Entries from April 2015
Monday, April 27. 2015
BitTorrent launches its Maelstrom P2P Web Browser in a public beta | #decentralized
Note: we often complain on this blog about the centralization in progress (through the actions of corporations) within the "networked world", which is therefore less and less "horizontal" or distributed (and then more pyramidal, proprietary, etc.)
Here comes an interesting initiative by BitTorrent, following their previous distributed file storage/"cloud" system (Sync): a new browser, Maelstrom. This is interesting indeed, because instead of the "web image" --indexed web content-- being hosted in proprietary servers (i.e. the ones of Google), so as your browsing history and everything else, it seems that it will distribute this "web image" on as many "personal" devices as possible. Keeping it fully decentralized therefore. Well... let's wait and see, as the way it will really work has not been explained very well so far (we can speculate that the copy of the content will be distributed indeed, but we don't know much about their business model --what about the metadata aggregated by all the user's web searches and usages? this could still be centralized... Yet note even so they state that it will not be).
Undoubtedly, the BitTorrent architecture is an interesting one when it comes to speak about networked content and decentralization. Yet it is now also a big company... with several venture capital partners (including the ones of Facebook, Spotify, Dropbox, Jawbone, etc.). "Techno-capitalism" (as Eric Sadin names it) is unfortunately one of the biggest force of centralization and commodification. So this is a bit puzzling, but let's not be pessimistic and trust their words for now, until we don't?
Via TheNextWeb via Compouted·Blg
Back in December, we reported on the alpha for BitTorrent's Maelstrom, a browser that uses BitTorrent's P2P technology in order to place some control of the Web back in users' hands by eliminating the need for centralized servers.
Maelstrom is now in beta, bring it one step closer to official release. BitTorrent says more than 10,000 developers and 3,500 publishers signed up for the alpha, and it's using their insights to launch a more stable public beta.
Along with the beta comes the first set of developer tools for the browser, helping publishers and programmers to build their websites around Maelstrom's P2P technology. And they need to – Maelstrom can't decentralize the Internet if there isn't any native content for the platform.
It's only available on Windows at the moment but if you're interested and on Microsoft's OS, you can download the beta from BitTorrent now.
Posted by Patrick Keller in Culture & society, Interaction design, Science & technology at 10:27
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, data, interaction design, internet, privacy, profiling, science & technology, software
The Periodic Table of the Internet of (commodified) Things | #commodification #data #everything
Via CBinsights
Note: are you ready to see private companies commodify (even more) your body/home/everything? Then here comes the "periodic table" of the Internet of (every)Things, so to help you map the early actors. Expect to see this table (of companies/services) grow exponentially in the coming years, as this sounds like the new eldorado for large corporate profits.
In parallel, we should also say that there has never (?) been as many (?) structured and community driven, world-wide shared creation initiatives by designers, scientists, thinkers and so on. Could this end in some sort of conflict? ... But it seems that this is an important time when we'll really need to be careful about this, and support as much as we can counter-proposals to this sad, corporate only driven development and the fact that more and more "things" (feelings, speeches, bodies, organs, molecules, homes, ... public water, daylight, breathing air?) can become trading products.
It could probably end in the wrong shopping über mall if we don't!
Posted by Patrick Keller in Architecture, Culture & society, Interaction design, Science & technology at 22:08
Thursday, April 09. 2015
Corporate Dystopia: Liam Young Imagines a World in which Tech Companies Own Our Cities | #smart? #commodification
Via Archdaily
What if the manufacturers of the phones and social networks we cling to became the rulers of tomorrow's cities? Imagine a world in which every building in your neighborhood is owned by Samsung, entire regions are occupied by the ghosts of our digital selves, and cities spring up in international waters to house outsourced laborers. These are the worlds imagined by self-described speculative architect, Liam Young in his latest series of animations entitled "New City." Read on after the break to see all three animations and learn more about what's next in the series.
Viewers watching "The City in the Sea" at full size. Image Courtesy of Liam Young.
