Topics in Digital Media – Fall 09

“The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tales of the networked city” (speech)

Speaker Background:   Adam Greenfield is an American writer, consultant, and thought leader in information architecture and user experience.   He serves as Nokia’s head of design direction for user interface and services.

Greenfield graduated from NYU in 1989 with a degree in Cultural Studies.  He has served in the U.S. Army reserves as a psychological operations specialist, and headed up the information architecture department of Razorfish’s Tokyo office.  He is the author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing (2006), and co-teaches a class called “Urban Computing” in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

• Greenfield examines the possibilities, potentials and risks of fully networked cities.

Sensors/data gathering techniques already infiltrate cities and we are about to embed our cities with further capabilities.

We are creating a world where objects/buildings will also be invested with the ability to process and use the streams of info that we beam off ourselves.

• Embedding of this technology in our metropolitan areas actually stretches our experience of space and time.

• Do networked cities exist today, or is this the stuff of science fiction?

Yes:  The networked “ubiquitous” city is already becoming a reality for some of us, and it stands to reason that it will become a reality for more of us.

South Korea embraced this concept with “Yoo” (sp?).  A former sewage canal was embedded with technology and converted to a sensor platform.  Data now “pours off” of that city.  Also in the making in South Korea is New Songdo, a fully networked city.  A 2005 New York Times article on the project:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/technology/techspecial/05oconnell.html?_r=1&ei=5070&en=f49e6ccfdeea3832&ex=1137128400&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1136955721-1KkHc2eYEqMOALzXR5JEfw)

• Key point:  Greenfield believes that such projects start enamored with the potentials of a technological society rather than an understanding of human nature or desire.  What, Greenfield asks, would living in such a society feel like?

• Greenfield contends that our technology is changing our sense of place and space, that it has taken on a “placemaking” ability.

Example given:  images of a woman walking through a mall while speaking on her mobile phone.  It is the conversation she is having on the phone, he contends, and not the “physical container” of the mall itself, which is forming her directional choices.  The “space” she is inhabiting is the mobile conversation, and the path she follows through the mall is correlated to the intangible conversation.

Image of the Tokyo subway, with four passengers all intently staring at the mobile screens:  Greenfield posits that the passengers are escaping the reality of the crowded subway, using their phones to escape their physical space.

“Cyberspace is where you are when you are on the phone.”

“When it is raining on Oxford Street, the rain is as important as the architecture”:  the invisible network surrounding the city is now as important as the city itself

Cyber mediation affects your directional decisions as much as physical architecture does:  “That which primarily conditions choice and action in the city is no longer physical … but resides in the invisible and intangible overlay of networked information that enfolds it.”

• The Long Here:

Layering a persistent and retrievable history of the things that are done and witnessed there over anyplace on Earth that can be specified with machine-readable coordinates.

Example given:  Oakland Crimespotting, a digital visualization/mapping of crimes that happened through time in specific places in Oakland, CA.  Thus “history is co-present with you,” everything that happened in that spot before is still there, and influences your decisions.

Greenfield posits that through such cognizance, we are developing a sixth, digital sense, that is beyond our five senses.

• Geo-tagging

Example given:  Sibelius monument in Helsinki, digital record of number of photographs taken.  Geo-tagging can give you a sense that you are part of a masse, can change your sensation of a place when you can feel yourself bound into the history of that experience.

• The Big Now:

Locally, making the total real-time option space of the city a present and tangible reality; globally, enhancing and deepening our sense of the world’s massive parallelism.

Gives us a sense of everything that is going on now and in our world, shows us the vastness of the possibility space

Example given:  Twitter feeds that tell us what all of our friends are doing on a Saturday night in NYC.  It is a visualization of all the things we could be doing, a spectrum of possible experiences being funneled to us.

When you add the possibility of networked objects being able to Twitter as well, or otherwise convey information to you, on top of the human behaviour of the city, that is the Big Now:  how you are plugged into that network of possibilities.

• While Greenfield sees the networked city and networked objects as a “generally happy thing,” he is cognizant of the potential for exclusion.

The Soft Wall:

Networked mechanisms intended to actively deny, delay or degrade the free use of space.

Greenfield is leery of “differential permissioning,” where some people have access, and others do not.  He cautions that since human nature almost needs wall-building, we need to be aware of space issues because human beings have a history of keeping people out.

“Networked walls are less amenable to hacking and dismantling as human walls/barriers are.”  Example given:  if a bouncer refuses you entry to a nightclub, you have potential to circumvent this denial of access—you can cajole, beg, bribe, distract, etc.   Digital walls are harder to work your way around (example of malfunctioning ballard).

• Networking the city in ways that can effect the way we live now:

Cabspotting via GPS  (San Francisco)

Air quality readings (Manhattan)

Real estate values (Manhattan)

The network overlay can help us interact with the city itself, when the info is there where you are (e.g., you choose to avoid the street where there are muggings)

• “addressable, scriptable, queryable surfaces”- potential for billboards in Times Square to “talk” to us.  Greenfield does note that this won’t necessarily be pleasant until we regulate, but it still shows a new way of being metropolitan

• Info-processing has the ability to dissolve and change norms and behaviour

Example given: Hong Kong subway, where the way women swipe their metro cards has changed their physical movements – and there is no obvious evidence of that networked interaction having taken place.

