Planetaki Planet Future Interactions

Skopje 2014 Visualisation

2010-02-09T10:46:29+00:00

The clip below details a visualisation of municipality of Skopje (Macedonia) in 2014.

The St. Konstantin and Elena church and Alexa nder the Great monument are part of the Skopje 2014 project which envisages the transformation of the central district of the city:

The visualisation is in stark contrast to the most of the renders and animations we feature here on du and in many ways that is a good thing, indeed by the end of the clip with the rousing music we were quite getting into it. That said, we cant comment on the soundness of the plan - take a look at Macedonia: Online Rebellion Against “Skopje 2014″ Plan for full details on the reaction so far.

ixda interaction 2010 in Savannah

2010-02-08T18:09:57+00:00

Back from interaction10, the annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in Savannah, Georgia. A good occasion to visit the deep south (aka “dirty south 2) that I did not know at all. More observation on this at the end of this post, let’s focus first in lessons learned at the conference.

Before coming, I was not sure about the whole thing, wondering whether the talk/audience would be into web-stuff or other concerns. After three days there I have to admit that I am really happy with the quality of the talks as well as the diversity of the conference formats. As opposed to lots of events, it seems that the venues have certainly contributed to the quality of the interactions (definitely no big hotel-chain lobby with their cheesy carpets). Furthermore, I was also glad to present my talk about failures and get some interesting feedback to go further.

Instead of a selection of semi-automatic writings of the talks as I’ve done after the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, I tried to put together a selection of insights I collected at interaction2010. Overall, I was struck by the following three elements:

Incentives and rewards

A recurring topic was sur toutes les lèvres: the notion of providing “incentives and rewards” for the use of certain services. Be it about changing one’s behavior to reach a more sustainable development model or as a way to let people use applications they wouldn’t otherwise. This was a term I’ve heard in talks, conversations, participative activities and side activities. The break-out group about Foursquare at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium the other day also connects to this discussion because I think 4^2 epitomizes by-products of incentives. Simply because one the rewards the interaction designers of this location-based system created turned users into point-addicts. Although the design community has always talk about this, my impression was that design was more about creating “affordances” than incentives. Where the former lies in perceptual and cognitive psychology, industrial design and human–computer interaction, the latter stemmed from economics and sociology. I don’t judge anything here, I just see a pattern, perhaps design is well qualified to use both metaphors in its creative repertoire. The very notion for service design is perhaps useful here to understand this shift and I’ve heard someone arguing that an incentive was an “immaterial affordance” (which made me frown).

(someone typing notes without bothering looking at the blue-glow display)

About models

In addition, one of the theme I was interested in was the way designers work, achieve their projects and think. Which is why I paid close attention to tools, methodologies and abstractions. Fortunately, most of the presentation I attended showed some interesting examples of “models”. See for instance the two examples below: Nathan Shedroff’s model of experience/meaning (see his presentation for more) or Timo Arnall’s interesting model of the 3 levels for designing networked objects, and the one presented by Mike Kruzeniski.

Shedroff’s model was descriptive: as he explained, it helped him to show how meaning works in experience and the 6 dimensions of what constitutes an experience: significance, breadth, intensity, duration, triggers and interaction. As shown on this checklist, the role of the model is also prescriptive because it helps practitioners making decisions and acting upon other insights (i.e. user research).

Timo’s model is different, it originated in the categorization of experiences with networked objects, which can be:

Immediate tangible experiences: glanceable and that do not take too much attention as the Nabaztag, Nike+ or Chris Woebken’s animal superpower
Short term connecting and sharing: where the purpose is to share/get immediate feedback from friends such as the on-line component of Nike+
Long term service, data & visualization of the data produced that become social objects

What was interesting in Timo’s talk was that he showed afterwards how these three central aspects could be used to evaluate existing objects AND as a basis for designing new artifacts that could be used as an iterative cycle. The model is therefore evaluative and generative.

A third sort of model was the one showed by Mike Kruzeniski in his talk. In his work at Microsoft, his purpose is to connect engineers with a more emotional vision of innovating. The problem they encountered was that developers tended to cut features and design elements with a specific rationale which did not take into account emotional factors. The first model/metaphor they chose was the tree (cutting two many features of a product may lead to a weird tree) but it was not efficient. Thus, they adopted the “Body, Heart, & Soul” framework to qualifies, validates, and prioritizes the intangible qualities of design work alongside the more practical concerns of our Engineering partners. To put it shortly, categorizing features as “heart” or “soul” was a more legible way to prioritize (and suppress design elements). The soul is untouchable, the heart elements support the soul and the body is the rest. Each of this component has certain rules (”no more than 5 “soul” features) and it was a more humane way to prioritize than “p0″, “p1″ and “p2″. This kind of model was metaphorical in the sense that it helped engineers talk in a different way, a “beginner’s design vocabulary to start with an grow from”. Additionally, doing the simple work of categorizing features in these 3 topics was about articulating what matters emotionally to users (and then making choices). In this case, the model is both metaphorical (to convey this emotional sense) and operational (to enable easier prioritization).

These three examples are interesting given they exemplify the use of abstract models by designers from the ixda community. It as if the notion of model had been re-appropriated in a flexible way to serve the designer’s purposes, which is a relevant locus of observation. Make not mistake here, these are only examples I’ve seen and I won’t generalize from this sample. I am pretty sure you would also find predictive abstractions in designers’ work. However, it’s curious to point them out to show how models here are more seen as “tools to give structures to help you think” than explicative elements. The difference between designers and scientists in the way they build and use models, some epistemological comparisons may be intriguing here and I feel I am just scratching the surface.

(Wifi data points on a post-it in the washroom)

Showing products or not?

My third comment on the conference was the surprising lack of examples/products/services in lots of the presentation. I expected a design conference to be much more evocative in terms of design examples and it was not the case. Of course there are exceptions (Timo’s presentation for instance) but it’s as if all the potential examples had been vacuumed and resurfaced in Paola Antonelli’s talk.

The interest in objects

The mention of Antonelli’s work allows me to make a smooth transition to a trend I find interesting: the increasing interest (or the resurgence of interest) in technical objects and a way to talk about them, to analyze them (Timo’s model is inspiring for that matter) and how the history of digital artifacts matter. In her talk, she described how objects have always spoken to her and she summarized an upcoming MOMA exhibit that will cover the evolution of new media/digital technologies. Perhaps it’s just me reading The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are (Henry Petroski), Carl di Salvo’s new blog about objects, discussions with my neighbor or the game controller project with Laurent Bolli, but I am feeling a renewal of interest in analyzing objects (rather than users).

Not so much time for a write-up about the city itself but some pics are always worth a thousand words.

(The intriguing repartition of green pockets in Savannah)

(The pervasive presence of a local design school)

(Savannah has remnants of old shops)

(Luxuriance on the street, lovable pipes and nature around)

(Cultural shock for me maybe)

(Gorgeous brick buildings to be rented, a common feature in this town)

(Evocative drain pipe)

Apologies and explanations [longish, too emo for most]

2010-02-08T18:07:38+00:00

Many thanks to those of you who have written to note, comment on or bemoan the lack of posting hereabouts lately. I really do appreciate your support. It’s true, as more than a few of you have guessed, that Helsinki winter has sapped me of most of the energy I’d need to maintain a regular posting schedule, but there are deeper issues keeping me from having much to say as well, and maybe you ought to have an account of some of that.

I’ve basically given up trying to get any work done on the book for the time being. It’s been a struggle enough to find the time and space to think and write these last two years, and it’s by now abundantly clear to me that it was a particularly titanic and hubristic bit of foolery to even think of finishing this project while I remained at Nokia. The end of my contract looms on the horizon, though, just a few months out, and trust me when I say I’m very much looking forward to devoting myself fully to something that is fully my own.

If you’ve been waiting patiently for this book to appear — and your support and forbearance throughout this period have redefined “patience” for me — fear not, there is a completion path and plan that stretches across the second half of 2010. I also, frankly, feel (and believe you’ll eventually agree) that the book will be better for not having appeared in 2008; these two years have seen so many real-life case studies and stories to tell crop up in the general field of urban informatics that the book can only be richer for delivering an account of them.

Such energy as I do have, I’m currently devoting to Do projects, where there is a gratifyingly proportionate relationship between the effort I invest and the reward realized. Our Tokyo Blues continues to do well, but if you’re not familiar with it I’d love it if you’d have a look and consider ordering a copy or two.