Liam Young's London-based think tank Tomorrow's Thoughts Today explores the "consequences of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms" through techniques of fiction and film, with extremely high definition animations accompanied by short stories written by Jeff Noon, Pat Cadigan and Tim Maughan. The imagery produced seeks to "help us explore the implications and consequences of emerging trends, technologies, and ecological conditions," exploring emerging trends across media, technology, and popular culture in order to exaggerate them and better understand our own world alongside our future. The think-tank is being developed as a model for an architectural practice informed by research and speculation as products in and of themselves rather than buildings as final products. Animation is often employed by the think tank, as Liam Young tells ArchDaily:
"The skyline animations have been developed to be shown as super large scale projections, larger than the body so the audience has to move across the panorama, inhabiting it as they would do a city or building. Each animation is loaded with detail so as each time it is watched you might discover something different. The scale of the projections mean you are able to fully immerse yourself in the imaginary city and consumed by the soundscape you can sit and read the short story set in the city."
From "Keeping up Appearances". Image Courtesy of Liam Young
This latest series epitomizes many of the goals of the think-tank by looking at cites on a macro-scale and exaggerating trends across various stages of industry. The animations produced in the series thus far focus mainly on the technology sector and take existing cities as precedents for an exploration of themes and subsequent social commentary. For example, in the animation entitled "Keeping Up Appearances" (see top video) a future city is imagined in which almost every visible sign in the urban skyline is an advertisement for Samsung and the glowing logo represents the ownership of that particular piece of real estate. Based on a phenomenon occurring in many South Korean cities in which Samsung has begun to move into property development, in this exaggerated scenario the idea of corporate entities as driving forces behind real-estate development and growth becomes disturbingly plausible, while highlighting the real-world fact that many corporations have revenues which surpass the GDP of some countries. Young comments:
"The branded skyline is just the most visible consequence of our gadget allegiances. What I am suggesting is that our relationships to technology are in fact generating entirely new forms of city, and new notions of place or site itself. Where we are in the world matters far less now than how we are connected and who we are connected to. We now see new forms of city generated around operating system choices, who we like on facebook, our twitter network and so on. I am much closer to my virtual community than I am to my physical neighbors. The network has allowed 'non state' actors to permeate every aspect of our lives."
The next video in the series, entitled "The City in the Sea," looks at the very real issue of outsourced labor and industrialized cities in the developing world. Taken to its extreme in this animation, the imagined city is completely detached from any kind of nationalistic identity and only exists to provide a corporate haven for manufacturers that is devoid of regulations and taxes. According to Young:
"The City in the Sea is a multicultural city collaged from photos taken on expeditions through the outsourcing territories of India and China. The floating corporate city is built on the Pacific Ocean garbage patch and drifts in international waters, outside of national labor laws to become a free trade zone supporting the mega companies based on land. It is a city that connects to a long tradition of free states, from the traditions of pirate utopias, islands that existed with their own laws and governance to the speculations of offshore data havens on the abandoned naval fort Sealand or Google's mysterious barges. We also see the same desires to escape jurisdiction playing out on land with the formation of special economic zones and free trade regions. These forms of territory are forcing us to reimagine what a border might mean in the age of the network."
The third video in the series takes on a much more ephemeral quality and symbolically represents an element that is vital to our everyday lives, yet invisible to most. The idea of our online identity has become increasingly tangible to anyone that uses Facebook or surfs the web. Each of us possesses vast amounts of important information that is stored in "the cloud" but this notion has very little physical connection to our lives. Most are probably not aware of where their data is stored, but it is usually held in large data banks in places such as the city of Prineville, Oregon. These unassuming cities hold some of the world's most sought after goods: personal identity stored digitally. Young also foresees data centers such as this as a new architectural frontier and describes its significance:
"This part of New City is built for machines, it is the physical landscape of the cloud, our generation's cultural landscape. I am really interested in what these physical sites of the internet actually mean, they are a completely new cultural typology and architects need to take the data center on as a project. Is the internet a place to visit, are they sites of pilgrimage, spaces of congregation to be inhabited like a church on Sundays? Would we ever want to go and meet our digital selves, to gaze across server racks, and watch us winking back, in a million LEDs of Facebook blue? Every age has its iconic architectural typology. The dream commission was once the church, Modernism had the factory, then the house, in the recent decade we had the 'starchitect' museum and gallery. Now we have the data centre, the next forum for architectural culture."
"The City in the Sea" on display at full size. Image Courtesy of Liam Young.
