Planetaki Planet Future Interactions

Paris metro interactive map

2010-03-11T13:15:33+00:00

On the most interesting “static” map I’ve ever seen is the “indicateur d’itinéraires” located on some of the metro station in Paris (this one is close to the entrance of Ligne 1 in Paris Gare de Lyon). You press the number of the metro station that you want to reach with the keyboard below and the suggested route appears displayed on the lights on the board.

Although some folks think there’s a small person in there, the inner mechanism is closer to “Operation” with lights. Very low-bandwidth and based on electricity.

This device is actually called PILI, which stands for “plans indicateurs lumineux d’itinéraires” (Light-Based Indicator Plan for Itinerary”) and has been implemented in 1937. A simple and straight-forward way to get both a general overview as well as information about where you want to go. It’s intriguing to see how people from these times designed a map-based system without any complex display technology, and it’s very efficient.

Why do I blog this? Going to the French capital quite often, I love to spend some time observing how people interact with these machines. There are lots of things to notice, see for example:

User’s proximity to the device, which depends on their purpose (getting and overview, looking for a specific route).
The flexibility of usage: the device is very big and it allows people to use it in various ways altogether. If a person looks for a route, it doesn’t prevent others to observe the map and look for their information (without necessarily using the buttons).

Interestingly, I found it much more efficient than the 21st century version that you can see below. Even though it has different features, this new version is rather small (intended to be used by only one person) and I generally rarely see people using it.

Unity 3.0 Announced

2010-03-10T14:24:38+00:00

Hopefully we are about to dive back into the Unity game engine for a truly exciting project, as such the glimpse of Unity 3 opens up a number of possibilities:

Dark Unity from Unity3D on Vimeo.

As soon as we are back using Unity we will of course post the usual update movies and tutorials. Keep an eye on http://unity3d.com/ for full details.

Thanks go to Chester of http://associated-architects.com/ for the link.

London Twitter Cloud

2010-03-09T11:00:29+00:00

Regular readers will know we have been logging data in 12 cities via our Tweet-o-Meter, its still early days but the results for a weekend in London are intriguing.

The data covers a weekend period from Friday evening to Monday morning containing 380,000 individual tweets. Within these 60,000 were geo-referenced, tweeted by 5,500 individual users.

In terms of density the focus is on central London with local hotspots as the weekend progresses, around Kings Cross and Old Street. There is also a noticable trace along the main transport routes into and out of town, noting that we seem to be tweeting while on the move. The clip below details the visualisation in Google Earth:

Music - 'Social Awkwardness' by Xanthe over on unsigned bands.

The clip reveals a message cloud rising and hovering above London as a time-space aquarium where the time is plotted as the height information. Interestingly Google Earth is becoming the visualiser of choice for such data sets, the combination of location, imagery with the ability to view by time makes it a formidable engine for data visualisation.

Thanks go to urbantick who converted the data via a custom VB script.

Links for 2010-03-08 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-09T10:42:12+00:00

The battle of Britain's libraries [The Guardian]
"Why should we save local libraries? For me, it's because they do something cherishable yet utterly incomprehensible to the cost-cutters. Like public parks, libraries are particularly valuable in capitalist cityscapes, where you are incessantly encouraged to keep moving, keep spending – and don't even think about doing anything economically unproductive. (Figures released by the Valuation Office Agency last month showed that since 1997 there has been a 1,150% rise in the number of lap-dancing clubs in Britain, and a 6% decline in the number of libraries.)" Snitty article, though his heart's in the right place occasionally. 'Saving' libraries is easy cf. State Library of Queensland. Absolutely straightforward, and they're more important than ever.
The Library as Digital Creation Center and Urban Informatics Processor [Spatial Sustain]
"The new digital resource center at the State Library of Queensland envisions the future library as a place for creativity for, “art, design, gaming, engineering, sound, science, craft and architecture.” The idea of the new facility called the Edge is to foster connections for multidisciplinary design work and to foster innovation. The $7.9 million construction project has created a multipurpose space that includes sound and image recording labs and meeting and function rooms, all equipped with high end digital equipment. The director of the center has an idea for the center to become a hub for urban informatics – the study of how people interact with urban spaces by tapping information and data of our digital lives." This is the building I've been doing the strategic design on for the last 18 months.
North Tyneside high street 'revived' by fake shop front [BBC News]
"Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside. With 140 empty shops in the borough, council bosses think they have come up with a unique way of ensuring shopping areas remain as vibrant as possible." This is pathetic. Freeing them up for some productive use other than retail would be the thing to do.
Convergence at the Edge |[The Australian]
"THE 21st-century library will not just be a repository for information, but also a place for "creating, experimenting, connecting", a place where you can go not only to find out about but also use digital technologies to create "art, design, gaming, engineering, sound, science, craft and architecture". The State Library of Queensland recently opened its new digital resource centre, the Edge, an Australian first and one of only a very few such public-access, government-funded spaces in the world." And here's more on the new building I've helped create over the last year or so.
Residents take control of bays rebirth [SMH]
"BARANGAROO is being hailed as Sydney's biggest urban renewal project but just one bay to the west is a maze of harbourfront land four times its size and almost as ripe for development. As Sydney's shipping fleet has migrated south to Botany Bay, it has left behind more than 80 hectares of largely disused waterfront; long sweeps of emptying wharves, an old power station and the Rozelle marshalling yards. Sharing four kilometres of harbour foreshore, White Bay, Rozelle Bay, Blackwattle Bay and Johnstons Bay await an inevitable rebirth now that their past life is fast ending and the harbour is moving to its post-industrial future."

Flash Quarantine

2010-03-09T18:23:53+00:00

[Image: Landscapes of Quarantine opens tonight, March 9, at 7pm in New York City].

With the help of César Cotta and Joshua Hearn, and based on a design by Glen Cummings, we installed a massive, reflective vinyl wall graphic last night at 2am outside Storefront for Art and Architecture—and it looks amazing. Flash photographs make the city disappear and giant vinyl letters float in space.

[Image: Landscapes of Quarantine in New York City].

Ready or not, then, and half-covered in paint, our jeans ruined, in need of new shoes, dehydrated, our exhibition participants recently returned from Uganda and the eastern Congo with photographs and a film, mounting illuminated comic book manuscripts on the wall, exploring nuclear-waste repositories as symbolic geological centers of a future world, diagramming parallel split cities with quarantine spaces merely an arm's length away, and opening the facade panels of the gallery to allow bubbles and bulges and Tyvek screens to confuse the outside line with the street, and more, we will be there tonight, unloading dozens of cases of beer donated by Brooklyn Brewery, to celebrate this long project coming together at last in an exhibition space for everyone to see.

Stop by at 7pm tonight, March 9, if you're around and say hello—or drop in on Storefront for Art and Architecture during its regular opening hours any time before April 17. Orange will after-image through your brain for days to come...

