cityofsound

Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2010, New York

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.

For the life between buildings - some notes on the iPad

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.

Bryan Boyer (Postopolis! LA)

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

I’ve known Bryan for a few years, so it was a pleasure to have him speak at Postopolis! LA. (Note: some of the images below are from Bryan’s deck, which he kindly sent me afterwards.)

An editor at Archinect, and a recent grad from Harvard GSD, Boyer now notes that “he works for Finland”, essentially, as he’s now employed at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. 

One of the more forward-thinking architects I know, Bryan exemplifies one aspect of the architecture on show at Postopolis! LA - that of fluid frontiers around the discipline, of the application of a design discipline for strategic value outside of its traditional parameters of the built environment. (There are echoes of the debates around design thinking here, even further beyond Leon van Schaik’s notion of architecture re-calibrated as “spatial intelligence” rather than “technologies of shelter”.)

Michael Downing, Deputy-Chief of Counter-Terrorism for LAPD (Postopolis! LA)

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

Bryan’s pulled off a real coup here. He’s only invited the Deputy-Chief of Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau for the LAPD to speak at Postopolis LA. (Later that year, Downing would become interim Chief of Police).

Bryan’s typically articulate and impassioned introduction contextualises LAPD as “one of the world’s largest police forces, bigger than the military forces of many small nations”, before Michael Downing steps forward. He’s burly, packed into a sleek suit, looking every inch the pro football player turned successful local businessman. As such, he’s highly incongruous amongst the crowd at the Standard’s rooftop bar. (Don’t get me wrong - a few more suits, literally and metaphorically, would not have been a bad thing, in a way.)

Freya Bardell and Brian Howe (Postopolis! LA)

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

Freya Bardell and Brian Howe (of Greenmeme) presented several projects centred on landscape, sustainability, gardens and communities. They start by stating that the projects’ “underlying commonality is a deep concern for our planet and inhabitants of our planet”. Their practice is about “designing of sustainable strategies for community engagement”. They also describe it as partly “art activism”.

Their 2006 project GreenYourRoof involved monitoring plant species and documenting on website. They say the “data collection was very basic” comprising an environmental forum on invasive species etc.

Notes on New Songdo City. Or, What does your Seoul look like (Part 1)

(Much of this originally written at the time, September 2009.)

A day trip to Seoul. Depart Sydney Thursday midday, arrive in Seoul Thursday night, depart Friday late-afternoon back to Sydney. I'm in international airspace for longer than I'm on Korean soil. Don't ask.

What follows is a series of thoughts, vignettes and photos from your tired but intrigued correspondent.

I'd love more time to even begin to explore this city, but not this time. And actually I'm not really in what most would think of as Seoul at all, but New Songdo City. (The taxi driver called it Songdo New City; others call it New Songdo City. Who knows. I was actually visiting the Songdo International Business District. Which is part of Incheon Free Economic Zone. There's a furious series of city branding skirmishes going on over here.)

New Songdo City is a vast new development on reclaimed land — the Song Do tidal flats, in fact, just on the edge of Incheon and Seoul. I arrive at around midnight on the Thursday night. My taxi driver waves his hand towards the lines of lights ascending into the murky sky, describing loose outlines of skyscrapers.

Visualising emails on the CLOUD project, or sketching the ‘new smokestacks’

Regarding the previous post on The CLOUD, the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed the visualisation I layered over the third of my AAA exhibition boards. This was no more than a quick sketch, rattled together very late one night - by hand, direct into InDesign (not a good idea, by the way) - illustrating the emails to and from my in-box relating to the CLOUD’s design process. Although it was produced quickly, there’s a little more thinking behind it than meets the eye, and like most sketches, it’s development rather than destination.

The CLOUD

Finally, an urban informatics project I worked on that I can talk about here, even if it’s currently still ‘paper architecture’ (pixel architecture?). The nature of urban development is such that I can’t yet say much about recent design work on projects (including Masdar (with LAVA), Helsinki (with Sauerbruch Hutton/Experientia), and just yesterday Seoul (with Studio Libeskind) etc., as well as various others I can’t yet mention, and building/infrastructure-level projects in Brisbane and Sydney.)

This one though - the CLOUD - is being announced today, on the BBC, by the MIT press office, via its website, on Facebook, here at City of Sound, and elsewhere. We thought we’d try to share most of the details of the project. I think it speaks to a few new ideas of what a monument could be, what a contemporary design process can be, what a structure can be, what we can do with data, and so on.

A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, by Alain de Botton

My flight from Brisbane to Sydney had been delayed en route, due to 60kph winds at Sydney leaving only one runway operational, and so the plane was directed into a holding pattern. Presumably we were stacked alongside other aircraft, though none were visible.

