PLANET Future Interactions

Our high definition cloud timelapse system installed on a roof overlooking the London skyline seems to be working well. Capturing at 1600x1200 pixels every 10 seconds we collect approximately 9000 images a day which are then processed at 30 frames per second to create a timelapse film in high definition. Music eine neue welt. The movie above represents our second test timelapse for July 4th

“I cant believe it, the way you look sometimes,
Like a trampled flag on a city street, oh yeah,

And I dont want it, the things youre offering me,
Symbolized bar code, quick id, oh yeah,

How to represent a map for blind people. Seen this week in Torino.

Some device usages sometimes rely on a great confidence of certain technologies.

The BBC have a good article online looking at opposition to introducing Street View to Google Maps in the UK. Apparently Google started capturing London this week. The main issue is with the UK's privacy laws where people cannot be photographed without consent if the output is to be used for commercial gain - as is the case with Google Maps. There is also the issue of privacy in terms of houses

In their introduction to the great “Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilites and the Urban Condition” book, Graham and Marvin describes the 5 most important changes cities and urban infrastructures have experienced in the past century:

“

• the intensity, power and reach of those connections [water, electrical, heat, car infrastructures];
• the pervasiveness of reliance on urban life based on material and technological networks and the mobilities they support;
• the scale of technologically mediated urban life;
• the duplicating, extending variety and density of networked infrastructures;
• the speed of sophistication of the more powerful and advanced infrastructures.

• Part Scorsese, part Shakespeare [leaguehq.com.au]
  "It may be the computer age, with players receiving game plans via emails with video attachments but last night's decider resembled a old typewriter at edition time. The game darted, feinted, shifted back and forth like a typewriter carriage"
• Abolish states, says defence minister [BrisbaneTimes]
  "Australia is the most over-governed nation on Earth and reforms should include abolishing the states, Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon says."
• Rudd locks in green power plan [theage.com.au]
  "The Rudd Government has set Australia on course for a new era of greener but more expensive electricity, pressing ahead with a plan to make 20% of our power come from renewable sources within just over a decade."
• The New, New Way to Office [Changeism]
  "The name change does indeed reflect the company's true role, albeit about 5 years too late, that Fedex Kinkos is part of the invisible ecosystem of work"
• The Bookseller of Beirut [Monocle]
  "As anywhere, Lebanon's independent bookstores have slowly been eaten up by big, bland chains. Set in the once thriving district of Hamra, Esquire stands out as a slightly dusty, but proud, pillar of independence."
• Bangkok Community Radio [Monocle]
  "Bangkok's 'quality of life' radio station provides a lifeline in a city where public services are haphazard at best. The all-talk format of RDCK is a call to action and an attempt to solve problems via the community."
• Jelly
  "Jelly is casual coworking. We invite people to work from our home for the day. We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of."
• The OpenHub - Coworking in Melbourne
  "The OpenHub is a workspace where creative professionals and business owners can come and work in the City of Melbourne at an affordable price."
• Inside Beijing's National Swimming Center [BusinessWeek]
  "A multidisciplinary design team employed an innovative digital process to produce a surprising, highly integrated envelope-and-structure combination "
• Screwed [Flickr]
  Real screws on iPhone or no?
• Two new EveryBlock cities are live [The EveryBlock Blog]
  "We've launched two new EveryBlock cities: Charlotte and Philadelphia." The excellent EveryBlock extends.
• Polite, Pertinent, and... Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics
  Very good.

In a short post on MadRegale, Wired correspondent Alexis Madrigal suggests that we should open a series of "Chinese air bars" so that people around the world can temporarily experience what it's like to breathe the polluted city air of China.

[Image: The "air" in Beijing on June 20, 2008, with the summer Olympics less than two months away. Photo by James Fallows].

As one or two people might have noticed, I've brought back the Quick Links menu in the right-hand column... I missed it! So come back any time to see what's being Quick Linked.