Wasted Lhasa Youth

2010-03-09T07:12:52+00:00

But at least they're on target. Fairground target practice on the outskirts of Lhasa.

Links for 2010-03-07 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-08T10:17:34+00:00

Discovering SpatioTemporal Mobility Proﬁles of Cellphone Users [MIT Media Laboratory]
"Our analysis of mobility profiles of cellphone users expose a significant long tail in a user’s location-time distribution: A total of 15% of a user’s time is spent on average in locations that each appear with less than 1% of time."

Links for 2010-03-07 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-08T10:15:27+00:00

Open Agenda
"Open Agenda is a new annual competition aimed at supporting a new generation of experimental Australian architecture. Open to recent architecture graduates, Open Agenda is focused on developing the possibilities of design research in architecture and the built environment. An initiative of the School of Architecture at UTS, this national competition is intentionally broad in its scope, and dedicated to fostering new discussions on architecture in the public realm."

Links for 2010-03-06 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-07T09:51:47+00:00

Boom, Bust, Burn, Blame: Fake Omaha [Triple Canopy]
"From CyBar Stadium to Soapbox Yards: an artist project considering the evolution of a paper-and-ink city."
The Body Electric & Information Shadow [design mind]
"Can designers affect user behavior enough to create lasting change in the healthcare industry? How can we use biomedical feedback to improve technology? frog Creative Director Fabio Sergio talks to the crowd at Mobile Monday Amsterdam in January 2010 about how biometric data will become the source of new conversations. Filled with inspiring examples he questions what the nature of these new conversations will be."
When Is Transparency Useful? [Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought]
"Transparency can be a powerful thing, but not in isolation. So, let’s stop passing the buck by saying our job is just to get the data out there and it’s other people’s job to figure out how to use it. Let’s decide that our job is to fight for good in the world. I’d love to see all these amazing resources go to work on that."
Michael Foot: Tribune of the people [The Guardian]
"Mr Foot was a failure as a leader. But there is much about his political values and habits with which the over-professionalised, over-cautious, over-scripted politics of today should urgently reconnect."

CFP: Performing Places

2010-03-06T22:02:30+00:00

EASST Conference 2010
2-4 September, 2010
University of Trento, Italy

Performing Places

“The space of the city is not a static reality defined by built forms or demographic facts, but is instead a form of spatial practice created by the interweaving of everyday actions and interactions of its citizens. These interactions are no longer confined to face-to face contact, as communications media have re-arranged many social environments so that most people now find themselves in contact with others in new ways. Walls, doors, gates and distances still frame and isolate encounters, but new technologies have increasingly encroached on the situations that take place in physically defined settings. This session will look at how thinking about places as performative opens up new possibilities for both understanding and reacting to the potentials for communications technologies in space.

Networked space
The media theorist Castells has popularized the concept of the ‘space of flows’; where space is understood as linking up electronically separate locations in an interactive networks that connects activities and people in distinct geographical contexts. He contrasts this with the traditional concept of the ‘space of places’; which he defines as organizing experiences and activity around the confines of locality. One of the social consequences of such networked space is that that multiple social realities can occur in one place. The same physical space may be caught within the domain of two different social occasions. The social situations that occur in these overlapping behaviour settings support gatherings that possess a special characteristic in that they exist on more than one social level. For example, presence in public space and interaction has traditionally been equated with face-to-face contact. Yet, presence in public space as mediated by new technologies has a different type of aesthetic, no longer dominated by visual access but by informational access. The features and structure of the interaction is enabled by a connection, which is not necessarily achieved through physical movement from one location to another. As such, everyday actions and behaviours no longer belong to particular places, and are now multiplexed and overlaid; there now exists the possibility to switch rapidly from one activity to another while remaining in the same place, so we end up using the same place in many different ways. On one hand this gives rise to confusion, and ambiguous and contested zones emerge, where the multiple and overlapping behaviours created create disparate, fragmented and discontinuous spatial references. On the other hand we can consider space as a field of interaction, composed of intersections of mobile elements it is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it (de Certeau 1984, 117). In this case space is performed so that, rather than being inhabited as an intransitive bounded entity, it is experienced as a far more fluid event-based space that comes into existence only through the social actions of those present.

Performative space
In this session we will investigate the social effects of communications media on how space is inhabited and acted upon. We will explore the relevance of concepts such as neighbourhood, community and territory in times when cities become essentially transitory social spaces for many of those who experience them. In particular we will focus on the performative nature of space.”

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by email (following website instructions) by March 15th 2010.

Convenor: Katharine Willis

Quick Links 8

2010-03-08T18:25:46+00:00

[Image: National Geographic: "A spelunker in a glacier cave in Greenland gazes upon colors and shapes that look more like a swirling galaxy than a cave formation." Photo by Carsten Peter].

Having now spent every available moment of every day for more than a week stuck inside Storefront for Art and Architecture, painting the floors and walls, installing vinyl, coordinating deliveries, sweeping up loose tape and sawdust, and more, I've decided to upload a slightly longer than normal cache of links. It might be a few more days before I can post again.

I hope to see some of you at the exhibition opening, though, which takes place Tuesday, March 9, at 7pm: Landscapes of Quarantine.

[Image: The future is not what it used to be: MIT's thresholds seeks essays on critical futurism].

thresholds 38 | Futures: Call for Submissions: "Whether it is a revolt against the futures of the past or a curiosity towards the unknown, thresholds 38 invites methods, projects, practices and alternative kinds of critique that imagine unorthodox futures that can emerge from within this institution." Submissions due March 12.

Synthetic Aesthetics | Call for Participants: "We seek participants for a project on synthetic biology, design, and aesthetics. The project will provide funding to bring together scientists and engineers working in synthetic biology with artists, designers, and other creative practitioners."

Synthetic biology is broadly defined as the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing biological systems for useful purposes. Design is central to synthetic biology, as the living world becomes a product of design and manufacturing choices, rather than evolutionary pressures alone. Thus, it becomes important to ask what role design--and the related concept of aesthetics--play in this burgeoning field. Other forms of engineering and manufacturing work in close conjunction with creative practitioners: structural engineers work with architects; mechanical engineers with product designers. Can synthetic biology benefit similarly from such collaborations?Applications due March 31.

Open Agenda | Call for Submissions: "Open Agenda is a new annual competition aimed at supporting a new generation of experimental Australian architecture. Open to recent architecture graduates, Open Agenda is focused on developing the possibilities of design research in architecture and the built environment... Open Agenda will award seed funding to three exceptional design research proposals that explore new positions in architecture for critical consideration." Register by May 1.

[Image: The Niagara Falls without their water, photographed by Flickr user rbglasson, via mammoth].

mammoth | Absent Rivers, Ephemeral Parks: "For six months in the winter and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were 'de-watered' as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion. During the interim study period, the dried riverbed and shale was drip-irrigated, like some mineral garden in a tender establishment period, by long pipes stretched across the gap, to maintain a sufficient and stabilizing level of moisture. For a portion of that period, while workers cleaned the former river-bottom of unwanted mosses and drilled test-cores in search of instabilities, a temporary walkway was installed a mere twenty feet from the edge of the dry falls, and tourists were able to explore this otherwise inaccessible and hostile landscape."

