-creators of content, so that the audience becomes part of the project. Investigating further the paradoxes that arise from this new responsive media at a time when communication patterns are in flux, this title features the work of leading designers, such as Electroland, Usman Haque, Shona Kitchen and Ben Hooker, ONL, Realities United Scott Snibbe. While many works critique the narrow public uses of computing to control people and data, others raise questions about public versus private space in urban contexts; all attempt to offer a unique, technologically mediated form of ‘self-learning’ experience, but which are most effective concepts in practice?

Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy

2009-09-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

Description:

The Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League, explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it are affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other 「situated」 technologies? A new generation of architecture that responds to building occupants and environmental factors has embraced distributed technical systems as a means and end for developing more mutually enriching relationships between people, the space they inhabit, and the environment. This pamphlet discusses key qualities of "responsive" architecture as a performing instrument that is both mutable and contestable.

This book is downloadable via here

Link

City Tag-location-based multiplayer game for spontaneous social interaction

2009-09-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

iPaq screens showing 3 different game states

CitiTag is a wireless location-based multiplayer game, designed to enhance spontaneous social interaction and novel experiences in city environments by integrating virtual presence with physical. In the first version of CitiTag you roam the city with a GPS- and WiFi-enabled iPaq PocketPC in search for players of the opposite team that you can ‘tag’. You can also get tagged yourself if one of them gets close to you. Then you need to find a friend to free you. Urban space becomes a playground and everyone is a suspect.

Where: The Open University Campus in Milton Keynes and Bristol Centre (St. Augustine’s Parade

Why:The CitiTag game is being developed to explore social experiences and emergent behaviours in public spaces through playful interaction, based on the awareness of other players’ presence. The project is motivated by the hypothesis that very simple game rules based on presence states (e.g. I am Green and ‘tagged’) can result in an enjoyable social experience, stimulated by real world interaction among players. The aim of our studies is to identify the design implications for future technology mediated social experiences and how such experiments can inform the experience design process.

The project involves the collaboration between HP Labs and the Open University’sKnowledge Media Institute (KMi). KMi’s Centre for New Media is developing the client software and multi-user server. The user trials will provide data for Yanna Vogiazou’s (OU) and Bas Raijmaker’s (RCA) PhD work.

Urban Computing As Fried Eggs

2009-09-16T19:46:00.000-07:00

Via Fabien on the 7.5th Floor, I came across an illustration by Karen Martin starting to map the field of Urban Computing. It’s not a field, of course — closer to a large set of intersecting practices and broader disciplines swirling about those practices. Two things to be said. First about visualizations and illustrations of complex social-practice-fields. Second about urban computing (whatever that is, and whyever that is.)

What I find most compelling here is the absence — difficult to capture, to be sure — of the messiness that is definitely part of what is referred to as “urban computing”, which I wouldn’t even try to define, except in a rather messy diagram, much messier than Karen’s valiant work.

Knots, intersections, tangles and generally messy illustrations are, I’m sure, very unpopular, particularly with design’s general fetish of clean lines and the Tufte aesthetic of making complex visualizations all tidy and Tufte.

I’m not an illustrator or visualization guy by any stretch, but I’m much more agreeable, and prone to appreciate the messy illustration of what are complex engagements of social practices. This was my one effort to represent the military-industrial light and magic complex — the swirl of history, time, politics, national security and the entertainment enterprise. No attempt to be orderly and legible in the Tufte sense of things. It’s a complex “eco-system” with layers and knots and disorderly eddies (not flows..please..) of power and aspiration and money. Why organize that with bullets and linear connections? Simplifications erase the beast, leaving just shards of bone to be imaginarily cobbled back into a fictitious whole. What produces meaning, in my mind, is not so much names of practices, or companies or individual participants, but rather the ways in which the imbroglios form, power is manipulated and deployed — the process of deploying “resources” to create the names and to give them “stickiness” and the holding power that then makes them, you know — a “given.”

Latour sums this notion up eloquently, and there’s lots more to be said, at some other time, I’m sure.

“..we do not find all explanations in terms of inscription equally convincing,
but only those that help us to understand how the mobilization and mustering of new
resources is achieved. We do not find all explanations in terms of social groups, interests or economic trends, equally convincing but only those !that offer a specific mechanism to sum up “groups”, “interests”, “money”!and “trends”: mechanisms which, we believe, depend upon the manipulation of paper, print, images and so on.” ["Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together"].