On the subject of books, it’s also mildly interesting to me that, while sales of Everyware have apparently found entirely new regions of toilet to circle, paradoxically enough the book seems only to be growing in influence and even finding the broader readership I’d always wanted for it. What makes me ambivalent about this otherwise happy circumstance is that, after all, I wrote the thing in 2005 — and five years is a lifetime when you’re talking about technology. I can’t imagine that anyone picking up this book for the first time in 2010 is going to find it anything but quaint, but as usual, I couldn’t possibly be more delighted that people continue to find it of use.

The situation with regard to speaking is, I’m afraid, less felicitous. I’m coming off a run of mediocre-to-outright-bad talks, capped by a jetlagged muddle before a room of very, very bright people at last month’s Microsoft Social Computing Summit in New York. There have been exceptions — the hour or so that I spent in conversation with Usman Haque at Hackney’s SPACE at the tail-end of November was just electric, profoundly gratifying — but for the most part I don’t feel like audiences are getting very much value out of what I’m trying to bring to the table.

One of the harder things about public speaking for me has always been this notion I have that, for any given audience, you’re always carrying around some insight that would blow their minds — but you don’t know which of the ten thousand notions floating around your skull it actually is. And your task, if you want to leave the people who have entrusted you with their time and attention with something of worth, is to somehow divine that one thing, and sort it from the banalities, shallow takes and things they’ve heard before, better stated by someone else.

Simply put, I don’t think I’ve been doing a very good job of this my last three, four, five times out, and I think the smartest thing I can do by way of response is cut way back on my travel and speaking commitments and see if that improves my sense of what people might find valuable.

I’m trying to carve out more space, in general, for long-form reading, contemplation and synthesis, and this means stepping away from the fast-twitch clock speed of contemporary media. This goes specifically to my use of Twitter and Dopplr and Foursquare and whatnot: it’s not such a good idea to use these to get in touch with me, as I’m not paying attention, and especially don’t be hurt if you’ve tried to connect with me on one service or another and haven’t heard anything back.

2.
And this points toward the primary thing that’s been bothering me, the thing which has been keeping me from wanting to be particularly visible at the moment (or for any future easily foreseeable from here). My feelings about it are complicated, will be a little difficult to articulate correctly, and will quite probably rub some of you the wrong way even if I do get the expression of it righter than not.

This is the crux of it: I’ve come to feel that, by virtue of my public participation, a whole lot of people I don’t know expect and (what’s more and worse) feel like they have the right to demand a certain level of performance from me. They – and for some people reading this, I really mean “you” – insist on a certain frequency of posting, a certain quality of cleverness or perspicacity, a certain threshold of seriousness. I believe this because I hear about it in spades if I fail on any count to deliver on your expectations.

I get asked to advise people on their academic and career choices, point them at resources, introduce them to (what they seem to believe are) my influential friends, write forewords (for free), speak at events (for free), give what amounts to free consulting. In most of these cases the person asking seems to think I have huge draughts of time and energy available to me, coupled with magickal access to some source of insight they don’t. And for the last several years — because all of this would be very gratifying for anyone, and I’m acutely aware of what a privilege it is to be in any such position — I responded to each and every such request with a “yes,” answered each and every mail, took time to ensure that each and every query was engaged politely, promptly, and as fully as possible.

What I want to say to you now is that whether or not anyone else on Earth is capable of measuring up to these expectations, I am not.

I’m exhausted. Drained and spent. Distracted from the things I want to achieve in the precious little time any of us have in this life. (I can’t even begin to imagine what anybody who’s genuinely a public person in any real sense of those words experiences.) And yes, I acknowledge that this is in large measure my own fault. I suppose it’s what anybody asks for when they post things in the open, for all & sundry to read and link and respond to…but I have to tell you it’s the furthest thing from anything I have in mind when I hit “publish.”

See, in my heart of hearts, when I write something here, I’m intending it for a very small group of friends and colleagues — like maybe ten people. This is both because these people constitute my imagined peer community, and because it’s virtually impossible for me to conceive of anyone else caring in the slightest what I have to say. The main reason I bother is because, for whatever reason, I believe that inherent in the act of consuming other people’s intellectual or artistic output is the responsibility to replenish the well by producing your own…but you don’t ever actually expect anybody to notice that you’re doing so, or trying to. So it’s always a little surprising for me when someone who is not part of that tiny crowd goes and links something I’ve posted here before a broader audience, with the implication that it’s worth that audience’s time in considering and engaging.

OK, fair enough. It’s a public Internet: all adults understand this basic fact. If you’re not prepared to have your words travel widely, why bother blogging at all? All stipulated. Even more so, in this case, because I’m venting about the perceived limitations of a particular community of practice, and what should I expect but that the people who feel themselves taken to task might want to respond?

What I dislike is the very premise that what I posted even constitutes a “challenge” that’s worth addressing in any such way. The reason people keep blogs — let me be more straightforward: the reason I keep a blog — is to express opinions. Precisely to not, always, have to be consistent or sensible or bound by a duty to the truth. To not, always, have to be responsible. To not, always, answer to the same standards I’d expect of (say) a writer for the New York Times or the Guardian. To be full of shit, if I feel like it. And, what’s more (and this goes to the bozo who whined about my ostensible tone of “world-weary superiority”), to be full of shit in whatever style I feel like adopting.

As it happens, I do stand by what I wrote in the linked post. But in reading the responses to it on the IxDA site, it’s obvious that most of the people there found my take on matters transparently and profoundly wrong — plainly contradicted by the facts on the ground, which some of them proceed to enumerate. And here’s the mystery to me: if what I wrote is so obviously fatuous, why even bother addressing it at all? The unspoken premise is, I suppose, flattering, but it’s also dangerous and wrong: that my opinion somehow has more weight than Random Internet Person’s, and therefore demands a response.

Let me be the very first person to assure you that it has not and does not. I simply don’t believe in “thought leaders,” gurus, or “experts”; I think you should be very suspicious of anyone who allows themselves to be referred to as such, and triply so of anyone who refers to themselves as such. This is not, at all, to say that I don’t believe in, acknowledge and sincerely admire expertise…but in the end, opinion, no matter how well-informed, is just that and should never, ever be taken for anything more.

For me personally, this resistance to the notion of “thought leadership” is one of the many healthy values I picked up from punk rock, where the kid on the stage was just another kid in the crowd ten minutes ago, and will be again ten minutes from now. Stiff Little Fingers said it all better and more tunefully thirty (!) years ago, but the bottom line is that you’re making a serious blunder if you’re looking to me or anyone else for superior insight: the only insight worth having is the one you’ve developed yourself. Or that, anyway, is my opinion.

Now I’m no worse at basic operations of logic than anyone else: if my voluntarily choosing to do something is observably leading to unpleasant results, for me and everyone else…then perhaps the best way to prevent that outcome is not to engage in that particular pursuit anymore, y’know? I’m going to step away from the keyboard for awhile, which may or may not be quite a long while, and try to find ways of making better and deeper contributions — contributions, in any case, that do not involve inane nanocelebrity and the spurious, misleading and entirely unwanted mantle of “thought leadership.”

As Stiff Little Fingers’ lead singer Jake Burns used to say at the close of every gig (and it’s a habit of his which, I now realize, I’ve been subconsciously aping for years): thank you very much for your time, and your voices, and your applause. I am now and will always be grateful that you gave my words and ideas your consideration. Now go and be your own hero.

Processing: A 3D City in One Minute

2010-02-08T14:28:41+00:00

We have featured the students work as part of the The Master of Advanced Studies in CAAD at ETH in Zurich quite a lot recently and we are quite fastidious as to what goes on the blog. It goes to show the quality of the output.

The following example by Jakob Przybylo, Min-Chieh Chen and Michele Leidi is a typical - this time creating a city using processing:

Processing City - Sandy City (Trailer) from mjchen on Vimeo.

The clip below provides an insight into the process:

Processing City - Sandy City (HD version) from mjchen on Vimeo.

Being able to create a city in one minute - using their processing application is impressive, it also allows output via .dxf, as such it can be imported into any number of rendering/modelling packages.

No word yet on a wider release, but it would be good to see if this could be made available....

Links for 2010-02-07 [del.icio.us]

2010-02-08T10:32:45+00:00

Kristina Keneally| Labor CBD metro [SMH]
"A WESTERN Metro would be built within five years and light rail would be built in the CBD, according to the transport blueprint that Kristina Keneally will release this month, government sources say."

Toward the city come hills

2010-02-08T18:10:01+00:00

[Image: Mudslides strike Los Angeles; photo by Gary Friedman for the L.A. Times].

In his short novel Man in the Holocene, author Max Frisch describes the psychological implications of living in the presence of possible Alpine landslides. The idea that the very earth beneath your feet might someday start to avalanche takes on existential overtones.