BBC | North Tyneside high street "revived" by fake shop front: "Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside... The government-funded project involves colourful graphic designs featuring a range of different shop types, which are either taped inside the windows or screwed to the fascia so they can be removed and reused as required."

InfraNet Lab | Terrestrial Discontinuities: "...these [energy corridors in the western United States] range from 3,500-feet wide to upwards of 5 miles wide. With these widths, we could almost begin to see these corridors as an ecology in and of themselves—rather than an ecology competing with National Parks, they could become the New National Parks, infrastructural vectors, protected as natural reserves by virtue of their very danger to us."

Guardian | Greece should sell islands to keep bankruptcy at bay: "Greece must consider a fire sale of land, historic buildings and art works to cut its debts, two rightwing German politicians said today in a newspaper interview that is bound to exacerbate tensions between Athens and Berlin. Alongside austerity measures such as cuts to public sector pay and a freeze on state pensions, why not sell a few uninhabited islands..." It might be ethically wrong, as well as politically dubious, and I have no money, but BLDGBLOG would certainly buy one. The Sovereign Neo-Cyclades.

[Image: Tactical drone seed-bombing, courtesy of Design Under Sky].

Design Under Sky | Ludic Guerrilla Gardening Drone Warfare: "...with recent advancements in augmented reality and virtual gaming, I can't help but imagine that a new style of drone-based urban landscape replenishment isn't a far off possibility."

Post-Traumatic Urbanism | Mediterranean Union: "A [high-speed rail] line running along the Mediterranean littoral is a seemingly impossible idea based in visionary assumptions. After all, it would need to pass through a region mired by instability and fractured by impenetrable borders. Functioning like a conveyor at the scale of continents, it would redistribute flows of people, warping the space-time fabric of an entire region—linking long disputed territories and as yet unformed nations. It would string together a seemingly impossible series of names: Gaza, Barcelona, Beirut, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Cairo. In doing so it would open a conduit between the differential pressures of North Africa and Europe—all this in the context of EU policy that increasingly conceives of Southern Europe as a bulwark against refugees. The political question we asked ourselves is the following one: what are the emancipatory potentials of infrastructure?"

City of Sound | Notes on New Songdo City (Part 1): "...it occurs to me that the logical thing to do would be the greatest engineering project of the next centuries; quite possibly the greatest diplomatic and economic project of the next centuries too, linking Japan with China via Korea via a high-speed rail link across gigantic bridges."

Spaceinvading | Sandwiched by INABA: "As part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Jeffrey Inaba's firm INABA was commissioned to design a pop‐up café located in the museum's interior courtyard. The project consists of three large‐scale lanterns that occupy the courtyard's double‐height space; a 24‐foot long service counter; communal tables; high‐top counters; and 'droopy' seat cushions."

[Image: ~~Project by CJ Lim~~ Image by Squint/Opera for Grant Associates].

SCI-Arc | London Eight Exhibition: "SCI-Arc presents London Eight, curated by renowned English architect Sir Peter Cook. A founding member of the 1960s futurist group Archigram and a visiting faculty member at SCI-Arc, Cook invited five architects who currently teach at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where Cook was professor from 1990 to 2005, to participate in an exhibition at the SCI-Arc Library Gallery. These architects were then asked to select a 'protege' whom they had mentored through their studies at the Bartlett to exhibit alongside their own work in the gallery." Includes work by Smout Allen, Johan Hybschmann, Marjan Colletti & Marcos Cruz, Yousef Al-Mehdari, CJ Lim, and Pascal Bronner.

Hudson Valley Seed Library | "The Hudson Valley Seed Library strives to do two things: to create an accessible and affordable source of regionally-adapted seeds that is maintained by a community of caring gardeners; and, to create gift-quality seed packs featuring works designed by New York artists in order to celebrate the beauty of heirloom gardening."

Urban Forest Map | "The Urban Forest Map is a collaborative project among city agencies, tree advocacy groups, and citizen foresters like you to map every tree in San Francisco, which will help protect and expand our urban forests."

GOOD | Fallen Fruit's Tree-planting Dreams Are Uprooted In Madrid: "For the last 10 days Fallen Fruit had been scouring the area [around Madrid], leading urban foraging trips to find what other fruit-bearing trees existed in the neighborhood around the city-funded Matadero art space, plotting the best locations for future apples, peaches, plums, pears, and apricots... The plan was to have the trees planted before their final presentation that night, giving the people of Madrid a map to all the public fruit they could eventually eat."

Cleveland Plain Dealer | Galleria mall is giant greenhouse, raising organic crops in Cleveland: "...by late spring or early summer, there will be fresh tomatoes for sale among the shops and galleries at the downtown Cleveland mall. Very fresh—as in vine-grown in bags and troughs hanging from steel stair banisters and ceiling beams in the shopping center that stretches between East Ninth and East 12th streets."

[Image: King's Vineyard, London by Soonil Kim, via Pruned].

Pruned | King's Vineyard, London: "One can certainly imagine such a network [of aerial vineyards and urban viticultural installations] built to grow others things, such as vegetables, herbs, fruits, cash crops, commercial flowers and plants, with the winery turned into a farmer's market."

Independent | Syria's Stonehenge: Neolithic stone circles, alignments and possible tombs discovered: "Dr. Mason explains that he 'went for a walk' into the eastern perimeter of the site—an area that hasn’t been explored by archaeologists. What he discovered is an ancient landscape of stone circles, stone alignments and what appear to be corbelled roof tombs. From stone tools found at the site, it’s likely that the features date to some point in the Middle East’s Neolithic Period—a broad stretch of time between roughly 8500 BC – 4300 BC. It is thought that in Western Europe megalithic construction involving the use of stone only dates back as far as ca. 4500 BC. This means that the Syrian site could well be older than anything seen in Europe."

New York Times | A Jewish Ritual Collides With Mother Nature: "From Washington to New York State, a series of 'snowmageddons' have wreaked a particular form of havoc for Orthodox Jews. The storms have knocked down portions of the ritual boundary known as an eruv in Jewish communities... Almost literally invisible even to observant Jews, the wire or string of an eruv, connected from pole to pole, allows the outdoors to be considered an extension of the home. Which means, under Judaic law, that one can carry things on the Sabbath, an act that is otherwise forbidden outside the house. Prayer shawls, prayer books, bottles of wine, platters of food and, perhaps most important, strollers with children in them—Orthodox Jews can haul or tote such items within the eruv. When a section of an eruv is knocked down by, let’s say, a big snowstorm, then the alerts go out by Internet and robocall, and human behavior changes dramatically."