It is clear that the technology sector has already played a transformative role in our global economy, and Liam Young's work gives us a glimpse at how technology may finally influence our built world. By illustrating these potential future scenarios and exaggerating them, Young opens a platform for discussion on how to take control of our own built world. But what is next in the series? What other pressing cultural issues require attention if we are to understand our built environment? Young tells ArchDaily:
"I am interested in continuing to look at the new types of 'city' that are emerging out of the network. Cities are increasingly being designed not for the people that occupy them but for the technologies and algorithms that are being built to understand them and manage them. Cities developed based around the logic of machine vision, satellite sight lines, Wi-Fi weather systems and so on are all of interest. These technologies are fundamentally changing what cities mean and these types of speculative projects are critical to play out possible scenarios for discussion."
Viewers watching "Keeping Up Appearances" at full size. Image Courtesy of Liam Young
Readers can view all three animations accompanied with short stories by Jeff Noon, Pat Cadigan and Tim Maughan, at Liam Young's Vimeo profile.
Tomorrow's Thoughts Today
Posted by Patrick Keller in Architecture, Culture & society, Science & technology at 10:00
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, brand, city, commodification, culture & society, research, science & technology, speculation, urbanism
The truth about smart cities: 'In the end, they will destroy democracy' | #smart?
Via The Guardian
By Steven Poole
Songdo in South Korea: a 'smart city' whose roads and water, waste and electricity systems are dense with electronic sensors. Photograph: Hotaik Sung/Alamy.
A woman drives to the outskirts of the city and steps directly on to a train; her electric car then drives itself off to park and recharge. A man has a heart attack in the street; the emergency services send a drone equipped with a defibrillator to arrive crucial minutes before an ambulance can. A family of flying maintenance robots lives atop an apartment block – able to autonomously repair cracks or leaks and clear leaves from the gutters.
Such utopian, urban visions help drive the "smart city" rhetoric that has, for the past decade or so, been promulgated most energetically by big technology, engineering and consulting companies. The movement is predicated on ubiquitous wireless broadband and the embedding of computerised sensors into the urban fabric, so that bike racks and lamp posts, CCTV and traffic lights, as well as geeky home appliances such as internet fridges and remote-controlled heating systems, become part of the so-called "internet of things" (the global market for which is now estimated at $1.7tn). Better living through biochemistry gives way to a dream of better living through data. You can even take an MSc in Smart Cities at University College, London.
Yet there are dystopian critiques, too, of what this smart city vision might mean for the ordinary citizen. The phrase itself has sparked a rhetorical battle between techno-utopianists and postmodern flâneurs: should the city be an optimised panopticon, or a melting pot of cultures and ideas?
And what role will the citizen play? That of unpaid data-clerk, voluntarily contributing information to an urban database that is monetised by private companies? Is the city-dweller best visualised as a smoothly moving pixel, travelling to work, shops and home again, on a colourful 3D graphic display? Or is the citizen rightfully an unpredictable source of obstreperous demands and assertions of rights? "Why do smart cities offer only improvement?" asks the architect Rem Koolhaas. "Where is the possibility of transgression?"
Smart beginnings: a crowd watches as new, automated traffic lights are erected at Ludgate Circus, London, in 1931. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images
The smart city concept arguably dates back at least as far as the invention of automated traffic lights, which were first deployed in 1922 in Houston, Texas. Leo Hollis, author of Cities Are Good For You, says the one unarguably positive achievement of smart city-style thinking in modern times is the train indicator boards on the London Underground. But in the last decade, thanks to the rise of ubiquitous internet connectivity and the miniaturisation of electronics in such now-common devices as RFID tags, the concept seems to have crystallised into an image of the city as a vast, efficient robot – a vision that originated, according to Adam Greenfield at LSE Cities, with giant technology companies such as IBM, Cisco and Software AG, all of whom hoped to profit from big municipal contracts.
"The notion of the smart city in its full contemporary form appears to have originated within these businesses," Greenfield notes in his 2013 book Against the Smart City, "rather than with any party, group or individual recognised for their contributions to the theory or practice of urban planning."
Whole new cities, such as Songdo in South Korea, have already been constructed according to this template. Its buildings have automatic climate control and computerised access; its roads and water, waste and electricity systems are dense with electronic sensors to enable the city's brain to track and respond to the movement of residents. But such places retain an eerie and half-finished feel to visitors – which perhaps shouldn't be surprising. According to Antony M Townsend, in his 2013 book Smart Cities, Songdo was originally conceived as "a weapon for fighting trade wars"; the idea was "to entice multinationals to set up Asian operations at Songdo … with lower taxes and less regulation".