"Nobody in the village," Frisch writes, for instance, "thinks that the day, or perhaps night, will come when the whole mountain could begin to slide, burying the village for all time." He then supplies us with the image of a "laborer who has been working all his life on supporting walls and does not believe the whole mountain could ever begin to slide"; for someone such as that, a landslide's accompanying loss of foundation is simply too extraordinary to think about.

Somewhere in the hills, though, Frisch suggests, is a hidden logic: it both explains and demonstrates how thousands of tons of rocks and the spaces between them can unlock, breaking open into discrete geometries to tumble toward the valleys below, perhaps bringing houses—whole cities—down with them.

And it can all start with a minor act: a small crack, perhaps a rainstorm, perhaps just the weight of one man hiking alone. "That is the way landslides begin, cracks appearing noiselessly, not widening, or hardly at all, for weeks on end, until suddenly, when one is least expecting it, the whole slope below the crack begins to slide, carrying even forests and all else that is not firm rock down with it," Frisch writes.

Indeed, "One must be prepared for everything."

[Images: Beneath the pavement, liquid terrain. All photos by Anne Cusack for the L.A. Times].

A few months ago, meanwhile, I bookmarked a short article in the L.A. Times. Published after massive wildfires had burned through the hills around the city, denuding them of all vegetation and thus destabilizing the rock and soil, the article reported on a number of city residents in the outlying hilltop communities who had begun to eye the slopes around them with alarm. It was as if the earth itself had been weaponized: every hill, scarred by fire now and insecure for void of plantlife, was a mudslide waiting to happen.

To protect against this cascading eventuality, a new municipal landscape architecture thus emerged: mazes of concrete barriers and walls of sandbags showed up to redivide the streets. Circulation through the neighborhood would be entirely redefined, and a massive landscape of waiting would be installed: a space patient for all the material locked inside those hills to arrive.

Officials have said the concrete barriers [they soon installed] will stay in place for three to four years because the hillsides are completely barren in the wake of the Station fire, which charred more than 160,000 acres. It was the worst wildfire in L.A. County's history. Many measures had been put in place, including the clearing of debris basins, the notification of residents in high-risk areas, the distribution of sandbags and the laying of several thousand feet of K-rails.These spatial precautions were put to heavy use last week when the hills disgorged themselves, liquifying, going mobile, and flowing through, past, and over the neighborhood houses.

It was a "Niagara of mud," the L.A. Times reported.

[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

"The mudflow twisted garage doors into dented accordions," we read, and it "disintegrated walls of sandbags and knocked over 4,000-pound concrete barriers that lined the road to divert water away from homes. About 25 vehicles were damaged, flowing down the street and smashing against walls, trees and one another." In one case, "a white single-story home appeared submerged in several feet of dirt, looking as if a giant child had dropped the house in a sand pit."

Another man, woken up in his Snover Canyon house in the middle of the night, looked outside to see "muddy water carrying boulders the size of bowling balls... through the 4-foot-high barricade of sandbags, a plywood wall and a chain-link fence. A sheet of mud nearly a half-foot deep and 16 feet wide cascaded across the backyard."

He ran to the bathroom window. He had expected this. It was the weak point of his defense. There at the corner of the yard, a geyser of water crashed into the remains of the wall and shot into the air. He had to get his family out. He didn’t know what else might be coming down that mountain.The terrestrial uncertainty of that final sentence is astonishing.

[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

Once the mudslides abated in one district, "nine homes in the foothill area suffered enough damage to be red-tagged, which means they’re partially collapsed and uninhabitable. With crumbling walls, sunken roofs, shattered windows and mud-filled living rooms, the structures are in a precarious position," themselves now more like residual appendages of the debris flow than freestanding architectural units.

[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

However, perhaps the best article ever written about mudslides in Los Angeles was produced nearly 30 years ago by John McPhee. Called "Los Angeles Against the Mountains," it was originally published in The New Yorker but was later collected in McPhee's genuinely excellent and very highly recommended book The Control of Nature.

Among many other things, McPhee devotes several paragraphs to a description of the DIY architectural tweaks that have arisen in response to these landscapes-gone-mobile. "At least one family," he writes, for instance, "has experienced so many debris flows coming through their back yard that they long ago installed overhead doors in the rear end of their built-in garage. To guide the flows, they put deflection walls in their back yard. Now when the boulders come they open both ends of their garage, and the debris goes through to the street."

Not only has this image stuck with me for years now, ever since I first read McPhee's book, but it has also been impossible for me to avoid thinking about when looking at the photographs you see here, particularly those taken on the mud-slicked streets themselves by Irfan Khan. But the very idea that one could deliberately open a causeway for the natural world to flow, with awe-inspiring violence, through one's own personal space—that you could actually build a kind of sacrifice zone within your own house for forces otherwise well beyond spatial control—is, at the very least, an extraordinary metaphor for living with the natural world.

This minor architecture—of repurposed overhead doors, emergency ditching, concrete crib structures, deflection walls, and more—brings the ever-present possibility of geologic collapse into world of design.

After all, how do you build on an earth that keeps disappearing?

[Images: Photos by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

Returning to Frisch's book, there is a fantastic, if brief, image of sound being put to use to stimulate minor avalanches, perhaps as a way to help avoid the Big One later on. "Men blow three times on a little horn and wave a red flag," Frisch writes, as if describing a fairy tale of precisely administered sonic land-disassembly, "and shortly afterward the bits come rattling down, pebbles and gravel from the Ice Age."

I mention this out of the possibility that perhaps Los Angeles city officials should not be responding to the ever-present threat of landslides on the urban perimeter with hardened architectural defenses but with something more like preemptive techniques: why wait for the hills to come to you, in other words (see this diagram of how debris basins work), when you could simply bring them down on your own time and schedule, in rock-by-rock increments, pulling rivers of solid geology out from their halo'd terraces above the city? Could micro-landslides somehow keep apocalyptic avalanches at bay?

Or, more realistically, does L.A. need to ditch the bulky mazes of concrete switching walls and go for a massive replanting effort, instead? Like Beijing's Great Green Wall against the coming desert, L.A. needs to plant a wall of minor roots against the instability of its mountains.

Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2010, New York

2010-02-08T07:09:30+00:00

As I started writing this, it was hovering around 39˚C here in Sydney. Gusty, burning hot air. Too hot. It could not have been more different to New York, where I'd been a week or so earlier, where the temperature had been hovering around -7˚C and down to -15˚C with the windchill. I was in Manhattan for a Microsoft Research event: their annual 'social computing symposium', and this year was loosely focused on 'the city'. Many thanks to Tom Coates + Matt Jones, Liz Lawley, Clay Shirky et al for the invite.

Here are my notes on the event, with a dash of local colour thrown in for good measure.

(There are some other excellent notes, from Nicolas Nova and Liz Goodman, and a fine set of photos from Julian Bleecker that capture the essence of the event.)

The venue was the now near-legendary ITP at NYU, set in a typically sturdy building on Broadway, around Greenwich Village and the other relatively opaque NYU buildings, so I was often tramping around in the scruffy, rough-hewn nature of American urban fabric - I'm always struck by how different the various surfaces of the street are here, compared to Paris, say; Manhattan's are muscular, tough, fractured, brutish; I like it.

The surrounding streets were festooned with discarded Christmas trees. The relatively low-rent retail around here had a discernible air of desperation about it ("40% off sale price!"). The recession is far more evident than in Australia.

Walking to and from the hotel on Union Square was a particular pleasure for the three days I was there. The soundscape of Manhattan is immediately and easily familiar, shaped by the buildings such that it bounces around the streets: the rattle of distant subway under your feet, accompanied by a welcome draught of warm air blown up through the sidewalk; the chatter of hundreds of different dialects; the rolling thunder of supersized trucks careening through the rough and ready streets; the bawls and drawls of homeless and helpless; fragments of cellphone conversation; Dirty Projectors on the iPhone; eventually, the freezing wind howling round the blunt edges of my hotel ... For all that insecure New York is now often gripped in the fear that the party has moved on, that it is no longer the centre of the world, or the locus of American creativity, or that the US itself sometimes now feels like an un-developing nation, that it is beginning to unravel at the seams, or is at least being leapfrogged by others ... For all that, New York is still utterly beguiling, every single time. Beautiful.

(However, I was taken by Smith Magazine's 'Big Apple in Six Words' vs. Jay-Z, spotted on Flavorwire. As they point out, as if we needed reminding, "we do not live in the same New York as Jay-Z.")