Spillway | Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us: "One progresses from queue to queue before entering the building, progressing to slightly higher echelons of security clearance each time depending on the paperwork one has brought with one. Unsmiling police officers with automatic weapons stare at you, and you realize that if you made a dash towards the building itself, you would have to enter an area of open space that designed as a killzone, surrounded by armed representatives of the Metropolitan constabulary. Behind crossfire plaza is the building itself, its generous Scandinavian spaces seemingly as distant as the country you are trying to visit. The contradictions of that space are horribly unsettling, with a strongly dystopian odour: we can see the structures of a democracy retrofitted with the apparatus of authoritarianism. It gives a sense of how far we've fallen in 10 years."

[Image: The "High Houses" of Lebbeus Woods].

Lebbeus Woods | High Houses: "The High Houses are proposed as part of the reconstruction of Sarajevo after the siege of the city that lasted from 1992 though late 1995. Their site is the badly damaged 'old tobacco factory' in the Marijn dvor section near the city center."

Serial Consign | Toronto Sound Ecology: "Toronto Sound Ecology is a web mapping project dedicated to archiving field recordings collected in and around Toronto."

Some landscapes | Alpine Symphony: "Birdsong, thunderstorms and flowing water are pretty standard, but... would it be possible to move away from the sublime and the picturesque, to convey more unusual settings or simply nondescript landscapes through purely orchestral sound?"

Google Earth Blog | Solving a Murder With Google Earth: "On January 24, 2006, Jennifer Kesse vanished. The police quickly determined that she was abducted, but nothing solid has turned up in the past four years... During this time, users on her site discussed the new events and came to a stunning revelation: using Google Earth's historical imagery, they found an image from approximately one month after she disappeared. The image seems to show some promising information."

Related from last summer: Sydney Morning Herald | Mugging suspects snapped by Google Street View: "Dutch police have arrested twin brothers on suspicion of robbery after their alleged victim spotted a picture of them following him on Google Map's Street View feature."

National Geographic | Quintana Roo Underwater Cave Project: "Beneath the jungles of the Yucatan peninsula, [Sam] Meacham and his team are exploring and mapping the longest underwater cave system in the world." See also: Blue Holes Project: "Blue holes can run extremely deep underground, with one Bahamian blue hole exceeding 600 feet (180 meters) below sea level, and contain a series of mazelike passageways going miles in many directions. These cave systems can transition from giant rooms to tiny holes that divers must remove all of their gear in order to squeeze through. To add to the challenge, currents reverse in the ocean caves, making timing of dives critical."

[Image: Architizer comes to Los Angeles].

Architizer | Los Angeles Launch Announcement: "We are happy to announce that on March 18th, we will be hosting a party in Los Angeles at the new A+D Museum space [at 6032 Wilshire Boulevard]. In partnership with Haworth, Dwell Magazine, LA Forum, SCI-Arc, and BLDGBLOG, the event will be an evening to meet fellow Los Angeleno architects as well as a celebration of Los Angeles architecture culture." Here is a map. If you're in LA, stop by and say hello!

[Image: Rendering of the new A+D Museum].

(Some links via @doingitwrong, @javierest, @geoparadigm, @stevesilberman, and possibly elsewhere. Don't miss Quick Links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7).

Image Stacking: 8400 Images - Day and Night in the City

2010-03-06T11:00:21+00:00

Using our recent tutorial on image stacking it is possible to stack images from both day and night to create a single image of the city skyline over time. The photograph below consists of 8400 images taken using a Go Pro HD with one image every 5 seconds. The streak of light to the left is the moon during the night time sequence, while the right hand light is the daytime sun. The small lights are aircraft during the evening:

You can view a higher resolution version on our Flickr Stream, we will have more on the Go Pro HD next week, including a tutorial to create 24 hour+ timelapses.

Links for 2010-03-05 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-06T10:46:25+00:00

Interview David Bosshart, directeur de l’Institut Gottlieb Duttweiler [Le Temps]
"la voiture reste un symbole fort de l’individualisme contemporain. Mais son statut est concurrencé par d’autres moyens de transport et remis en question par la ville verte de demain"

Future Photo

2010-03-06T04:34:43+00:00

I'm a fan of design provocation - little projects that challenge the way we think about and see the world. Which is why Sasha Pohflepp's camera made me smile - press the button and it pulls in a photo from the internet that was taken somewhere in the world at the same time. We're at a stage in human evolution where connectivity can still bring about a sense of child like surprise and wonder - pause a moment to enjoy it because it's an experience that most of you will look back on as an era of nostalgic innocence in years to come.

Here on future perfect we've been exploring and thinking about the future of cameras for quite a while - from understanding the first camera phone's in Japan to the social rules that govern group photos in Lhasa and beyond the beyond. As an experience-capturing device 'the camera' makes for a wonderful object to explore: its ubiquity now crosses every demographic, every time-zone and most contexts - whether allowed or not; and the practical and social practices around taking photos are often finely entertwined with the events they are capturing. How might the future perfect connected camera differ from todays stand alone terminal? A couple of examples...

We've all been in situations where a photo hasn't turned out - with a better connected, location and direction-aware camera it's possible to pull on other peoples' snaps of the same place - right down to knowing which camera settings they used to get their results.

The whole idea of pressing a button to 'record' an event is a powerful one - in part because it denotes the control and ownership to the button-presser. Ever been in a group and handed your camera to someone else to take the photo? How did you feel about the resulting photo - both in terms of attachment to what was taken and in terms of how it ended up being used? What happens when live feeds a-la USTREAM become the default functionality - is there a point where no-one expects 'the photographer' to actually hold the camera?

Lift Seminar @ Imaginove about gestural interfaces

2010-03-05T17:05:16+00:00

Yesterday in Lyon, Emmanuel Rondeau and myself organized a Lift@Home about gestural interfaces. We (Lift) indeed partnered with Imaginove, a French cluster of companies, research institutions and universities focused on video games, audio-visual, cinema, animation and multimedia. Several other Lift seminars will be organized around various topics such as the Social Web, 3D virtual environment, networked objects and locative media. We’ll focus on the uses and practices of each of these technologies, to reflect upon how they are appropriated by users and how this information can be fed back into the design process.

Yesterday’s seminar focused on how gestural interfaces such as the Nintendo Wii, new kinds of accelerometers and (3D) cameras are used in the context of video games. There were around 50 participants, mostly game designers, interaction designers and Human-Computer Interaction academics.

After a quick introduction about the evolution of video-game peripherals over time, I described the pros and cons of these kind of interfaces as shown on the following slide

In addition, I mentioned some of the projects we carried out when I worked at Phoenix Interactive, a French video-game studio based in Lyon. These projects showed how we studied the various ways to transmit/explain gestures to players, a project in collaboration with a laboratory in Cognitive Psychology.