The Australian landscape had also disappeared surprisingly quickly into the gloom of evening outside the window, a gigantic land mass suddenly and easily secreted away. On take-off from Brisbane an hour earlier, ascending above the mangroves and oil refineries at the mouth of the Brisbane River, the lower stratosphere of South East Queensland had been suffuse with a yellowy haze from the dust storms apparently now firmly ensconced along the east coast. But now the view out of the thick starboard window was complex in composition and banal in content, a multi-layered montage of grime and moisture in the foreground, vast inhuman darkness pocked by the odd spot of light in the background, and my trousers reflected in the cabin reading light somewhere in-between.

The delay, which again reminds me of the brittle nature of the oft-inappropriately-named civil aviation (and the essentially unsustainable nature of domestic commercial aviation in the long run), does however give me enough time to both start and finish Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport, his account of spending, well, a week at the airport, as writer-in-residence at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, courtesy of BAA. 

To my mild surprise, I enjoyed it hugely.

Sensing the immaterial-material city

I've been meaning to post more on this theme for a while - it's partly one of those entries that is really a 'note to self'. But when Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze posted their fascinating research into visualising the (otherwise invisible) characteristics of RFID last night, it prompted me to hit 'publish'.

Their research piece Immaterials is quite lovely, exploring the spatial qualities of RFID in terms of its readable volume, captured with a simple LED/sensor and camera. Here's their video, in which they explain more:

(As well as the conceptual backdrop, outlined in more detail by both Timo and Jack, I particularly like the care and attention they've given to the visualisation, and the presentation of the research. This is quality design.)

In their work I even see something of the early experiments of, say, Benjamin Franklin and Nikola Tesla in terms of understanding the behaviour of electricity, such that it can then be tamed, conducted, and put to work. It's perhaps drawing a long bow to make that comparison, but it feels like a similar sentiment. Whilst electricity is hardly invisible, there is a sense of trying to understand such immaterial phenomena through prototyping and experimentation. (And again, while some would see that as the province of science, it's also the contemporary purpose of design.)

(In this particularly fine image, we see Tesla's friend Mark Twain conducting high-frequency high voltage current, bringing a lamp to incandesce. Tesla is lurking in the background.)

Part of the purpose behind Immaterials is to understand more about RFID in terms of an emerging 'material knowledge', as Timo put it, from the designer's perspective. But perhaps also in order to raise awareness of a technology which is essentially invisible - and often feared - such that we can better understand it, and so make informed choices. It's similar to my own far sketchier work exploring the shape of the wi-fi at the State Library of Queensland (written up here) - if you could perceive the phenomenon of wireless internet as a physical space, what might it look like? (It'd be more interesting to ask what it feels like, actually.)

Despite the fact that it suggests the already massively overused term "making the invisible visible", I'm particularly interested in tapping into the content in such transactions, as well as their materiality/immateriality, as a way of understanding patterns of behaviour in what I'm calling the new soft city. 

Closing the loop then means finding a way of exhibiting these invisible phenomena back in physical space. In an email exchange with Jack last night, I suggested that we might see such blooms or halos sparking as transit card-carrying passengers walk through ticket barriers in subway stations (I'm currently working on informatics for a subway project; it was front-of-mind). Jack had already put it thus:

"Having produced these visualisations, I now find myself mapping imaginary shapes to the radio enabled objects around me. I see the yellow Oyster readers with plumes of LED fluoro-green fungal blossoms hanging over them – and my Oyster card jumping between them, like a digital bee cross-pollinating with data as I travel the city."

As well as the wi-fi research, I've also been fascinated by capturing existing everyday examples of how the city assesses invisible or hidden characteristics of its infrastructure.

I've been taking photos of people who appear to be sensing the city - in the broadest, er, sense of the phrase. The following shots are from Sydney and Los Angeles, and indicate the more quotidian, prosaic activities involved in instrumenting and monitoring the city - from surveyors to telecoms operators, from vans counting passing traffic to guys probing underground pipes, from markings on streets indicating what's underneath to this peculiar footage of what looks like someone using a sonovac but is probably just a device checking for cables.

I've created a public group at Flickr called Sensing the City, so if you have similar photos, do add them there. I'd be interested to see what turns up. 

While it's a very different sensibility and approach to the aforementioned explorations of radio frequencies - it's often a very material city, rather than immaterial; just hidden - in the context of discussions around instrumenting the fabric of our cities via urban informatics it's interesting to consider how much of this already occurs on our streets. And despite being marked by traffic cones and fluorescent work jackets it's become an invisible activity, somewhat ironically, for passers-by. These people are sensors.