Link

Hybrid Reality and Location-Based Gaming: Redefining Mobility and Game Spaces in Urban Environments

2009-09-16T19:36:00.000-07:00

Adriana de Souza e Silva

North Carolina State University, USA, souzaesilva@ncsu.edu

Hybrid reality games and location-based mobile games use urban spaces as the game scenario and are played with the aid of mobile technologies equipped with location awareness and Internet connection. This article conceptualizes hybrid reality and location-based mobile games within the area of game studies via their three main characteristics: mobility, sociability, and spatiality. In addition, the article proposes a theoretical framework for studying these games focusing on the possible implications of transforming urban spaces in playful environments. Last, one location-based mobile game, BOTFIGHTERS, and one hybrid reality game, CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? are used as examples of how these games (a) create a new logic of game space, (b) transform the relationship between serious life and playful spaces, and (c) transform the perception of urban spaces and patterns of mobility through the city.

Key Words: hybrid reality games • location awareness • location-based mobile games • mobile technologies • mobility • urban spaces

Paper is on acm

Using Virtual Reality to Foster Civic Engagement

2009-09-16T19:34:00.001-07:00

Using virtual worlds to foster civic engagement in Boston will be the topic of the April 4

meeting of the Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) when it convenes for the final session this academic year.

The meeting will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Rabb Room at Tisch College, and is open to all. A light lunch will be served.

Eric Gordon, assistant professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, and Gene Koo, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, will brief the group on their ongoing project to involve residents of Boston in using Internet technology to help shape the design of their neighborhood.

“What usually happens is the city brings people together and asks them yes-or-no questions about a proposal. Our idea is to adopt internet technology to ask people to be part of an actual design project run by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, not by developing blueprints, but by participating in a dialogue in ways never before possible,” Gordon explained.

Koo and Gordon are adapting Second Life, an online 3-D virtual world, to spur community dialog. Local residents will gather in a lab and view a design proposal in Second Life. Together, they will move objects around to see what the streetscape could look like under different arrangements.

“This is much more involved than looking at a model,” said Gordon. “They’ll play with the space, because Second Life allows you to build things and move things around together.”

While many of the millions of Second Life “residents” who currently access that virtual world do so independently, Gordon said that the Hub2 project, as it is known, brings people together to jointly address a problem. This, he said, accomplishes two goals: it gets people to share and respond to each other’s ideas, and it surmounts the digital divide which would prevent those without internet access or technical savvy from participating.

Hub2—the first initiative of its kind—was launched last September with partnerships and support from members of Emerson College, Harvard University, the City of Boston and the BRA.

Gordon’s work is focused on the social dimension of new media, with a special interest in place-based digital communities, social networking, and virtual environments. He is working on two book projects: The Urban Spectator: New Media and the American City and The Place of Social Media: How Networks Think Globally and Act Locally. In addition to his work on public urban spaces, he is also interested in public academic spaces. He is working on a project funded by the National Endowment for Humanities that explores the use of the social web in academic lectures and events.

Koo helped found Legal Aid University, which provides training and professional development to poverty lawyers across the nation. Prior to his appointment at the Berkman Center, he worked at Mass. Law Reform Institute, where he coordinated a knowledge management website for the state, helped develop a portal to educate Massachusetts residents on their legal rights, and advised on technical and practical implementation of a statewide case management system. He is also involved with efforts across several law schools to use virtual environments for legal instruction.

Co-sponsored by Tufts’ Sociology and Political Science Departments and Tisch College, CERG has provided an interdisciplinary cross-school forum since 2003 for people at Tufts, as well as individuals from other colleges and Tufts host communities, to share ideas and present work in progress relating to civic engagement research.

For more information and to be added to the email notification list, contactsusan.ostrander@tufts.edu or kent.portney@tufts.edu.

Exploring mobile gesture design at Nokia

2009-09-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

IBM TV - Smarter Math: Equations for a smarter planet

2009-09-16T17:56:00.001-07:00

IBM TV - Smarter Grid: Making the power grid smart

2009-09-16T17:52:00.001-07:00

Urban Computing--Navigating Space and Context

2009-09-16T17:46:00.000-07:00

As computing moves from the personal desktop into the world around us, the problems of design and usability go beyond technical considerations to contend with preexisting social structure and cultural norms associated with public spaces.