The next presenter, Emmanuelle Jacques, a sociologist from the University of Montpellier, described some results from an ethnographical study of Nintendo Wii usage. She described the discrepancy between the gestures that game designers expected to be made and people’s practices. As shown in the following picture, the movement amplitude of gestures is indeed quite different with expert players (the smaller girl) and novice players who think they must replicate real-world gestures. Emmanuelle discussed the implications of such notions, showing that playability is a much more complex notion than simply replicating what is done in the physical world.

The following presenters, Timothée Jobert from Litus/CEA and Etienne Guerry from XPteam in Grenoble presented an interesting case study of user-centered design. They described the results of an ethnographic study about how people use two sorts of gestural interfaces (the Nintendo Wii and the Bodypad). They then showed how these results were used in the design of video game prototypes based on a new kind of technology (a combination of an accelerometer and a magnetometer designed by Movéa). They ended their presentation with a demo of their prototypes, leading to a lively discussion about new technologies can overcome the problems game designers encountered with the Wii and the notion of realism.

Nonfiction

2010-03-07T17:30:17+00:00

Just a quick note, on a break from painting the interior of Storefront, that I will be live on the air in NYC in about ten minutes, speaking with Harry Allen on his show Nonfiction. We'll be discussing architecture, The BLDGBLOG Book, and more. Tune into WBAI for audio...

Links for 2010-03-04 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-05T09:45:30+00:00

[I Hate Rendering] Folding Scraper by b4architects [Y Magazine]
"Today we’re officially launching I Hate Rendering ... Far from any nostalgic view, and well aware of the huge contribution of modeling and rendering to the spreading and understanding of architecture, this section aims at starting a wider and shared reflection on representational methods, too often suffering from the fascination/slavery to the newest technology. It is meant to somehow balance the weight of what is substantially a very efficient instrument – the computer, the rendering process – and what instead is the personal expressive and communicational skills of every designer. A section that is thus completely dedicated to sketches as a primary vehicle between the world of “ideas” and the “real” world, in which our words will be few and images will communicate. In this spirit we today present you b4architects studio’s “hand” and their Folding Scraper"
ACCESS [NAIT5]
"ACCESS lets you track anonymous individuals in public places, by pursuing them with a robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system."
3D Display Cube [NAIT5]
"A patented system that integrates LED technology to create true three-dimensional imagery, the 3D Display Cube has wide spread uses with retail and public display, signage applications, home display, and advertising. The 3D Display Cube comes has an easy to use graphic system that allows the import of Photoshop files as well as video files to be displayed within the spatial region. This graphics system allows any designer or animator to create shapes and 3D video for the Cube without the need for programming. The 3D Cube also allows for external video cameras and audio to be plugged in to display real-time data in true 3D."
Tokyo Sky Drive [NAIT5]
"“Tokyo Sky Drive” is an absolutely stunning video journey through the city of Tokyo, using a parallel image trick to great effect."

Ad Literacy

2010-03-05T06:32:57+00:00

Facebook's ad platform is the Flip of advertising: smart, simple and just enough to be effective.

If you haven't already tried Facebook's advertising platform you should - because it, and services like it, are increasingly going to become part of the vocabulary and literacy of the future perfect. For better and sometimes definitely for worse it democratizes access to run a particular form of online advertising.

The platform allows anyone with a Facebook account and PayPay/credit card/... to create a targeted advertising campaign in a few minutes, with Facebook approval to run the ad appearing within an hour. You can target the advertisement by many criteria including location, age, gender, sexual preference, company, school,... and can fine-tune the campaign once it starts - for example I managed to push a narrowly targeted ad in front of a Facebook-using colleague based on little bit of knowledge of her background.

The broad implication of platforms such as this (and I'm thinking beyond AdSense) will be the true mainstreamification of online advertising - Facebook's ability to cross-sell to its users - anyone who has created a facebook event page is particularly juicy virgin target) will bring 101 online advertising skills to a broader demographic. Increasingly the people previously-known-as-consumers will be able to think in terms of segmentation, click-through and reach, which in turn will continue to change the way they expect advertisers target them - the acceleration of an already shifting target.

I know, you're right - none of this is particularly new, except that it is. Sony made umpteen different models of feature-rich camcorder only to be trumped by the Flip - it's not about being first, its about being relevant to a particular demographic, and one thing Facebook's senior management understands is relevancy (of course how they apply that understanding is a different issue).

In the spirit of pushing the boundaries Facebook needs take their platform a few steps further - allowing their users to see the criteria by which advertisers are seeking them out and revealing the price paid to put the advertisement in front of their eyeballs. You gotta know your (lack of) worth.

The New York Times explores the line between targeted and creepy here..

Photoshop Tutorial: City Star and Aircraft Trails

2010-03-04T15:07:53+00:00

Last week we covered creating 'day trails' in Photoshop using the technique in Astrophotography known as 'star trails'. Today we take the same technique and use it to create a view of city activity at night.

You will need:

1 x Timelapse System, you can use a simple webcam as per our previous Tutorial: Torch + Webcam = HD Timelapse System a DSLR such as the Canon G9 with CHDK , a iPhone with the free Gorrilacam app or any camera that can take photos at regular intervals. We used a Go Pro HD camera in timelapse mode, taking a picture every 5 seconds.

1 x Copy of Photoshop, you can download a 30 day trial.

1 x Photoshop Stacking Action (thanks to Deep Space Astrophotography)

Time Taken, 4 to 12 hours to capture, 2 to 6 hours to process.

Setting Up

The concept is simple, set up your camera, webcam or iphone at a suitable location, and capture an image at regular intervals, for our example we captured an image every 5 seconds pointing at the skyline of London. Capturing an image at least every 5 seconds is vital for star/aircraft trails as it allows for closer spacing between the lights in the final image.

We left the camera running for approximately 12 hours capturing 8000+ images, saved into a folder on our computer. Ours captured covered both day and night time, resulting in the following timelapse:

The next step is to open up photoshop, chose the images you want to use, and start stacking.

Image Stacking in Photoshop

The images will be stacked onto of an intially blank image via a simple automated action:

1) Create a new blank black image the same size are your captured photographs.

2) Load the action into the action windows in Photoshop and load the action Startrails.atn.

3) In Photoshop click 'File', 'Automate' and 'Batch'. Select the action you have just loaded and choose your directory with the images as source and make sure you select 'None' for the output directory.

Click 'Ok' and leave it running, our Mac laptop took around an 2 hours to stack the images - resulting in the Start/Aircraft Trail' below:

The line across the centre is a star and the bright line on the left is the moon coming into shot. The rest of the lights are aircraft in the sky above London.

You can view higher resolution versions via our Flickr Photostream.

Could Australia become the ‘Nordic Region’ of the Pacific Economy?

2010-03-04T11:01:54+00:00

I’ve done a couple of talks in Sydney recently both of which finished with the idea I’m about to relate. (The talks were the closing keynote at Web Directions South, December 2009 and a talk to the Planning Institute of Australia around the topic of ‘creative cities’, February 2010. The images below are slides from the presentation.)