This year's Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium had pulled together a fine set of people including Genevieve Bell, Julian Bleecker, Ben Cerveny, Tom Coates, Anil Dash, Russell Davies, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Adam Greenfield, Liz Goodman, Usman Haque, Tom Igoe, Natalie Jeremijenko, Steven Johnson, Matt Jones, Jennifer Magnolfi, Mike Migurski, Nicolas Nova, Ray Ozzie, Clay Shirky, Kevin Slavin, Molly Steenson, Linda Stone, Alice Taylor, Anthony Townsend, Duncan Wilson and many more. (A little US-centric, understandably.) Some old friends, some new ones, many I didn't know. Given the combination of social technology and the city, and the timezone, this was a great group of people.

The event stretched over two days, with series of talks grouped into loose themes followed by breakout sessions to pick apart what we'd heard. It more or less worked. Some of the talks were very good indeed; others just OK, but all were interesting on some level.

The most compelling talk was Kevin Slavin's, which is already being spoken of as one of the great presentations of the 21st century. If there were a Nobel Prize available for Powerpoint, Slavin would be a shoe-in for this round (although I have a sneaking suspicion it was Keynote, and thus disqualified). It was a majestically imaginative construction, a teetering house of cards, each new level beautifully delivered, veering from the physics of stealth bombers to the overwhelming dominance of high-frequency trading in the stock markets, via the early history of trading in lower Mannahatta, to today's NYC where real estate transactions in an entire sector of the city are dominated by optimising the physical proximity of algorithms to the mass of telecommunications infrastructure that is the 'carrier hotel' of 60 Hudson Street, before all of financial services ascends into the singularity and leaves this corporeal realm behind.

Something like that, anyway. Virilio 2.0, live on Broadway.

He was preceded by the dauntingly/hearteningly prolific Steven Johnson, who had just finished the manuscript for his latest book a couple of days previously. All of Johnson's books are worth reading, just as his projects from Feed to Outside.In have been worth watching, and the forthcoming book would appear to be right up my strasse, concerning the relationships between urban form and innovation and creativity. (Actually, it'll be interesting to see if it's 'innovation' or 'creativity'. Two very different schools.) Johnson's talk was tantalising, in that it described the routes taken by some of his trains of thought, but not that much of the content. Yet.

There were some Johnson-esque graphs (as he joked, it's obligatory to draw some when Clay Shirky is in the room) indicating relationships between creativity and size of city i.e. the bigger the city, the more innovative (don't worry; he went a little further than that). The measures of creativity will surely be explored more in the book too, for here they seemed a little over-focused on techno-scientific measures (products, patents etc.). Creativity of course also includes things like ballet, painting, stand-up comedy and gardening, few of which would register in such a measurement; but for that matter, would also include innovative services like the iPod, which have been predicated on very few patents (just ask Nokia), but rather, in the words of Patrick Whitney, protected and defined instead by a more "systemic nature of innovations and by trademark". Equally, I'd be interested in explorations of creativity (or perhaps innovation) applied outside of technology or creative industries sectors, but in manufacturing, agriculture etc.

Perhaps these activities might show up, but this initial definition should be an interesting section of Johnson's book. Equally, size may matter, but cannot quite be such a direct relationship - again, using that US techno-scientific measure, the hundreds of cities in China that are bigger than their US equivalents would simply not show up. Yet many are surely creative - and equally perhaps many are not.

I'm sure Johnson's approach will depend far more on the relationship with form than size, and here I hope he goes beyond 'the swerve' and Jacobs-isms - as useful as they are, I think we have a wider laboratory of urban environments at this point, as I tried to outline in my recent notes on New Songdo City.

The graphs he drew - which you can almost see in the above photo - indicate the direct relationship between metabolism and mass in animals, and so also indicate the biological and open systems theory angles that Johnson often approaches the subject from, which combined with a natural feel for Brooklyn-esque urbanism, tend to offer fresh insights to the field.

With my 'designing creative clusters' hat on, I cannot wait to see what he's come up with as Johnson tends to synthesise previously disparate concepts with considerable skill and imagination, and communicates them wonderfully well.

Sandwiched in between Slavin and Johnson, a good old-fashioned technical demo. And one that worked. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrated the new Bing Maps interface. I wasn't expecting much. I was blown away.

There are videos of Blaise talking about this around the place, so I won't go into too much detail, but what impressed me were the Silverlight-enabled transitions between the various zoom levels, the smooth switching of projection from 2D to isometric to tiles of angled aerial photography to street level, and the incredible integration of PhotoSynth at this street level. I'd been wondering about a genuine application for PhotoSynth for years, but with the latter on-hand, Bing Maps can even 'go inside' certain buildings - usually museums, galleries, admittedly - into 3D user-created photo-worlds.

It gives you pause for thought - although Google Maps has a massive lead in this market (as Flash does over Silverlight for that matter) these things - being non-physical, free, and with little embedded personal capital - can be relatively easily displaced. There is little friction.

Equally interesting is comparing Google and Microsoft's approaches here. An over-simplification perhaps, but with PhotoSynth providing a form of user-generated creation of the building/street, Microsoft are deploying emergent, colloborative processes at that scale, whereas Google are driving a car with a camera on its roof around every street in the world (more or less) to create their StreetView. Which is a top-down strategy if ever I saw one. Instead, Google deploy their bottom-up processes at the 2D map scale, via MapMaker etc. (although Building Maker is blurring the line here, with emergent process at the building scale. If that gets integrated into Maps, as it surely must, that's interesting. With buildings, Google users do structural engineering; Microsoft users paint the facade with photos and do interior decor.) And if this paragraph was a diagram it would look like this:

The afternoon session, concerning government, was less impressive. They didn't really focus on urban governance, which would've been useful, and few participants appeared to have much idea of the processes, politics and issues in that world. Having said that, Anil Dash was excellent: amusing, insightful, cleverly-structured and inspirational.

An obligatory Post-It note exercise, envisioning urban applications, was sandwiched in between these two sessions.

The morning of day two was 'curated' by Tom Coates and Matt Jones, and concerned 'the city as social technology'. After Tom gave a scene-setting presentation characterised by verve, imagination and an incredibly distracting clip of the monkeys and the monolith from 2001, Molly Steenson gave a great presentation that at first glance concerned the history of computers and architecture, yet really dealt with issues of design, agency and artificial intelligence in architecture.

I particularly appreciated Molly's evident ambivalence with Christopher Alexander, something I share, and also that she handed round some actual physical artefacts, in the form of the proceedings of 1960s ACM conferences on computer graphics and the like. It was a whistle-stop tour of Ivan Sutherland's famous Sketchpad demo, Marvin Minsky, J.C. Licklider, Negroponte's early work (The Architecture Machine, which is delightfully dedicated "To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture".) As we use AI increasingly on projects, albeit at the basic levels of agent-based modelling for instance, it's fascinating to reflect on the lengthy history of this work.

Duncan and I then gave our talk about our various projects. I should apologise here for running out of time. It turns out that one presentation plus one presentation does not equal one presentation. It does in fact still equal two presentations. Who knew? Either way, I think the presentation went well, and we were fortunate to be able to take over Ben Cerveny's workshop session to continue the conversation, as Ben had business to attend to.

Usman Haque followed us, with a hugely entertaining, almost totally off-the-cuff discussion, which genuinely engaged the punters. He ran through a series of statements he'd "heard around the place" - most of which revolved around applying web metaphors to urban environments - asking whether people agreed with them, before revealing he didn't agree with any of them and outlining what he did believe. It was feisty, scattershot, funny, engaging and insightful. As a rhetorical tactic, it worked, and I happened to agree with just about everything he did believe in, for what it's worth. A couple of references to follow-up: Stanislaw Lem's Peace on Earth and H. Von Hurster's 'On Self-Organizing Systems and their Environments'.

The 'breakout' sessions split four ways afterwards, with Matt Jones, Nicolas Nova and Jennifer Magnolfi all leading sessions I would've liked to have participated in. But Duncan and I were leading the other, and so we continued our talk of instrumenting urban environments.

The group involved Haque, Jeremijenko, Goodman, Bell and Yahoo Research's Elizabeth Churchill amongst others. Duncan showed videos of his work on the "stabilising" of the Millennium Bridge, perhaps one of the first high profile sensor-based projects Arup had done. It never fails to intrigue people. The first video showed the swaying of the bridge on those first days; the second showed the trials once the dampers had gone on, wherein crowds of volunteers, many adorned with sensors, walked back and forth across the bridge. The rather saucy name given to the phenomenon discovered by engineers and researchers during this process - 'synchronous lateral excitation' - also caused a stir in the workshop.