In India, meanwhile, prime minister Narendra Modi has promised to build no fewer than 100 smart cities – a competitive response, in part, to China's inclusion of smart cities as a central tenet of its grand urban plan. Yet for the near-term at least, the sites of true "smart city creativity" arguably remain the planet's established metropolises such as London, New York, Barcelona and San Francisco. Indeed, many people think London is the smartest city of them all just now — Duncan Wilson of Intel calls it a "living lab" for tech experiments.
So what challenges face technologists hoping to weave cutting-edge networks and gadgets into centuries-old streets and deeply ingrained social habits and patterns of movement? This was the central theme of the recent "Re.Work Future Cities Summit" in London's Docklands – for which two-day public tickets ran to an eye-watering £600.
The event was structured like a fast-cutting series of TED talks, with 15-minute investor-friendly presentations on everything from "emotional cartography" to biologically inspired buildings. Not one non-Apple-branded laptop could be spotted among the audience, and at least one attendee was seen confidently sporting the telltale fat cyan arm of Google Glass on his head.
"Instead of a smart phone, I want you all to have a smart drone in your pocket," said one entertaining robotics researcher, before tossing up into the auditorium a camera-equipped drone that buzzed around like a fist-sized mosquito. Speakers enthused about the transport app Citymapper, and how the city of Zurich is both futuristic and remarkably civilised. People spoke about the "huge opportunity" represented by expanding city budgets for technological "solutions".
Usman Haque's project Thingful is billed as a 'search engine for the internet of things'
Strikingly, though, many of the speakers took care to denigrate the idea of the smart city itself, as though it was a once-fashionable buzzphrase that had outlived its usefulness. This was done most entertainingly by Usman Haque, of the urban consultancy Umbrellium. The corporate smart-city rhetoric, he pointed out, was all about efficiency, optimisation, predictability, convenience and security. "You'll be able to get to work on time; there'll be a seamless shopping experience, safety through cameras, et cetera. Well, all these things make a city bearable, but they don't make a city valuable."
As the tech companies bid for contracts, Haque observed, the real target of their advertising is clear: "The people it really speaks to are the city managers who can say, 'It wasn't me who made the decision, it was the data.'"
Of course, these speakers who rejected the corporate, top-down idea of the smart city were themselves demonstrating their own technological initiatives to make the city, well, smarter. Haque's project Thingful, for example, is billed as a search engine for the internet of things. It could be used in the morning by a cycle commuter: glancing at a personalised dashboard of local data, she could check local pollution levels and traffic, and whether there are bikes in the nearby cycle-hire rack.
"The smart city was the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people," suggested Dan Hill, of urban innovators the Future Cities Catapult. "It never answered the question: 'How is it tangibly, materially going to affect the way people live, work, and play?'" (His own work includes Cities Unlocked, an innovative smartphone audio interface that can help visually impaired people navigate the streets.) Hill is involved with Manchester's current smart city initiative, which includes apparently unglamorous things like overhauling the Oxford Road corridor – a bit of "horrible urban fabric". This "smart stuff", Hill tells me, "is no longer just IT – or rather IT is too important to be called IT any more. It's so important you can't really ghettoise it in an IT city. A smart city might be a low-carbon city, or a city that's easy to move around, or a city with jobs and housing. Manchester has recognised that."
One take-home message of the conference seemed to be that whatever the smart city might be, it will be acceptable as long as it emerges from the ground up: what Hill calls "the bottom-up or citizen-led approach". But of course, the things that enable that approach – a vast network of sensors amounting to millions of electronic ears, eyes and noses – also potentially enable the future city to be a vast arena of perfect and permanent surveillance by whomever has access to the data feeds.
Inside Rio de Janeiro's centre of operations: 'a high-precision control panel for the entire city'. Photograph: David Levene
One only has to look at the hi-tech nerve centre that IBM built for Rio de Janeiro to see this Nineteen Eighty-Four-style vision already alarmingly realised. It is festooned with screens like a Nasa Mission Control for the city. As Townsend writes: "What began as a tool to predict rain and manage flood response morphed into a high-precision control panel for the entire city." He quotes Rio's mayor, Eduardo Paes, as boasting: "The operations centre allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
What's more, if an entire city has an "operating system", what happens when it goes wrong? The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. The smart city, according to Hollis, is really just a "perpetual beta city". We can be sure that accidents will happen – driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole transport subsystems or the electricity grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How smart will the architects of the smart city look then?