It’s not a detailed, analytical, thoroughly-researched idea, as will become all too clear. Rather, it’s a way of thinking about Australia which is intended as a prompt and provocation as much as anything.

It was partly inspired by reading Jacques Attali’s patchy but intriguing book A Brief History of the Future (2006). In a thoroughly entertaining and insightful rattle through human history, Attali implicitly suggests that the story of civilisation can be punctuated by observing the dominant oceans at any one time. In very broad brushstrokes, the emergence of what would become mercantile activity starts in Mesopotamia and ends up in a fabrication lab in Shenzen. Grand narratives such as Attali's are often problematic, but that doesn’t stop them being interesting and useful to think with.

With that in mind, I decided to end Web Directions South in particular on a rallying call. It’s worth bearing in mind that no-one asked for such a rallying call, and thus its effect may be somewhat limited accordingly. Equally, that particular platform is hardly the place to ‘launch’ such broad ideas. But they didn't seem to mind.

Here goes.

Human history can be characterised in a series of shifts across oceans, and its first such dominant ‘organising ocean’ was the Mediterranean of the Greeks, Romans, and what are known as Moors but probably shouldn’t be, and lets pin that period from around the 8th century BC to around 1000 AD. (Arguably it started a little earlier with urbanisation around the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, but that’s a minor wrinkle. Unless you’re a Mesopotamian, of course, in which case I apologise.)

By the early middle ages, we can shift the story to the North Sea, and the emergence of the great trading centres of Antwerp, Amsterdam, Bruges etc. Attali’s book really picks up at this point, as he starts to detail the increasing sophistication of global markets from city to city across Europe, ending up with London.

By the 18th and 19th centuries however, and throughout the 20th century, we can broadly pin the shift eastwards around the Atlantic, as the American giant tightens its grip on an increasingly global market, whose focal point shifts ‘across the pond’ to Boston and then New York.

Now, however, we can talk of a further shift of the axis towards the Pacific, with the East Asian economies of China, Japan, South Korea, other South-East Asian Tigers, possibly combined the West Coast of North America, becoming the dominant economic centre. (India and Brazil don’t fit neatly into this, but again, fitting neatly is not really the point of this exercise.)

Spin the globe back to the North, and observe the Nordic Region, or more specifically Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland (again, let’s conveniently ignore Iceland at the moment.)

Interestingly, this region has around the same population base as Australia. The combined population of the Nordic Region countries adds up to around 24 million; Australia is around 22 million and growing rapidly. It’s the same ballpark.

And look at what the Nordic Region has produced over the last 50-100 years.

Saab, Volvo, Ericsson, Nokia, Bang+Olufsen, Iitalla, Marimekko, H+M, Fritz Hansen, Artek, Ikea, Lego, Electrolux, Tandberg, Linux, Opera, Dopplr, Spotify.

It’s a fairly extraordinary level of output, across both services and manufacturing, and often deeply symbolic goods, imparting genuine cultural identity. A fairly random selection but extraordinary nonetheless.

I’d argue that it’s because of two things, essentially.

A shared local culture that values design, innovation, craft.
Its strategic position adjacent to what had been the primary economic powerhouse of the last few hundred years (the North Sea and Atlantic eras.)

We might wonder how that culture emerged - whether it’s derived from some deeper, earlier traditions around craft, or from particular spiritual traditions - or whether it developed in symbiotic fashion with the rise of that industrial output.

And note that that list of innovations is not just the solid ‘mid-century’ manufacturing base of cars and household goods, but also includes the new knowledge-based products of Spotify and Dopplr, which also tend to be derived from a craft-based practice, as even a cursory reading of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman will make clear.

But I’d suggest that the strategic position is just as important.

And so spin the globe back to Australia.

Note Australia's strategic position just below what we can assume is the economic powerhouse of the next few hundred years. Right there, in roughly the same timezone as most of that East Asian focal point, and with reasonable connectivity to the West Coast. Not exactly handy for any of those places, as Australia isn’t exactly handy for anywhere, but in terms of timezone, in exactly the right place.

This shift to the Pacific Economy is debatable too, of course (see Economist note below), but we can at least agree that most of the indicators seem to point to Australia being very well-placed at this point - if it were to take advantage of such a strategic position.

So with a similar population base, and a similarly useful strategic position, could Australia become the ‘Nordic Region’ of the Pacific Economy?

If we assume that this is a broadly attractive proposition - big assumption, but I’d be happy with it - what would we have to do to achieve this? Clearly that missing component is cultural, partly. Can we re-shape the local culture to value design, craft and innovation? Easier said than done, but entirely possible. After all, much of Australia’s culture is engineered to value resources and agriculture, the so-called ‘primary industries’ (a telling phrase, that). Yet an industrial policy - and associated cultural policies, education policies and so on - could instead value the New Primary Industries.

(Two interesting issues here, both predicated on a new synthesis of manufacturing and design. Firstly, how China intends to retain manufacturing whilst increasingly 'owning' design too; secondly, how this might shape urban form, as part of a move to what I'd call 're-industrial cities'. Watch for forthcoming entries on both.)

(Steal a quick covetous glance at Denmark, and the example of one particular small agency MindLab, a design facility created by three ministries - Employment, Taxation, Economic & Business Affairs. Here, as Bryan Boyer notes, “design capability is explicitly integrated into government activities … working to help government bodies improve the services they offer to the citizens of Denmark with a mix of design, social science, and public policy expertise.” I’d be surprised if there was a single Australian who could imagine Australia’s equivalent ministries doing such a thing at this point. And by the way, I don't mean Australia should simply try to 'become Danish' or 'Nordic'. Nor do I mean to actually portray the region as some kind of Nordic version of nirvana - friends who live there can often end up more than a little irritated by it at times. More that Australia could find its own response to this possibility, developing similar or even enhanced values.)

The other re-shaping would be to ensure that Australia sees its future is Asian, broadly speaking. While this might seem obvious, and manifest in the increasingly Asian urban population, this isn’t necessarily a widely-held view, or a popular one, sadly.

But the relationship between, for example, Australia and China has always been complex. John Birmingham’s book Leviathan explores this in detail with reference to Sydney, relating the tale of the Australian Steamship Navigation Company's attempts to employ cheap skilled Chinese seamen on three of their ships in April 1878, and how anti-Chinese movement swept across the nation as a result.