Following this, Natalie Jeremijenko led a great discussion about the role of the designer/engineer in projects like this, and what levels of agency they/we have within the contemporary development process. We eventually got onto the harsh cut-off in built fabric development processes, wherein little information on the inhabited phase of projects - the ongoing design phase, as adaptive design would have it - is gathered, and certainly rarely acted upon by professional designers or developers. Tough but important questions; exactly what such a session should be. Genevieve Bell, Natalie and I had a good chat afterwards, in a curious but enjoyable little "Australian" cabal, holed-up in frozen NYC.

(This 'breakout' discussion maybe indicated one of the few problems with the symposium - that few present had experience of actually working with city governments or property developers, say, on urban-scale projects that affect either governance or built fabric (some certainly did, outside of Duncan and I, but by far a minority). Of course side-stepping existing structures is a valid tactic in terms of achieving change; not everything must be reinvented from within 'the system'. You still need to know what to side-step though. While I'm being critical, there was also a tendency to grasp for biological metaphors and insights when thinking about the city - and perhaps more understandably, urban systems. While there is considerable insight to be gained from such approaches - and biomimicry in particular, from a design perspective - there is also considerable difference with cities, and citizens, and the way they work. Equally, although many here came from different backgrounds a way of thinking has emerged concomitant with developing web-based structures and systems, and we might have benefited from further external references - a biologist, an architect, a landscape designer, a policy-maker, say. Then again, this was a social computing symposium after all.)

For some reason, the afternoons for both Monday and Tuesday weren't as good as the mornings had been. I'm not sure whether this was due to the sessions themselves, or fatigue (and certainly my jet-lag kicked in big time on Monday, so perhaps it was just me). Yet maybe the afternoons tended to fall apart because the conversations stimulated by the morning needed some time and space to be expressed. This drifting focus wasn't just due to the event being in Manhattan, and therefore surrounded by distractions, as people did stay in and around ITP in the main. It's just that the conversation needed to dissipate, that half-formed reflections needed to be articulated. So it tended to, and attention was lost a little in the afternoons as a result. That's how I read it anyway.

The aforementioned Anil Dash Show was an exception on the afternoon of the first day. But I cared little for the presentation on governance structures of Burning Man. As Matt Jones commented at the time, perhaps there's a gene for appreciating Burning Man which seemed lacking in many of us. Actually, I don't think it's genetic - I just suspect that Burning Man is rubbish. But then I've never been. And I'm English.

Tuesday's afternoon session on (urban) games was also a little variable, though Kati London of Area/Code gave great overview of some of the best work in this area, including their own fine work. Dennis Crowley of FourSquare was also very entertaining, but if the technocratic/biological metaphor had been slightly, well, pervasive throughout the two days, so had been the game metaphor. As longer-term readers will know, I've previously focused on football, and video games such as Grand Theft Auto, as metaphor to some extent, but generally in terms of notation of interactive systems, and exploring the (creative) tension between the individual and a system. But the idea of competition and point-scoring - of seeing everything as a game - becoming an overriding metaphor for everything (with its tendency towards individualism and acquisition) is limiting at best.

For notes on other talks, Liz Goodman appears to have the most complete set. The absence of notes from a talk above means little or nothing.

Before the event kicked off, Duncan and I walked over to the new Cooper Union building by Morphosis (after I'd been so impressed with the Caltrans building in LA), which I rather like the look of.

After the event, a quick tour of the High Line, which is of course wonderful. With a fair wind, notes on those to follow. (All photos from this New York visit are here.)

After New York, down to California and a couple of days in the Arup San Francisco office. Though I was working for most of it, it was good to briefly catch up with friends there too, and then finally get out for a bit of a walk on the last afternoon. If I'd been strategic, I could've gone to San Francisco Federal Building to complete my hat-trick of Morphosis buildings but didn't make it. Next time. Still, I feel I got under the skin of the city a bit for the first time. Report: San Francisco is largely appealing.

Format and Reinstall

2010-02-08T18:10:01+00:00

[Image: The opening ceremony of the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics; photographer unknown].

A comment from Alexander Trevi on a recent post pointed our attention to the final paragraph of an article by the Associated Press: "According to the International Olympic Committee," we read there as part of an overall discussion of the forthcoming Vancouver Olympics and that city's unseasonal condition of snowlessness, "the 1964 Innsbruck Games also faced a lack of snow. The Austrian army rushed to the rescue," however, "carving out 20,000 blocks of ice from the mountainside and transporting it to the luge and bobsled tracks. They also carried 1.4 million cubic feet of snow to the Alpine ski slopes."

This landscape-on-the-move arrived just in time to format the local terrain for winter sports purposes, temporarily repurposing an assembly line of athletic tracks and military equipment in the process.

For the life between buildings - some notes on the iPad

2010-02-08T07:09:30+00:00

Many, many, many people have written about last week’s announcement of Apple's iPad. I don’t actually remember a response quite like it. Far more than for the iPhone, for instance, or for any contemporary product or service I can recall. Perhaps its omnipresence in the media is due to promise it appears to hold for the media itself. But the response outside of the traditional media also feels immense.

As for me, I couldn’t help but make a few observations - I'll try to take a different angle, at least initially, approaching it from urbanism as much as product/service design, particularly not having seen the thing in the flesh yet. To get the basics out of the way right away, yes, I think it’ll be incredibly successful. And yes, the name’s a bit iffy but will not be a problem in time because it'll be incredibly successful. And yes, it’s the first iteration of something that will be rapidly refined over the coming years.

There’s been lots of talk of it being a ‘third’ product, in-between iPhone and laptop. To me, this reminds me of ‘third places’. That’s a Ray Oldenburg term, of The Great Good Place, and generally refers to cafés, bars, libraries etc. Thus the iPad to me feels more like a product for third places rather than a third product. Its form factor and service model is defined for in-between spaces. Although it will float around the home and the office perfectly well, it comes into its own in these third spaces in a way that that phone and laptop cannot, being either too small or too large respectively.

With this in mind, it also reminds me of Jan Gehl’s book, Life Between Buildings, in that the iPad is a device for the life between buildings.

If we approach it spatially - in terms of context of use I mean, rather than the device itself - it becomes clear why I think it’ll be a success.

It’s a device for airplanes, taxis, public transport, park benches, coffeeshops, pubs, bars, bistros, co-working spaces, breakouts, studios, receptions, meeting rooms, plaza and piazza, public libraries, beaches and all manner of transient spaces, civic spaces.

It’s a device for cities.

It’s not that it couldn’t be used in rural environments of course; just that it wouldn’t be. The general lack of third spaces in such places means that a phone and a PC are sufficient. By living in cities, in other peoples’ places, a different kind of device becomes appropriate. Something light and small enough to fit in a handbag or satchel, yet powerful and productive nonetheless. In the old view of city living - say, the classic Parisian apartment - the small size of dwelling meant that the bistro downstairs at the street level of the block becomes the dining room, the bar/coffee shop becomes the living room, the shared courtyard becomes the garden, and so on. While this vision is hopelessly romantic, there are numerous urban variants on this kind of living, and these transient (yet personal) spaces are where the iPad will fit right in. (Again, exurban environments clearly have coffee shops too, but they are not part of a integrated system of living in the same way. And so different tools will suffice.)

As software becomes a service, data resides in the cloud, various forms of wireless connectivity coalesce over the city, and yet face-to-face physical connection becomes more important than ever, a device like the iPad becomes obvious. The cloud is the connective tissue between these spaces, the software provides the platform for interaction with information, the tablet is the tool, and the forum is the city.

The particular device is not the core aspect, necessarily, though brings things together at a certain place and time. The overall service model - noting how iTunes made the difference to the iPod - is key. There’s a symbiotic link between software, hardware and context. The link I’m now interested in is this last link to space, as well as system. As in, how do we design environments for this activity, and how does this activity work in, and affect, particular environments?

In much contemporary work - at least the more knowledge-based end - people are often transient too, even in a corporate office environment. In fact, in the latter, the chance that anyone will be at their desk at any one time is around 50% or less (which has implications for the way we design commercial office space, never mind soft infrastructure like computing.) Given this, it might be very handy to have a machine for easy lifitng between coffee bar, meeting room, what are euphimistically-called ‘quiet rooms’ or studio-like spaces, breakout spaces. Or in a non-corporate environment, just moving effortlessly over the space.

Of course this is why the broad move to laptops in working environments is key, but if a laptop is connected to a big screen (as may often be the case) and power socket, and you just need to flash some code, some text, some images/photos etc, some webpages, some Powerpoint etc. past someone’s eyes, a tablet will not just be more convenient, but far more appropriate. Indeed, a distributed phalanx of tablets will be far more palatable, more civil, than the walls of laptop screens that are temporarily erected during meetings now.