• The bottom line:

A city that responds to the behaviour of its residents and other users, in something like real time … underwriting the transition from browse urbanism to search urbanism.

• Greenfield:  A networked city’s greatest value is in becoming a place that is there for you to use, a city that you can compose to your liking

- Anu

Dan Hill is a British designer and “urbanist” based in Australia.  Here are some of the key ideas in his post “The Street As Platform”:

“So the more relevant question is how do the buildings and the rain of data interrelate?”

• “Informational systems are beginning to profoundly change the way our streets work, the way they are used, and the way they feel. This in itself presents a major challenge for the existing practice and vocabulary of planning.”
• Issues: openness, responsibility, privacy, security, interaction, experience.
• These issues will be decided by a scores of people ranging all manner of professions and private/public citizens
• car speeds and traffic management–loads of questions here brought about by new/now old (e.g. GPS) technologies
• “Are leasing or ownership models appropriate for the hardware and for the software?”–I love this question!
• “What is the power consumption of this street? As Buckminster Fuller might have said, “how much does this street weigh?””  Cool.
• Is he saying that by “dispersing the energy” of the street, we will reduce our dependence on oil?  and place a greater dependence on undersea cables?
• software models convey much of this data of the street exactly, but  say little about the “cultural memory of the street.”  This is his “tip of the iceberg” attempt at elucidation, as well as the locked and open street examples.
• Offers two examples by way of exploration:

The Locked Down Street:

• Government regulation will likely increase in an attempt to regulate the flow of information
• the more interesting area, he says, is social software where people give up their private information quite willingly
• still, a degree of consumer “regulation” comes into play in these scenarios (Facebook ad example)
• Information aggregation is often lost due to closed standards
• Still a struggle between closed systems and localization (He gives an example in the suggested reading about a guy trying to buy a U.S. book in the U.K. with no price comparison available on the site he’s checking.)
• “It might well mean a new multidisciplinary and holistic approach to the street.”

Open Source Street:

• “Just as good street planning might leave a space open to possibility, and not over-prescribe its program, so informational systems can leave themselves open to possibility.”
• Ponders the idea of open road signage and the need for standards
• the street as API, enabling massive generation and recombination
• Great grass patch worn down on the way to library example.  The data available on our street could be put to great use.  Scads of information is just sitting there.
• As with social software, sensors on the street could stand to be more transparent.  Showing the seams will engender more trust and use.
• Concludes by saying the reality of the street will be mixed–proprietary and open–and the complexity of the relationship between humans and technology, street and ether will continue to grow faster than we adapt, but we will keep trying.

Threads And Gripes for the Week

While Hill details a mother lode (ha,ha) of what’s happening now in terms of data flow on the digital street, he spends less time than the Picnic video regarding philosophical questions concerning humanity’s relationship to technology.  For this reason, as well as an issue of presentation, I felt the video was much more compelling.

This is not to say that I did not learn from the Hill piece–I did not know half of the data flows he described in the piece and the descriptions alone solicit questions (to be thrown at you in class).  However, his tip of the iceberg seemed too dull, too elongated.  The NPR clip I tagged gets many of the same points across in a much more interesting presentation.  Although I do love audio, I’m not generally biased against print/online reading.  Hill says he dashed the post off, and his spew is remarkably better than mine, but I longed for a professional editor here.

Both the reading and the video use the same gorgeous rain on Oxford St. quote.  Hill tries to describe the individual drops and how they hit or miss the buildings. Greenfield asks how do we use the rain?  He advocates for starting with people first, technology second.  Both approaches are worthy in the context of the digital street.  I just prefer to dream big so I dig Greenfield.

That being said, I thought a few of Greenfield’s examples did not follow his “how do people use technology, time, space” question.  The London bridge tweeting is amusing and uses real-time sensor data apparently, but I could go and observe the bridge myself and fictionalize it.  Someone is doing this right now with our Bobst library, as we know from Melissa’s travelogue.  The London bridge tweets are certainly reflective of a human imagination, but if we could do the same with old technologies (eyes and books, for example), this example makes me say so what?  It doesn’t really help us interact with the city in a new way, at least by his description.

I have a different beef with the Times Square billboard example where the signs tell us what we are doing in the moment.  Greenfield admits that this would not be pleasant, but suggests that it could represent a new definition of “metropolitan.”  These omniscient billboards seem to put technology first, not people thereby violating Greenfield’s stated, desired perspective. I’d call it “metrotechnician.”  Way to step on your own brilliant ideas there, Greenfield!  The Hong Kong subway example, however, is perfect-a seemingly frictionless, people centric marriage working today on the digital street.

I know you *have* to tell us, but what did you think of the reading/video, and how do you dream about the street?

(And now, a little something many of you have likely seen, to take us out into the everyware…)

http://www.vimeo.com/3924951

-Gorditamedia (Camille–that’s with a ‘C’ and two ‘l’s, Mushon ).

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