Last day in Ahmedabad - our rickshaw driver shouting over the drone of the 2-stroke, and she stops to pull in the scarf. We collectively exhale.

The Village Voice reports today about a recent event led by one of Where's favorite American provocateurs, Reverend Billy. The Rev led a lively picnic-cum-protest in New York's Union Square, one of my all-time favorite urban public spaces, which is apparently under the threat of having its lovely Neoclassical pavillion turned into a private restaurant. While I'm not at all opposed to public-private partnerships as an option for reviving parks and public spaces in need of the funding and attention, the idea that one of the most popular and attractive parks in the country's largest city (which also happens to be one of its richest) needs privatization is absurd. Which leads to the conclusion that privatizing any part of it would only be done out of greed or incompetence. Let's hope this idea dies on the vine, eh?

We have set up a new high definition timelapse system overlooking London's skyline to record London's weather. Running via a specially waterproofed Logtech Quckcam Pro 9000 we capture an image every 10 seconds at up to 1600 x 1200 pixels. By running the images at 25 frames per second it is possible to obtain high definition video of the last days skyline/weather - our first sample can be viewed

With the means to identify people and objects around you - with or without their knowledge, a framework to discover, access and extrapolate that data, and a personally carried tool through which to do all of this on the fly and without ever pulling up a web page - how long before the practice of digitally tagging angels and devils kicks off?

Onsen baskets in Yakushima (above) trolleys at Singapore airport (below).

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Two kinds of training: respondent conditioning is when you perform two events simultaneously so the subject confuses cause and effect. So think of Pavlov and his dogs: the dogs salivate when he gives them food, and then he rings a bell whenever he gives them food and the dogs get used to that. Or rather, they get conditioned to that. Then they confuse cause and effect and end up salivating whenever the bell rings, whether the food comes or not.

Geoff Shearcroft, of The Agents of Change, will be coming round tomorrow at 11:30am to speak at the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up branch here in London.
I first found Shearcroft's work – and, thus, The Agents of Change – through a book called Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. There, Shearcroft's image of a mouse with a suburban house growing out of its back – as if grafted there, or perhaps cloned – was a tongue in cheek glimpse of what Shearcroft called, in a 2001 paper for the Royal College of Art, "the new biology of architecture."

[Image: "Grow Your Own" by Geoff Shearcroft].

• You have WiFi right? [The Sydney Morning Herald]
  "If an utterly trivial movie like Sex and the City can recognise how important technology is - and how we are increasingly reliant on being connected in order to do business - isn't is a shame the state government can't see it the same way."
• Kindertotenlieder
  Fascinating installation piece, feat. Arup Acoustics.
• Liquid economy - Jonathan Glancey on the London Festival of Architecture [guardian.co.uk]
  "To mark the London Festival of Architecture, Jonathan Glancey explores whether the capital's waterlogged past holds the key to its future "
• High-speed Britain [Economist.com]
  "BRITAIN could get a new network of high-speed intercity railways. Network Rail, which manages the country's rail infrastructure, is launching a study looking at five potential routes"
• Agents in the City: First Steps to Crowd Based Architectual Modelling [Digital Urban]
  "Yesterday we posted about roads in 3d models and how small details begin to bring the 3d city to life. The same goes for pedestrians and modes of transport, in essence these objects populate the city and add a significant level of realism."
• Google Tech Talk: Urban Reconstruction and Modeling for Building Virtual Worlds [Digital Urban]
  "Automatic Architecture: The CityEngine (on) the procedural modelling of cities and more specifcally the work by Pascal Mueller a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Computer Vision Lab of the ETH Zurich, Switzerland."
• The Reign of Spain: European champions (of nearly everything) [The Independent]
  "Sunday night's triumph in Vienna was a moment of pride, unity and joy for this nation – and a mark of how far it's come." Hear hear.

Another interviewee at tomorrow's event is Simon Bradley, editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides and author of St Pancras, one of the titles in Mary Beard's ongoing Wonders of the World series.

[Image: Simon Bradley and St Pancras].