So I’m afraid this new device may be additive rather than subtractive. It probably is 'yet more stuff in the world'. But at least it’s well-designed, relatively cheap, carefully thought-through, with increasingly considered life-cycle thinking (if not quite good enough). Well, at least most parts of it are well-designed. (See below.)

The various previous netbooks had, or met, many of these same conditions of course, yet Apple’s superior user experience, and integrated services, primes it for many many more citizens than any previous form of computer.

Some, thinking of third products rather than third spaces, have queried the idea of a third computer anyway. The thinking here is stuck in pre-'New World computing' mode, to quote from this excellent review of the iPad.

In particular, that Old World thinking centres on a techno-centric view of computing as the 'universal machine', or Swiss army knife, capable of doing anything and so highly flexible - and so rarely used to its capacity and for most of its existence using a minute proportion of its processing power. You might almost say this is a resource-abundant view; another anachronism.

But the idea of ‘a primary computer’ is increasingly ridiculous, particularly as we move towards an ‘internet of things’, with data, including media, increasingly fluid, stored anywhere and accessd everywhere.

How many computers do you think you have, or use, already? Just the one? How about in the car, in your phone, in the fridge, in your camera, in the set-top box etc. Think on. It’s already almost impossible to calculate the number of computers most people use in their daily life, just as it is with the data traces contemporary life produces.

We’ll ultimately think of data floating across numerous computers and contexts, some of which are personal and some of which are shared.

So this is not about what some have called “the mythical convergence device” at all, but about multiple devices for divergent spaces.

Obviously, there’s a necessary critique here about ‘more stuff in the world’, which is fair enough. I’m not advocating for multiple computers necessarily - as Apple would have it: an iMac in the living room, a Macbook Pro on the desk, an iPhone for walking, an iPad for the transient bits in-between etc. But it is relatively smart of Apple to now have a stratified yet integrated range of products across all those spaces, you must admit.

That ‘Swiss army knife’ model may well be on the way out. It should be fine to say of a particular product, “Oh you can’t do that on that one”. That's OK. We don’t expect, say, cars to do everything - off-roading in a Honda Jazz is not recommended, any more than doing the weekly shop in a Lamborghini is. When functions are attempted to combine we end up with monstrosities like the SUV. Or common or garden PC.

As for the lack of openness that has been critiqued, long-time readers will know that I've often been an advocate for open systems, but many will also know that the form of development involved in open systems tends to mitigate against ease of use. Poor design also mitigates against ease-of-use, of course - the hours I’ve put in explaining the difference between files and directories to Windows users cannot be got back. Paul Dourish, in the Where The Action Is, explored the mental models underpinning computing. It’s clear that many users, and potential users, will never want to, or be able to, live within those mental models. So to me, a relatively closed or controlled system that abstracts files and folders yet still enables a way into computing may be a price well worth paying, at least on this device (which again, is not the only computer in the village.)

Stephen Fry has nailed why many Apple products work for many people - because they’re not open, because they’re controlled. Democracy and openness does not always make good city form, either. Sometimes, often, it leads directly to NIMBYism, or consultative processes so convoluted that nothing actually gets done. Whereas, sometimes accidentally, dictators often have created great urban spaces (though often some years later). This is a core paradox around openness and control, but there is a time for both. Fry again:

“Yes, I do like and have tried to champion OpenSource software. How can I square that with my love of Apple? I’m complicated. I’m a human being. I also believe in a mixed economy and mixed nuts. I love our National Health Service and the National Theatre, but I also love Fortnum and Mason’s and Hollywood movies.”

Or, in John Gruber’s analogy, the iPad is akin to a shift from manual transmission to automatic in most cars (that won’t go over so well in dear old Blighty, where I think most cars are still sold with manual transmission, apparently out of sheer stubbornness.)

A more fundamental critique may occur around ‘seamfulness vs. seamlessness’. The lack of seams - obvious traces of structure that enable users to comprehend and ultimately manipulate the system - in the iPad’s system is what enables that accessible user experience, yet also prevents those users that wish to learn or explore deeper structural or integrative elements from doing so. Again, there are plenty of other devices to explore those aspects with, however. Not every device has to do everything.

Either way, as John Gruber notes, it’s more complex than that in that, when he says, “Apple like their technologies open and their products closed”.

Others have critiqued it as a consumption device rather than a production device. While I think it’s too early to make that critique - as we don’t know what software will be produced for it yet, nor how it will work - this also falls into the trap of thinking about users using one machine for everything, that everything should do everything. This is not a displacement device - replacing a laptop, say - but works alongside other devices. And those devices more oriented towards creative work won’t go away. Quite the opposite.

Incidentally: It’s been funny watching the videos of people trying to figure out the gestural controls - fidgety taps, repeated swipes, awkward pinches, agitated pecking. Like a teenager fumbling with a bra strap.

Incidentally: A camera would be nice of course, but it also would’ve meant that the fluid sense of orientation that Ive talks about in the promo is gone. Would you chat in landscape or portrait? Either. Portrait would be like talking to a Bill Viola ‘icon’ piece, and so quite appealing if unsettling. Landscape is more likely, but then the camera would be on the side of the device, near the thumb, when in portrait orientation. Hm.

(Apologies to Bill Viola)

Incidentally: In designing a computer “for the rest of us”, finally, 25 years after promising to do so, perhaps the best analogy for the iPad, as a product designed for everyday people, is actually the AK47, or in car terms, the Mini, 2CV or perhaps Trabant. Crucially, it does not yet share the adaptability, innate or crafted, of those products as a piece of industrial design, nor quite as software design. Yet. But if the rhetoric around 'New World computing' is right, it's worth considering how it stacks up against these genuine pioneers.

Scaling the interface

All is not perfect, however. Some of those screenshots and videos of the iPad software in action unfortunately make all-too-clear some issues with Apple’s interface design. Although some elements of the iPhone software have always been problematic, the scale of the iPad screen brought it home to roost. The trigger was seeing the risible Notes scaled up to 9.7 inches, where the full horror of that interface design became evident.

There appears to be a schizophrenic character (if you’ll permit me to mis-use that term, no offence intended) to Apple’s software design, entirely at odds with its highly consistent hardware design.

Even at this distance, some parts of the UI look fantastic, like the YouTube app, or the core applications of Mail, Safari, iTunes, most of iPhoto etc. They are entirely in-sync with the clean machined lines and brushed textures of the Dieter Rams-influenced industrial design of Ive+team.

On Jonathan Ive’s Wikipedia page, it (at time of writing) states the most recent 'phase' that Apple has been going through is amusingly though accurately dubbed ‘extreme minimalism’ or ‘dark aluminium’. In the NYT, Paul Saffo says “a defining quality of Apple has been design restraint.” In the same article, Steve Jobs is quoted thus:

“Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.””

But what do they think when iBook pops up in these surroundings? Likewise, Contacts, and even Calendar to some extent, appear to be trying to be desk diaries. iTunes doesn’t try to be a shelf full of vinyl records at all.

But Notes, IBook, the Dock itself, parts of iWork, most of Calendar and Contacts are quite different, indulging in faux-textures, references to physical objects like desk diaries, 3D spatial metaphors, ‘spacey’ background images and so on; an entirely different interface language. What’s going on?

iBook in particular seems very rushed, and not great. That shelf interface is particularly horrible. While the bookshelf metaphor was trailblazed by Delicious Monster a few years back, it hasn’t improved with time. Why would a Rams-fan such as Ive settle for clumsy faux-wooden shelving? Particularly when you might have referenced the Ram’s designed 606 shelving system, which is about as perfect as shelving-as-modular-interface can get?

I don’t actually think that the interface should literally ape the 606, by the way - just that it might be better moving in that direction rather than some thrift store, sub-Leksvik, chunky wood monstrosity made by outsider artists. It would certainly reinforce the holistic nature of the design across hardware and software. Even better would be to ditch the shelf metaphor altogether in favour of something more appropriate for digital content; something more innate to the medium.

Within iBook, the layout of the books’ pages are fraught with issues. As many have picked up, the idea of automatically justified text is either lazy or ignorant. Either way it’s not great, in almost all contexts. Likewise the fonts they’ve got listed. While changing size is handy, obviously, these ‘features’ such as forced justified paragraphs in only six typefaces utterly negates the idea of book design, a complex and beautiful craft. Apple in particular ought to think more carefully about this.

Equally, the page turning metaphor Is without much merit. As with the designers of Mag+, I wasn’t looking for a ‘realistic’ page-curl from a new interface on reading. So much effort has gone into that page curl, and yet it still will not feel like paper. It will feel like touching a screen.

In an otherwise useful review by Andy Ihnatko:

“On the iPad, it feels as though you put your finger on the bottom-right corner of the page and dragged that corner towards the spine of the book until it flipped over.”