“The new (colonial) ministry, led by Henry Parkes, quickly announced that it would introduce laws restricting Chinese immigration. Parkes, who thought of the Chinese as a ‘degraded race’ which would ‘always pull down the superior British race morally, intellectually even physically,’ had to fight big-business representatives who clung to the dream of importing cheap Asian labour. But with another surge in Chinese migrant numbers in 1881 being blamed for a smallpox epidemic, and with extra-parliamentary agitation continuing, conservative resistance was overcome. It was the end of this interest in the Chinese as a cheap, superexploitable labour source which laid the basis ‘for the emergence of a nationally supported White Australia Policy.’” [From Leviathan, by John Birmingham, p.105]

Scroll forward 130 years, and the sniff of a mild recession (which Australia hasn't even had, yet) brings out anti-immigrant sentiment in newspapers, and official policy. The cover of the Daily Telegraph (the most widely-read newspaper in New South Wales, sadly) proclaimed ‘NSW jobs going to China!’, and immigration policy slams the door just in case:

This despite China being Australia’s major trading partner (albeit largely predicated on the resource trade, something which has little useful symbolic value.) So shifting sentiment around Australia and Asia will not be straightforward. But it is absolutely essential, not just because it would be the Right Thing To Do, but also because of this strategic positioning. Fortunately, many Australians do realise this, on both counts.

While we’re in this line of thinking, we can handily puncture a couple of other myths around Australia while we’re here.

Firstly, that it’s a long way away from anywhere, and so suffers from “the tyranny of distance”. This is no longer an excuse, as in fact it turns out that Australia is rather well-located after all. Contemporary telecoms effortlessly facilitates working across geography - recall this new geography - but working across timezones is far more difficult. Once Australia frets less about the Mother Country - and becoming a republic might be key in this process - it will become clear that its temporal and proximal relationships are not half bad.

The second myth is that it’s a small market, and that this can be trotted out as an excuse for poor products and services, or lack of innovation. I’ve never actually accepted this ‘excuse’, but in any case, the small population is irrelevant in this case - not only does the example of the Nordic Region belie it but we can also argue that a small nation ought to be far more fleet of foot, if anything.

The size of the nation is a key debate in a growing country like Australia, with current predictions forecasting a population of around 35 million by the middle of the century. This is linked to another debate around an increasingly ageing population.

In both cases, however, there is little actual emphasis on imagining what that population might be doing. (This is akin to so-called ‘sustainable city strategies’ that essentially focus on the surface layers without addressing what the city might actually be for.)

So in positing this thought - could Australia be the Nordic Region of the Pacific Economy? - I’m actually more interested in opening up a debate that imagines what Australia might be for.

Increasingly, Australia has everything going for it. It might well be The Lucky Country after all. Yet in recalling the title of Donald Horne’s 1984 book, and in particular his biting phrase, "Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck", we need to critically assess whether we’ve moved on from almost half a century ago. (We might assess Robin Boyd’s contemporaneous book, The Australian Ugliness, in the same light.)

“I had in mind in particular the lack of innovation in Australian manufacturing and some other forms of Australian business, banking for example. In these, as a colonial carry over, Australia showed less enterprise than almost any other prosperous industrial society.”

As long as we don’t ask questions about the trajectories we wish to take as a nation, or even as an archipelago of city states for that matter, Australia remains half-trapped in that Old World rather than the New. So the purpose of my question, as implied by these overly-simple maps and observations, is really to encourage us to think about how well-placed Australia might be, and how to start framing the questions that move us forward.

What if it were to genuinely value design, innovation and craft? How would that goal shape our education policies, our industries, our cities, our culture?

What if Australia genuinely pursued its links with Asia at a deeper level than simply belching coal northwards? How should we re-imagine our national identity, values and culture, such that this enhances social mobility, well-being, ecology, economy, and ultimately civilisation?

We can shape our future, after all.

(NB: Regarding the oceans. There are inconsistencies with this grand narrative, as usual. Not least in the potential return of the Mediterranean as major economic player once again, stretching from Morocco to Turkey, and whose growth since the turn of the century is second only to China. Read more in Adrian Lahoud’s fascinating post on an infrastructure for a Mediterranean Union. As for Asia only now being the economic powerhouse, even The Economist can’t decide whether that’s the case. This recent article explores that in more detail, going both ways, but also points out a flaw in my interpretation of Attali’s argument about the shift towards the East. Asia has in fact accounted for over half of world output for 18 out of the last 20 centuries. A further ‘wrinkle’ perhaps. The progression from empire to nation state to city state is interesting, though also debatable. And we just don’t know yet whether Attali’s broad organising principle of rapidly-increasing tendencies towards individualism will continue to career into the abyss, before we re-emerge in a broadly optimistic vision of a very different society. Like I say, it’s worth a read, whether you agree with him or not.)

(NB: I’d been meaning to post something about oceans for a while, not least since Marcus Trimble’s note on Australia’s undersea land grab a couple of years ago. The new map of Australia - including its new undersea territory, though not its territories on Antarctica - is interesting partly due to the way it plays with figure:ground. I started to wonder, with the ocean-centric position above, how to draw a map of the world in which the oceans appear ‘more important’ than the land, given that the land masses are what the eye is naturally drawn to, understandably enough. Not as easy as it sounds.)

(Equally, with this kind of entry, it's almost impossible to resist drawing Dad's Army-like arrows all over the maps. But resist I did.)

(NB. Not wishing to succumb to more Scandiphilia, it’s worth noting that several of those countries are also resource-rich, just like Australia, and have benefited from that. It’s not all Marimekko blinds and streaming music services. It’s also worth noting that they too might have a declining manufacturing base (see the latest Monocle RE Sweden and Saab), though to a lesser extent than in Australia. It’s telling, however, how such countries react to resource bounty. Compare what Norway, for instance, has done with its sovereign wealth fund - around US$390bn and growing - and which is largely constructed of deposits from its resource wealth, as opposed to Australia’s Future Fund which was kicked off by the proceeds from the privatisation of the state telco; it’s around US$58bn and probably not growing, thanks to those Telstra shares. Australia, far larger than Norway and the largest coal exporter in the world, has a lot less in the bank. Has the boom of the last 15 years or so been frittered away on a few million home extensions instead?)

Links for 2010-03-03 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-05T06:34:27+00:00

Do Projects Walkshop [Do]
We basically walked around the Cuba Street district of Wellington for an hour and a half with eyes wide open, looking very carefully for all of the sites in the streetscape where information is being gathered up by a networked system, or drawn back off such a system and displayed or acted upon. Then we returned to a command post we’d previously set up and provided with a map of the area, to plot our findings and consider what we’d seen in the light of a couple of fundamental questions: who owns this data? How might one get access to it? What kind of interface might be involved? Whose interests does it tend to support, or undermine?