While much computing research has been concerned with home or work, the focus has recently been shifting toward “third places”—the spaces between home and work. These are complex spaces, as they are navigated both through physical movement and interpretations of social context.2 As computing blunders into our personal worlds—annoying, interrupting, or distracting us—it is potentially even more disruptive in public spaces, where friends and strangers alike navigate the complex social context of coexistence. While public space presents challenges to technology design, it also has the advantage of being more accessible than private spaces such as home or work, affording great potential for both observational studies and field testing of real world applications. Sociological research illustrates that public spaces can be understood as combinations of “front spaces” for performative action5 and spaces for semiprivate and private interactions. People inhabit these spaces even as they interpret their surroundings and gauge the mood of these spaces to increase their understanding of where they live. As much as public space brings with it a sense of egalitarianism where civic life is played out and embraced,7 it also can be fraught with adversity and conflict. Both these contingencies must be taken into account when considering the design of computing for public spaces. This special issue focuses on the topic of urban computing because we feel it is important to consider public spaces as potential sites for the development of computing. The articles presented here point to issues of theoretical understanding of these spaces, as well as the technical feasibility of technology design and development. We are not calling for technology designers to become urban planners and social scientists, but we do suggest that there is a wealth of research in these areas that needs to be taken into account when designing new technologies. Collaborations are crucial to understanding social life and creating technologies that can augment it in positive ways. We believe that research in urban computing can be useful for augmenting and extending existing theories in relevant fields and for greater blending of these fields into a coherent understanding of public social life. The articles presented here were selected based not only on their ability to shed light on the field, but also for their collective impact—each offering a different perspective on public computing.

Download full intro paper

Computational architecture: Theveryma

2009-09-16T17:40:00.001-07:00

For a different take and a different scripting language, go read theverymany, Marc Fornes’ blog on his experiments in computational architecture. 98% of his blog so far is Rhinoscript code for creating generative structures, accompanied by intriguing illustrations. It makes you want to work with Rhino just to be able to see it run.

For those who don’t know it, Rhinoscript is a VBScript language used to control Rhino, a high-end 3D package used for anything from CAD/CAM and visualization to computer animation. Rhino is popular with coding architects, sculptors and CGI heads alike. It’s not as old skool as AutoCAD and AutoLISP, which has been used for computational architecture since 1986. But it’s likely a lot more useful.

theverymany is refreshingly focused on sketches and code, but there is documentation of one interesting recent project: "From DIN to DIM", a “series of experimentations looking at transitions between the German Standard of design to self-similar objects controled by declared variables…”. Done with Vincent Nowak and Claudia Corcilius, it consists of generative formal studies, using nested loops to generate structure.

As with much computational architecture, the results are visually very compelling. The techno-organic tower structures recall fashions in blobby architecture, while simultaneously reminding one of 70s sci-fi book covers. The translation of simple code structures into complex and appealing form seems effortless, it would certainly be interesting to see the slides shown in higher detail.

Marc Fornes is a graduate of the AA's Digital Research Labotary class, and is currently working as an architect for Zaha Hadid Ltd. He indicates in the sidebar of his blog that his rhinoscript library might be available as open source.

Link

Generative architecture- theory and design

2009-09-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

Generative architecture refers to a picture in which component invention is set in motion with some degree of autonomy and some degree of design control.

A bicycle is a static system of interactive parts, governed by environmental forces and component relationships. The bicycle requires a skilled cyclist to become a dynamic system successfully operating in changing conditions. Like a bicycle under rider-power, an inhabited building is dynamic. Architects arrange a future building to suit its inhabitants; they become generative architects when they treat building design as component set invention, and if they subject the proposed components to design development using semi-autonomous or autonomous rule-systems.

Lamastudio

Gridshell Tectonics: Material Values Digital Parameters

Andrea Palladio and Zaha Hadid Architects

ParametricDesign.net

Generative Design- Good evening, Mr.Eiffel

2009-09-16T09:49:00.000-07:00

Update: It’s now clear that the news about the Serero project for the Eiffel Tower is a hoax, as seen on Archinect and NY Times. Thanks to Sarrach for the tip.

Good news for anyone planning to visit that Parisian icon, the Eiffel Tower: A competition for an extension of the tower’s public areas aims to reduce wait times and increase its visitor capacity. And best of all, the winning entry was produced through a generative design process.

Serero Architects have proposed an extension of the top plateau of the tower, using a carbon Kevlar structure capable of carrying the weight of visitors venturing out onto the observation deck to take in the beauty of the French capital. Without any physical modification to the existing structure, it will double the available floor surface.

The generative script was inspired by the cross bracing beams that give the Eiffel Tower its architectural signature, generating 3 interconnected woven forms. The result is a nice combination of the current architectural trend of sub-divided surfaces and the Art Nouveau flourishes of the original tower. Considering that many Parisians hated the tower when it was first built, it will be interesting to see how they react to this revision of their shared heritage.

See Serero Architects for more of their projects involving generative design. ViaMadeincalifornia, a great blog about computational architecture.

Link