No, it doesn't. This is ‘ocularcentric’ thinking (that Pallasmaa et al have so brilliantly critiqued, if not eradicated, sadly, in architectural discourse) — the mistaken belief that somehow sight overrides all other senses. Or that in this case, visual feedback is so convincing that it substitutes for touch. Touch is another sense altogether, and the iPad has no sense of that, having no feedback for texture, or weight of object (at least in this version).

So this part of the interface is entirely skeuomorphic, and valuable processor-time, screen real-estate and gestural interactions would be better spent on the new functionality enabled by this new medium. You can call it an e-book - and reading Bleak House on on an iPad is still reading a book, from a content point-of-view. But from an interface point-of-view it is not a book, or a magazine, but something else, a window onto text, with new possibilities, and so new affordances. It would be far better to focus on new functional manoeuvres, like clipping text, saving/quoting elsewhere, contextual services, 'scrobbling' reading patterns and so on.

I look forward to seeing a Kindle app for the iPad, if Amazon can bring themselves to do it. They (Amazon) can then drop out of the hardware market. Amazon has always been about transcending hardware; the first hardware it transcended was the mainstream bookshop. Equally, I'd guess iBook should be much better by launch.

But does the software mentioned above even come from the same team that designs iTunes, Mail etc? And how is design co-ordinated across the hardware and software? I’m aware these are age-old discussions around Apple’s design team and process, but each new product seems to highlight these occasional, but meaningful, inconsistencies even more.

The other effect of the iPad I’m interested in is how its scale might affect the application interfaces, and applications themselves. The iPhone had indicated that for many apps the screen and associated interaction model was effectively the right scale for many basic applications. While interaction designers for mobile would argue they’d been exploring (relatively) small screen interfaces for years, the explosion of innovation that Apple’s App Store model enables has both honed and expanded interaction around applications.

In this respect, I’d argue that Facebook on the iPhone is far superior to Facebook on the PC, partly as all the extraneous chrome and optional functionality is pared back to a core. Ditto Tweetie for Twitter, Google apps and so on. Incidentally, the App Store model also means that users paid for applications direct, rather than through advertising, which I think is far healthier in many respects cf. newspapers. The advantage is that interfaces can be honed around core function rather than advertising.

There’s a focus forced by the constraint of the iPhone that leads to better UI. I think the iPad has the same possibilities - constraints in terms of screen, input mode etc - but across a wider set of more complex applications. Some reviewers have indicated this effect of these constraints on the iPad’s software already:

“I was struck by the amount of restraint the apps’ designers used. A bigger screen increases the temptation to just keep adding interface elements. And yet it’s remarkably uncluttered. All of the features of a “real” spreadsheet are there, but there are appear to be fewer buttons and controls here than what you’d find on a typical Android tip-calculator app.”

I think the really interesting point will come when a truly meaningful piece of productive software - Photoshop, SketchUp, or Omnigraffle, say - is attempted on the iPad. I would hope that it’s possible to compress Photoshop’s interface by half at least. (Of course Adobe are at an interesting point in their relationship with Apple, so we’ll see …)

With iPad I hope we’ll see that there is a middle-ground between the phone and the laptop, and that the way the application interfaces are designed defines that as much as any aspect of the hardware. If we start seeing genuinely productive or creative software appearing on it, those who talk of it ‘merely’ being a machine ‘for consumption’ might need to re-think. (Please read alongside earlier points about the device being part of a system of interactions, rather than a closed all-purpose system.)

If it’s technically possible to develop a Processing environment, a sawn-off Photoshop or Illustrator, Sketchup, Omnigraffle for the iPad, then I see no reason why Apple wouldn’t move those apps to the front of the shop, and thus the iPad becomes productive, at least in a traditional sense.

The iPad abstracts away complexity such that files, folders, and multi-tasking are effectively invisible or inactive, which will require a new approach to, say, sharing multiple edited versions of images between applications and spaces. It’s not at all impossible to imagine productive workflows that do not require foregounded multi-tasking or obvious, seam-ful access to filesystems. Conceptually, there is nothing in computer science that states that this must be so. It’s just become the de facto standard approach to operating system and application design. So this will requires a 'New World computing' approach to re-thinking how we might do it, and that’s not a bad thing. It’ll be interesting to see how people approach it.

The Long River

2010-02-09T07:03:38+00:00

[Image: "Chongqing XI" by Nadav Kander, winner of the 2009 Prix Pictet; courtesy of the Prix Pictet].

Speaking of the Prix Pictet, the winner of the 2009 prize was Nadav Kander for his project Yangtze, The Long River. It's an amazing group of images.

From Kander's artist statement:

The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100 miles (6500km) across china, traveling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even for those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a significant role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people.Kander "photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source"—a daunting task, for, as Kander points out, "more people live along its banks than live in the USA, one in every eighteen people on the planet."

[Image: "Chongqing VII, (Washing Bike)" by Nadav Kander; courtesy of the Prix Pictet].

Part of Kander's visual goal was "showing humans dwarfed by their surroundings. Common man," the photographer adds, "has little say in China’s progression and this smallness of the individual is alluded to in the work."

The images featured in this post have the feel of a film set—more cinematography than photography—as if Kander has unknowingly captured a mise-en-scène, some wrongly cut dramatic moment, unfolding on the river banks.

Actors, perhaps unsure of their larger narrative role, seem overwhelmed by their infrastructural surroundings.

[Image: "Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic)" by Nadav Kander; courtesy of the Prix Pictet].

The stage set-design theories of Edward Gordon Craig come to mind. Craig was an early 20th-century stage set designer (and son of an architect), whose "architectonic scenery," according to M. Christine Boyer, foregrounded architectural backdrops so strongly that his props ultimately became the only on-stage action an audience was meant to watch.

Craig "proposed that a stage in which walls and shapes rose up and opened out, unfolded or retreated in endless motion could become a performance without any actors," Boyer writes. "The stage thus became a device to receive the play of light rhythmically, creating an endless variety of mobile cubic shapes and varying spaces. Deep wells, stairs, open spaces, platforms, or partitions created a stage of complete mobility, which Craig believed appealed to the imagination." It is a stage devoid of actors, in other words, just large pieces of equipment moving about according to the rules of their own choreography.

What happens, then, if this depopulated dramaturgy becomes blown-up to the scale of national infrastructure?

In one sense, this perfectly empty landscape into which humans try vainly—and at great emotional cost—to situate themselves is the hallmark of J.G. Ballard. We might even specifically ask, looking at Kander's photos: when will a Yangtze River-based rewriting of Ballard's Concrete Island come along, exploring these spatial questions?

Concrete Island, of course, is Ballard's 1974 novel about a London motorist—as it happens, an architect—who is stranded on his way home by a car accident. Freeing himself from his ruined vehicle at sundown, he finds himself trapped beneath the yawning arches of the motorway, stranded in a peripheral world of drainage culverts, ascent ramps, sliproads, and storm tunnels, a kind of urban blindspot (read Mike Bonsall's awesome forensic archaeology of London's Westway, a spatial interrogation of the built environment in order to discover where Ballard's novel was meant to be set).

With no rescue in sight, Ballard's architect is left to fend for himself, surrounded by gigantic pieces of urban infrastructure whose purpose now seems oddly counter-human; he is "alone in this forgotten world whose furthest shores were defined only by the roar of automobile engines... an alien planet abandoned by its inhabitants, a race of motorway builders who had long since vanished but had bequeathed to him this concrete wilderness."

I'm left wondering: who is the J.G. Ballard of contemporary China? Nadav Kander's photographs—many more of which can be seen at the Prix Pictet site—are an enticing glimpse of what a Ballardian sensibility might create there.

Igneous Hydrology: Landscapes on Demand

2010-02-07T20:58:01+00:00

[Image: "Scene J3" from Snow Management by Jules Spinatsch, courtesy of the Prix Prictet].

I was reminded, via an old post on Pruned, of an amazing series of photographs by Jules Spinatsch called Snow Management; Snow Management was deservedly short-listed in 2008 for the Prix Prictet.

With those images, Spinatsch documents the infrastructure of snow control—and outright terrain manufacture—at an Alpine resort, including the labyrinths of retaining fences and the individual pieces of equipment that make snow creation and large-scale, though ephemeral, landscape-sculpting possible.

[Image: "Scene D6" from Snow Management by Jules Spinatsch, courtesy of the Prix Prictet].