Links for 2010-03-03 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-04T11:01:54+00:00

Detroit homes sell for $1 amid mortgage and car industry crisis [The Guardian]
"Brumit calculates that he has spent $1,500 to buy and do up his house, principally by scavenging demolition sites. He will move in with his wife and four-month-old child once it is complete, probably in the summer. He said: "The Americans we know got ripped off by the American dream. But [the renovation] is the most like moving out of the country that we can actually do. We're the minority in terms of ethnicity and this is a rich environment … there's 30% open space in the city and that doesn't include the buildings that should be torn down. You're in a city riding your bike around and you hear birds and stuff. It's incredible."
Kevin Rudd announces $30.9b funding takeover of public hospitals [SMH]
"The Rudd government has finally announced its plan to fix Australia's public hospitals, with a $30.9 billion funding takeover as its centrepiece. The giant health and hospital reform program would result in the Commonwealth funding up to 60 per cent of all services, infrastructure and research costs in public hospitals.New "Local Hospital Networks" would pay for services, replacing the traditional model of Commonwealth grants to the states and territories."
Smallest commercial-class, solar-powered sensor developed [The University Record Online]
"A 9-cubic millimeter solar-powered sensor system developed at U-M is the smallest that can harvest energy from its surroundings to operate nearly perpetually. The system’s processor, solar cells and battery are all contained in its tiny frame, which measures 2.5 by 3.5 by 1 millimeters. It is 1,000 times smaller than comparable commercial counterparts""

Locative media projects that caught my attention

2010-03-03T10:42:47+00:00

Interesting locative media project that I’ve found relevant lately:

Address necklace by Mouna Andraos and Sonali Sridhar:

“Address is a handmade electronic jewelry piece. When you first acquire the pendant, you select a place that you consider to be your anchor – where you were born, your home, or perhaps the place you long to be. Once the jewelry is initialized, every time you wear the piece it displays how many kilometers you are from that location, using a GPS component built into the pendant. As you take Address around the world with you, it serves as a personal connection to that place, making the world a little smaller or maybe a little bigger.“

I like the idea of having a personal connection to a place and not necessarily a human being. This is so different than the raft of buddy-finder applications.

Compass Phone by HaYeon Yoo:

“This project addresses the issue of whether the mobile phone is a surveillance tool or a digital leash and explores designing an alternative means of communication which delivers a more poetic and aesthetic experience.

The Compass Phone does not support any verbal communication side, but has only a GPS function. It measures the distance between two people in real-time and then converts it to the time it takes for them to meet each other by either transport or time unit. A compass is hidden under the digit display. The centre of the compass always indicates the user’s position and its needle indicates the other person’s direction. “

This one is also interesting at it gives subtle cues about friends’ movement in space; I see it as indicating a possibility, and less a factual or objective indication as other buddy-finder try to implement.

Landscapes of Quarantine

2010-03-03T18:25:32+00:00

In only six days, with a reception on Tuesday, March 9, "Landscapes of Quarantine" opens at New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture.

I'm absolutely thrilled to have curated this show, with Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography, and I can't wait to see it finally open for view. On the other hand, this week is an absolute mania of painting, material deliveries, installation, cleaning, and more, which means I'll probably be a bit thin on posts for the next few days.

The last four or five months, of course, have seen a wide variety of quarantine-themed interviews and posts here on BLDGBLOG, but it's worth reminding both myself and others why quarantine is worthy of architectural attention in the first place—as a spatial experience of waiting, isolation, and, often, emotional claustrophobia.

At its most basic, quarantine is the creation of a hygienic boundary between two or more things, for the purpose of protecting one from exposure to the other. It is a strategy of separation and containment—a spatial response to suspicion, threat, and uncertainty. From Chernobyl’s Zone of Exclusion to the artificial quarantine islands of the New York archipelago, and from camps set up to house HIV+ Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay to the modified Airstream trailer within which returning Apollo astronauts once waved at President Nixon, the landscapes of quarantine are as varied as they are unexpected.

Each of the works on display in the exhibition responds to some aspect of quarantine, from the "dark math" of triage and the ethical challenge of enforced isolation to the geological timescale of nuclear-waste sequestration. The works range from a wall-sized infographic comparing the infrastructural bubbles inside of which illegally imported orchids and the President of the United States, respectively, live, to a tear-off & take-home short story inspired by the idea of a Quarantine Administration bureaucracy. There are designs for a new, multi-player iPhone game called "Cordon Sanitaire"; field notes and sketches from North Brother Island, the final home of Typhoid Mary; a special issue of David Garcia's Manual of Architectural Possibilities (M.A.P.); and much more.

The exhibition will be up until Saturday, April 17; there will be a series of ticketed, quarantine-themed dinners in early April (more details and ticket sales for these will be announced in a few weeks); and there will be an evening of related programming on Thursday, April 9, hosted by Columbia University's Studio-X.

The reception kicks off at 7pm on Tuesday, March 9; it is free and open to the public (and there will be free beer, generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery). I hope to see some of you there!

("Landscapes of Quarantine" poster, flyer, logo, and exhibition was designed by Glen Cummings of MTWTF).

Links for 2010-03-02 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-03T10:41:21+00:00

Chile Earthquake Shortened Day & Shifted Earth's Axis: NASA [SMH]
"The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile probably shifted the Earth's axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said. Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometres of rock by several metres, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth's rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects. "The length of the day should have got shorter by 1.26 microseconds [millionths of a second]," Gross, said in an emailed reply to questions. "The axis about which the Earth's mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds [about eight centimetres].""
Dutch Camo Mashup Goodness [greg.org: the making of:]
"To evade detection from the air and retreat to Australia, the Crijnssen's captain ordered the 186' ship disguised as an island by covering it with branches. Unlike the official, formal Razzle Dazzle camouflage technique used in WWI to confuse submarines, the Crijnssen's improvised approach worked. The ship survived and eventually ended up in the Dutch Navy Museum at Den Helder, the city at the tip of the North Holland peninsula which has long been a strategic nexus of Dutch naval and shipping operation" Great story.
streets centered
"All of the streets in selected cities, horizontally and vertically centered."
Dan Hill - New Soft City | IxDA
My talk from Interaction 10. Sorry I start so slowly - it was so dark I couldn't see anyone (and so almost forgot it was a full auditorium) and rather jetlagged. I do wake up a bit further on, honest.
Pinboard — Antisocial Bookmarking [Daring Fireball]
"In addition to the fact that Pinboard itself is promising and clever, Ceglowski has implemented a genius feature on the sign-up page: you must pay a small one-time fee to create a new account: The signup fee helps discourage spammers and defrays some of the costs of running the site. The fee is based on the formula (number of users * $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay. As I type this, the fee is $2.91; when I joined four days ago, it was $2.33. This is brilliant." Very clever.
Steven Holl Architects Wins International Tourism Complex Competition in Hangzhou, China [Bustler]
"The north half of the plan is characterized by a new zone of recreational waterstrips, offering a variety of housing types, and Lantern Towers, which take inspiration from the old stone lanterns in West Lake. Setting “fire over water,” photovoltaic glass curtain walls gather the sun’s energy during the day, while at night one elevation of each tower glows, reflecting the day’s energy in the water. In the south plan, a tilted landform of natural grasses is punctured for light. Hovering over a large public water garden, the structure is a dodecahedron truss which contains a hotel, restaurants and cafes. Within the minimally restored shells of the oxygen and boiler plants, new experimental architectural forms, designed by a variety of artists and architects, take on functions of cafes, bars, and exhibit or performance spaces, and allow for a flexible programmatic plan which can take adjustments over time."