A less intrusive way to make a city smarter might be to give those who govern it a way to try out their decisions in virtual reality before inflicting them on live humans. This is the idea behind city-simulation company Simudyne, whose projects include detailed computerised models for planning earthquake response or hospital evacuation. It's like the strategy game SimCity – for real cities. And indeed Simudyne now draws a lot of its talent from the world of videogames. "When we started, we were just mathematicians," explains Justin Lyon, Simudyne's CEO. "People would look at our simulations and joke that they were inscrutable. So five or six years ago we developed a new system which allows you to make visualisations – pretty pictures." The simulation can now be run as an immersive first-person gameworld, or as a top-down SimCity-style view, where "you can literally drop policy on to the playing area".
Another serious use of "pretty pictures" is exemplified by the work of ScanLAB Projects, which uses Lidar and ground-penetrating radar to make 3D visualisations of real places. They can be used for art installations and entertainment: for example, mapping underground ancient Rome for the BBC. But the way an area has been used over time, both above and below ground, can also be presented as a layered historical palimpsest, which can serve the purposes of archaeological justice and memory – as with ScanLAB's Living Death Camps project with Forensic Architecture, on two concentration-camp sites in the former Yugoslavia.
The former German pavilion at Staro Sajmište, Belgrade – produced from terrestrial laser scanning and ground-penetrating radar as part of the Living Death Camps project. Photograph: ScanLAB Projects
For Simudyne's simulations, meanwhile, the visualisations work to "gamify" the underlying algorithms and data, so that anyone can play with the initial conditions and watch the consequences unfold. Will there one day be convergence between this kind of thing and the elaborately realistic modelled cities that are built for commercial videogames? "There's absolutely convergence," Lyon says. A state-of-the art urban virtual reality such as the recreation of Chicago in this year's game Watch Dogs requires a budget that runs to scores of millions of dollars. But, Lyon foresees, "Ten years from now, what we see in Watch Dogs today will be very inexpensive."
What if you could travel through a visually convincing city simulation wearing the VR headset, Oculus Rift? When Lyon first tried one, he says, "Everything changed for me." Which prompts the uncomfortable thought that when such simulations are indistinguishable from the real thing (apart from the zero possibility of being mugged), some people might prefer to spend their days in them. The smartest city of the future could exist only in our heads, as we spend all our time plugged into a virtual metropolitan reality that is so much better than anything physically built, and fail to notice as the world around us crumbles.
In the meantime, when you hear that cities are being modelled down to individual people – or what in the model are called "agents" – you might still feel a jolt of the uncanny, and insist that free-will makes your actions in the city unpredictable. To which Lyon replies: "They're absolutely right as individuals, but collectively they're wrong. While I can't predict what you are going to do tomorrow, I can have, with some degree of confidence, a sense of what the crowd is going to do, what a group of people is going to do. Plus, if you're pulling in data all the time, you use that to inform the data of the virtual humans.
"Let's say there are 30 million people in London: you can have a simulation of all 30 million people that very closely mirrors but is not an exact replica of London. You have the 30 million agents, and then let's have a business-as-usual normal commute, let's have a snowstorm, let's shut down a couple of train lines, or have a terrorist incident, an earthquake, and so on." Lyons says you will get a highly accurate sense of how people, en masse, will respond to these scenarios. "While I'm not interested in a specific individual, I'm interested in the emergent behaviour of the crowd."
City-simulation company Simudyne creates computerised models 'with pretty pictures' to aid disaster-response planning
But what about more nefarious bodies who are interested in specific individuals? As citizens stumble into a future where they will be walking around a city dense with sensors, cameras and drones tracking their every movement – even whether they are smiling (as has already been tested at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival) or feeling gloomy – there is a ticking time-bomb of arguments about surveillance and privacy that will dwarf any previous conversations about Facebook or even, perhaps, government intelligence agencies scanning our email. Unavoidable advertising spam everywhere you go, as in Minority Report, is just the most obvious potential annoyance. (There have already been "smart billboards" that recognised Minis driving past and said hello to them.) The smart city might be a place like Rio on steroids, where you can never disappear.