In a way, these scenes are like a big-budget variation on Sergio López-Piñeiro's idea, discovered via Mammoth, of a snow park or whitesward. López-Piñeiro's own photographic documentation of urban plowing practices—that is, the deliberate reshaping of snow piles into an ephemeral, new, seasonal topography—is an attempt, he writes, "to show how standard plowing techniques can become creative tools for generating winter landscapes." López-Piñeiro continues:

Ski resorts, with their huge array of technical devices and machinic subfamilies all geared toward—indeed, specifically invented for—the purpose of creating new landscapes below the thermal boundary at which their engineered shapes will liquify, become extraordinary experiments in terrain-generation on a massive scale. They are a kind of igneous hydrology: the controlled freezing of matter into artificial forms.

More images from Jules Spinatsch's spectacular series are available on his website, and the Snow Management series itself can also be downloaded as a 3.2MB PDF.

Paper: Mapping for the Masses Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing

2010-02-07T11:18:53+00:00

Continuing the publication online via Issuu of our papers we include our recent paper written with Andrew Crooks, Michael Batty, and Richard Milton from CASA entitled "Mapping for the Masses Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing" as published in Social Science Computer Review.

"The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. Click the right arrow to turn the page:

The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom-up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing, and traditional broadcasting. The authors conclude by arguing that such tools are helping to define a neogeography that is essentially ‘‘mapping for the masses,’’ while noting that there are many issues of quality, accuracy, copyright, and trust that will influence the impact of these tools on map-based communication."

Keywords: network economies; neogeography; web-based services; map mashups; crowdsourcing; crowdcasting; online GIS.

The paper can be downloaded from here (pdf link).

Links for 2010-02-06 [del.icio.us]

2010-02-07T11:03:26+00:00

Happy birthday, minister [Inside Story]
"Perhaps we should just enjoy Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister and not over-analyse the program and its effects. The Netherlands, Canada, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal and India all made their own versions of the programs. In Holland Sir Humphrey was played by a woman and Bernard by a Moroccan called Mahommed. It would seem that the phenomenon of the despised politician and public servant is universal, although it would be interesting to know what subtle variations occur from culture to culture."
FOA's New Street Station scheme gets green light [Architects Journal]
"Councillors in Birmingham have given the thumbs-up to Foreign Office Architect (FOA)’s £600 million redevelopment of the city’s main railway station" Hm that screen needs a bit of work.

Links for 2010-02-06 [del.icio.us]

2010-02-07T08:00:59+00:00

Quand le jeu sort de l'écran [Le Monde]

11 Principles: Designing Financial Services for the Poor

2010-02-07T20:56:28+00:00

The Institute for Money, Tecnhology and Financial Inclusion has generated a list of 11 Design Principles for Financial Services for the Poor, drawn from a cohort of 20+ research projects they are running around the world:

1 Design for social obligation
2 Design for social rank
3 Flexibility with sanctions
4 Structured illiquidity
5 Change the iconography, design with local values
6 Design for convertibility
7 Calculate convertibility
8 Design for relative volume, not increment
9 Lucky Numbers
10 Tranches and Tiers
11 Design for Cyclical Events

Download the principles here.

The IMTFI is funded, in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and in 2010 is set to more than double the number of projects around the globe.

Full disclosure: I'm on the IMTFI external advisory board.

Purity in Form

2010-02-07T04:59:17+00:00

Its difficult to imagine a more perfectly balanced graffitied waste bin - nothing to add, nothing to take away.

Rust Never Sleeps

2010-02-07T04:59:17+00:00

The notion that the forces of nature are constant.

Links for 2010-02-05 [del.icio.us]

2010-02-06T12:17:32+00:00

Twitter haiku: a great new way to deliver bad news [guardian.co.uk]
"Twitter mania / Hits the Guardian again / Yet I still read it" "Haters of Twitter / Complain about coverage / Yet bother to post"

Slides from interaction2010 talk

2010-02-05T22:56:15+00:00

The annotated slides from my talk “Design and Designed Failures: From Observing Failurs To Provoking Them” at ixda interaction10 are now available on Slideshare.

By rob

Failures are often overlooked in design research. The talk addressed this issue by describing two approaches: observing design flops and identify symptoms of failures OR provoking failures to document user behavior.

This talk was actually a follow-up of my introduction to the Lift 2009 conference a bout the recurring failures of holy grails. It was very much inspired by Mark Vanderbeeken (Experientia) who pushed me to go further than pointing out product failures and exploring why it’s important as a design strategy.

There was a good crowd of people and someone interestingly commented on the fact tat I may have made my presentation intentionally a failure to make the crowd react.

Thanks for the ixda interaction 2010 committee for letting my present this work!

Panoramic Globes: Rapid HD Visualisation of Place and Space

2010-02-05T19:34:31+00:00

Old school readers will be familiar with the movie below, but with over 1400 posts some of our favourite movies have got lost and the following is one of them:

Panoramic London Churches - HD from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Amazingly easy to make it lead on to the following Worlds within Worlds clip:

Worlds within Worlds: Using Panoramas for Sense of Location and Place from digitalurban on Vimeo.

In short, embedding panoramas in a x/y/z space allows movies to be created where the camera automatically pans around a scene, it can be done in any 3D software.

Empire

2010-02-06T06:13:13+00:00

[Image: From Empire by Andy Warhol, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art].

Tomorrow at noon here in New York City, a musical event that I would love to attend kicks off: 8 solid hours of sound, providing a live accompaniment for Andy Warhol's Empire—a film notorious for its one, unchanging shot of the Empire State Building.

Hanno Leichtmann, Andrew Pekler, and, most exciting at least for me, Jan Jelinek—who, bizarrely, I once introduced myself to at WMF in Berlin—will be providing the music.

The Museum of Modern Art describes Empire as follows:

Empire

That live soundtrack/concert/event, which kicks off at Le Poisson Rouge, is just one small part of an amazing, multi-day musical event called Unsound. Unsound features several audio heroes of BLDGBLOG, including Tim Hecker, Ezekiel Honig, Moritz von Oswald, Vladislav Delay, and even Levon Vincent, among many more.

In fact, after a long day spent touring the involuted subterranea of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave back in 2001, Nicola Twilley and I drove home listening to Vladislav Delay's Entain, our car creaking over the hollow roof of an earth below us, its caverns hidden beneath overgrown bedrock, sinkholes perhaps waiting on either side of the highway, heading northwest over collapse-prone mineral logics toward Chicago.

Google Earth - Creating a Zoom Movie

2010-02-05T15:45:19+00:00

A quick post as few years ago we wrote a tutorial on creating a 'zoom' movie from Google Earth, it involved all sort of issues with paths and local caches and reversing frames. Nowadays its simply a case of 'right clicking' in Google Earth and dragging the mouse:

Google Earth Zoom from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Google Earth fixes on the location (in our case the CASA offices) so you can drag back and forwards for a smooth zoom in/out. The movie was recorded using Snapz Pro on a Mac but any screen recording tool would do. Its nice to know that this is so much simpler now, although slightly worrying that i almost take a digital earth zooming out and back in at high resolution within 15 seconds for granted...

Miniature Tokyo City Timelapse

2010-02-05T15:45:19+00:00

The movie below combines timelapse techniques with tilt/shift and a focus on the city of Tokyo - we like it a lot:

We must get out and do a London version...

GIS and Augmented Reality in 2015

2010-02-05T15:45:19+00:00

The last 12 months has seen a turning point in terms of bringing geographically aware augmented reality to mobile devices. Significant developments in locational technology such as the inclusion of a built-in digital compass, GPS (Global Positioning System) and accelerometers into mobile phones have allowed not only location but also heading, and pitch to be detected and therefore incorporated into data display systems. These built-in technologies have brought augmented reality to the hands of the masses, and the phones themselves have sparked a market driven boom in fusing augmented reality with location-based services (LBS).Currently applications are in their infancy and mainly focused on specific topics such as ‘show me where the closest x is’. This however represents the tip of the iceberg with the addition of a GIS into the mix there is notable potential for the industry.

The short paper below was written by Sung-Hyun Jang of the GIS and AR blog and us here at digital urban as part of a larger wide ranging technical report for the Association of Geographic Information which is coming out soon. You can read the short below via Issuu:

To keep up to date with all things GIS and AR, head over to Sung's GIS and AR blog.

Post-Conflict Architecture and Design

2010-02-05T19:17:59+00:00

Volume magazine is hosting a conference this coming May about what they call "the Architecture of Peace." Part of this will be assembling "an inventory of inspiring projects for (post-)conflict territories"—and they're hoping that you will get involved.

Volume

From post-military landscape remediation projects to transborder community exchange programs, from conflict gardens to films, from anti-gang territorial initiatives to bunker recycling services, from museums of slave history to a cartography of divided cities, I would imagine there is a huge range of ideas and examples out there to explore.