Friday, November 11, 2011
The Space and Culture Blog- worth a visit!
WiFi Measuring Rods, Oslo School of Architecture
Making WiFi Visible - Network City
Robert Shields, 10/6/11
Note: The above post provides a link to Making 'Immaterials: Light painting WiFi', a post written by Einar Sneve Martinussen the YOUrban blog. YOUrban is a research project at the Institute of Design within the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Sound, Space and the City
Catherine Scheelar, 10/10/11
Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles
"In Sound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson explores the processes-from urban renewal to the performance of ethnicity and the experiences of audiences--through which civic space is created at music performances in downtown Los Angeles."
Mapping Flickr Photos and Twitter Tweets
Rob Shields, 7/20/11
RELATED/SOMEWHAT RELATED
Cognitive Cities Conference
Adam Greenfield's Presentation
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The Transdisciplinary Design Approach to Building an Interfaced World: A smattering of ideas, food for further thought
I've noticed that number of research and commercial projects incorporate ideas from a variety of disciplines, and this trans-disciplinary approach has been the topic of a recent assortment of articles, presentations, and blog-posts:
Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries in Interaction Design
Eli Blevis and Erik Stolterman, Indiana University at Bloomington, Human Computer Interaction Design Group
In this article, Blevis and Stolterman, both discuss "issues of and distinctions between notions of disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity.", and explain why Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interaction design are transdisciplinary.
"HCI and interaction design are in a unique position to make a real change and to address some of the most urgent issues of our time. We can't let issues of collaboration and disciplinary complications stand in the way of our attempts to serve these societal goals".
The Transmedia Design Challenge: Co-Creation
Don Norman
"There is another side of this new transmedia: co-development, co-creation, co-ownership. In this new world, we all produce, we all share, we all enjoy. Teacher and student learn together achieving new understanding. Reader and writer create together. Game player and game developer work together. This is the age of creativity, where everyone can participate. Everyone can be a designer. Everyone can be involved."
"The new design challenge is to create true participatory designs coupled with true multi-media immersion that reveal new insights and create true novel experiences. We all participate, we all experience. We all design, we all partake. But much of this is meaningless: how do we provide richness and depth, enhanced through the active engagement of all, whether they be the originators or the recipients of the experience?"
Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, recently wrote a blog post on a somewhat related note, Toward urban systems design. Although Adam speaks of urban design, Don Norman's ideas about encouraging the active engagement of everyone in the design process hold true.
Included in Adam's lengthily post is the abstract of one of his upcoming talks:
"The networked objects which are increasingly populating our lives and our cities already generate torrential, unceasing volumes of data about our whereabouts, activities, and even our intentions. How can we ensure that this data is used for the equal benefit of all? What provisions regarding such objects should citizens demand of their municipal governments? How might the juridical order respond most productively to the presence of these new urban actors?"
Adam goes on to describe what he's conceptualizing: "...it’s an attempt to use the appearance of networked informatics in our cities to argue a much larger point: that our times and circumstances call for a conscious art and craft of urban systems design."
Urban systems design. Who owns this domain?
Urban planners? Architects? The mobile phone companies? The Digital Out of Home folks? Google? Clear Channel?
Adam explains that his vision of urban systems design "....would have to be able to model the role of all the interdependent actors involved in producing urbanity: from institutional and technological to climatological, animal and microbial. (The networked informatic systems I’m most personally concerned with would of course be numbered among these actors.)"
An example of a company that fits Adam's vision is Stamen Design "Big ideas worth pursuing" Stamen focuses on interactive design and data visualization projects. It was founded by Eric Rodenbeck in 2001, and later added partners Michal Migurski and Shawn Allen. They address a the needs of a very broad range of clients, and their transdisciplinary approach supports their ability to see the big picture and the details, and all of the relationships in-between.
Adam also mentions the work of Paul M. Torrens, who is an associate professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, at Arizona State University. Dr. Torren's work is featured in the video below. The video + text was taken from BlipTV. The presentation was part of the 2008 O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference.