"If you have a mobile phone, and the right sensors are deployed across the city, people have demonstrated the ability to track those individual phones," Lyon points out. "And there's nothing that would prevent you from visualising that movement in a SimCity-like landscape, like in Watch Dogs where you see an avatar moving through the city and you can call up their social-media profile. If you're trying to search a very large dataset about how someone's moving, it's very hard to get your head around it, but as soon as you fire up a game-style visualisation, it's very easy to see, 'Oh, that's where they live, that's where they work, that's where their mistress must be, that's where they go to drink a lot.'"
This is potentially an issue with open-data initiatives such as those currently under way in Bristol and Manchester, which is making publicly available the data it holds about city parking, procurement and planning, public toilets and the fire service. The democratic motivation of this strand of smart-city thinking seems unimpugnable: the creation of municipal datasets is funded by taxes on citizens, so citizens ought to have the right to use them. When presented in the right way – "curated", if you will, by the city itself, with a sense of local character – such information can help to bring "place back into the digital world", says Mike Rawlinson of consultancy City ID, which is working with Bristol on such plans.
But how safe is open data? It has already been demonstrated, for instance, that the openly accessible data of London's cycle-hire scheme can be used to track individual cyclists. "There is the potential to see it all as Big Brother," Rawlinson says. "If you're releasing data and people are reusing it, under what purpose and authorship are they doing so?" There needs, Hill says, to be a "reframed social contract".
The interface of Simudyne's City Hospital EvacSim
Sometimes, at least, there are good reasons to track particular individuals. Simudyne's hospital-evacuation model, for example, needs to be tied in to real data. "Those little people that you see [on screen], those are real people, that's linking to the patient database," Lyon explains – because, for example, "we need to be able to track this poor child that's been burned." But tracking everyone is a different matter: "There could well be a backlash of people wanting literally to go off-grid," Rawlinson says. Disgruntled smart citizens, unite: you have nothing to lose but your phones.
In truth, competing visions of the smart city are proxies for competing visions of society, and in particular about who holds power in society. "In the end, the smart city will destroy democracy," Hollis warns. "Like Google, they'll have enough data not to have to ask you what you want."
You sometimes see in the smart city's prophets a kind of casual assumption that politics as we know it is over. One enthusiastic presenter at the Future Cities Summit went so far as to say, with a shrug: "Internet eats everything, and internet will eat government." In another presentation, about a new kind of "autocatalytic paint" for street furniture that "eats" noxious pollutants such as nitrous oxide, an engineer in a video clip complained: "No one really owns pollution as a problem." Except that national and local governments do already own pollution as a problem, and have the power to tax and regulate it. Replacing them with smart paint ain't necessarily the smartest thing to do.
And while some tech-boosters celebrate the power of companies such as Über – the smartphone-based unlicensed-taxi service now banned in Spain and New Delhi, and being sued in several US states – to "disrupt" existing transport infrastructure, Hill asks reasonably: "That Californian ideology that underlies that user experience, should it really be copy-pasted all over the world? Let's not throw away the idea of universal service that Transport for London adheres to."
Perhaps the smartest of smart city projects needn't depend exclusively – or even at all – on sensors and computers. At Future Cities, Julia Alexander of Siemens nominated as one of the "smartest" cities in the world the once-notorious Medellin in Colombia, site of innumerable gang murders a few decades ago. Its problem favelas were reintegrated into the city not with smartphones but with publicly funded sports facilities and a cable car connecting them to the city. "All of a sudden," Alexander said, "you've got communities interacting" in a way they never had before. Last year, Medellin – now the oft-cited poster child for "social urbanism" – was named the most innovative city in the world by the Urban Land Institute.
One sceptical observer of many presentations at the Future Cities Summit, Jonathan Rez of the University of New South Wales, suggests that "a smarter way" to build cities "might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team." That would certainly be one way to acquire a better understanding of what technologists call the "end user" – in this case, the citizen. After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeare's Coriolanus: "What is the city but the people?"
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, automation, computing, culture & society, data, interaction design, monitoring, science & technology, surveillance, urbanism
fabric | rblg
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
April '15
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