Modeling crowd behavior
"Paul Torrens (Arizona State University)--Ambient crowds are the new distributed computing platform. Smart mobs are fashioning new architectures for social networking. Armed with cell phones and mobile gaming devices, they are the new business model for location-based services. Seditious crowds are creating havoc in urban theaters of war and at global economic forums. Crowds of shoppers, endowed with smart chip credit cards and RFID tagged merchandise are trailed by long-lasting data shadows that follow them ubiquitously. Embedded in urban infrastructure and in the very products we consume, new technologies are emerging to enable cities to think about—and process—the people that pulse through them, with a burgeoning code-space being developed to capture the actions and interactions of individuals within large dynamic crowds. This presentation will focus on our recent research work in developing models of crowd behavior and their application to theory-building and scenario evaluation in the contexts just described. We have developed a reusable modeling platform for constructing large simulations of individual and collective behavior in dense urban environments. The simulations are developed with individual agents, equipped with geospatial AI that allows them to perceive and react to their evolving surroundings with an incredible level of behavioral realism. These agents are also capable of social and antisocial interactions. The simulation architecture is coupled to Geographic Information Systems, allowing for a suite of geospatial analytics and data-mining to be performed, across a wide array of scenarios. Moreover, the models have been developed as realistic 4D immersive environments with unprecedented levels of graphical realism."
At any rate, I haven't digested all that I've put out here in this post. I will return to this topic in the future.
RELATED
Transdisciplinary Design Approach: An Experimental Model to Project-based Teaching and Creative Problem Solving pdf Tatjana LeBlank
Rethinking Interdisciplinarity Helga Nowotny
SOMEWHAT RELATED
O'Reilly Where 2.0 2009
Location-based services, a historical view: "Look! A Map"
(I especially like the interactive map.)
Geography of the Stimulus Package -- from Stat to Stories
John Frank and John Seratts, from MetaCarta
The Emerging Geo-Web (video)
GeoEye
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Technology in Public Spaces: Piano Stairs in a Public Transit Station
What would you do if you came across this in a public transit station?
What if you were in a hurry, and the other people were not?
It is the topic of a small debate.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Adam Greenfield's Encounter with Fashionable Urban Screens: "jnd: An emergent vocabulary of form for urban screens"
If you follow Adam Greenfield, you know that he's the go-to guy when it comes to off-the-desktop, ubiquitous technologies. He has his doubts about street-level screens, but I think he has changed his mind.
Curious?
Take a look at Adam's recent post, jnd: An emergent vocabulary of form for urban screens and watch the two videos Adam posted, which I've embedded below:
If you take the time to read Greenfield's entire post, you'll appreciate his thoughts. Here's a quote that echo's the late Mark Weiser's vision of "calm technology":
"I found myself paying the H&M ads an inordinate amount of attention. Because the images’ figural elements evolve so glacially against a stable background, they’d found my cognitive sweet spot, that precise interval at the threshold of visual perception that makes you ask yourself: Wait, did that just change? What part of it? And I minded not at all. (In fact, I found it kind of calming. There’s a word you certainly don’t hear every day in the context of advertising.)"
Be sure to read the comments posted on Adam Greenfield's blog.
RELATED
Clear Channel has the contract for the Helsinki Screens
Hot Clear Channel Screens In Cold Helsinki - DailyDOOH
Clear Channel Outdoor Renews Long-Term Contract To Provide Outdoor Advertising For City of Helsinki
Speedbird (Adam Greenfield's blog)
Adam Greenfield is Nokia's head of design direction for user interface and services. He's the author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing (one of my most favorite textbooks ever).
Designing Calm Technology (Mark Weiser, John Seely Brown, 12/21/95)
SOMEWHAT RELATED
The Computer for the 21st Century" - Scientific American Special Issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks, September, 1991
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Trends: New interfaces and new interactions for computing and technology: Link to an article from The Economist
If you are interested in emerging technologies, ubiquitous computing, interface/interaction design, and topics related to usability and user-centered design, a recent article in the Technology Quarterly of The Economist, "The Trouble with Computers" provides a good overview of problems and solutions. The article quotes experts such as Adam Greenfield, the author of "Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing".
My favorite quotes from the article:
"Its an interface designed by engineers for engineers" - Adam Greenfield, on the Nokia 6680 mobile phone.
"...computer programmers and engineers....are often guilty of designing complicated systems packed with too many features...There's a point where humanity just can't handle it." -Steven Kyffin, senior researcher at Philips.
"Ease of use is one area where technology firms can differentiate themselves and gain competitive advantage" --The Economist
"Making computers simpler to use will require more than novel input devices. Smarter software is needed, too." --The Economist
The article goes on to discuss touch screens, gesture-aware interfaces, and context-aware devices and applications.
