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December Tech Salon in New York: Mobiles + Art + Activism | MobileActive.org
Very interested in these two projects:
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Projects & artists to be showcased include:* PATHWAYS TO HOUSING INTERACTIVE VIDEO PROJECTION (Sarkissian Mason Design Agency) – A video installation asked passers-by to SMS for awareness about homelessness and donate to Pathways to Housing
* TXTUAL HEALING (Paul Notzold) – TXTual Healing contextualizes text messaging into user generated story telling, whether in public space or as an indoor installation.
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More on urban planning and social media/ input by the people:
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The NYC Dept of Transportation continues to re-imagine traffic throughout the city; employing a system of bike paths, street closings and new traffic alignments to create public space and make traffic safer and more efficient. The task was to imagine the public spaces created by the new traffic alignments, and design a language of street furniture and planting that helped to define the space. Before beginning to develop our design principles, the design team first had to ask, what should a public place be?The aim was to engage a wide audience in answering this question. Forty Dutch urban design students and their professors, landscape architect Erik de Jong and planner Arnold van der Valk, happened to be in town and were eager to discuss urban public space in the American context.
These young designers joined Balmori Associates staff and the client in a design discussion. The team also extended the conversation to a worldwide public through live video and twitter. The discussion touched on topics that including ecology, funding, furniture and materials, program, public/private, public amenities, scale, and circulation/traffic. In the Twitter forum, the discussion focused on sharable space, urban decorum, and contextual appropriateness. These topics helped us to develop our design principles.
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David Barrie: ‘Open source’ place-making
Lots of great ideas here:
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In its most naked form, ‘open source’ place-making is about taking a development site, establishing a very basic planning framework for it, triggering population of the site and then through its unfolding occupation form a forward plan for its development.(…)
A second dimension to open source place-making is to innovate the management of a neighbourhood, prioritise opportunities for tenants to benefit from short leases, self-build and self-management of the way in which they relate to buildings; also support different terms of trade and promote internal markets in goods and services on a barter basis – perhaps even follow a model by which tenants provide services-in-kind to external grant funders of a site, in lieu of rent.
(…)
…be a talent scout, recruit and capitalise upon its momentum.
On one level, ‘open source’ place-making is asking the development sector to open its mind up to a different way of thinking about design and site assembly: what tech people call interaction design.
Start to see physical space as a form of sovereign real estate – much like a web page – who’s personality unfolds through the involvement of users – and see activity on site as a sequence of what geeks call transient interrupts that develop, die or mutate in to profitable enterprises over time.
(…)
On another level, ‘open source’ place-making is a plea: to slim down bureaucracy, open up development to taking an equity stake in the customer and reflect the fact that in an internet economy, people are loyal to data and experience and ‘modal switch’ between platforms; what’s more, maximise opportunities to win a return on investment in certain markets or market-makers: such as social enterprise, independent retail, consumers who live in online, as well as offline spaces, and those who want autonomy.
(…)
urban development has wound right down, with producers and consumers of land either deleveraging or starved of bank credit.
You don’t need to be Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve to realise that in this climate, it might be profitable – as well as more effective – for the real estate and renewal sectors to follow people and their money more resolutely in to online and social markets, and start to behave like those markets.
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Very interesting: Urban planning as not-planning, informed by social media…?
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The rise of social enterprise prioritises human relationships and transactions of social, not just commercial value, says Barrie. ‘It shifts the narrative of renewal from the provision of space to services, with sites acting as places that enable change, rather than dictate them via a masterplan.’ Social productivity, he concludes, presses for a new narrative in urban development. Historically, it has been social networks that have made places.In online social networks, people have multiple independent groups of friends, often linked to family, shared experience and hobbies. Temporary ties are common-place. People rely upon the recommendation of friends to make decisions. Historically, these are drivers of human association with public space and it has been the physical public realm that has made a market in these relations.’
‘Increasingly, says Barrie, ‘minds copy the workings of the internet and flit sharply from one idea to another, addicted to the breadth of everything, rather than the depth of something This is at odds with one of the traditional functions of places and placemaking: to create fixed opportunities for human interactions and narrative. In this context, physical places start to look like either passing scenery or locations that host uses that enable people to fulfil a task.’
There is nothing new, he continues, about designing places that embrace the sociability and social value of business or human relations. ‘However, places that explicitly integrate the unfolding development of social ventures, or could be described as living rooms for a networked society, have been thin on the ground. ‘no doubt because of the risks associated with social enterprise paying rent, the failure to find a profitable operating model for municipal wi-fi, the perception of social business as a means of addressing market failure, rather than creating wealth’.
Approaches to urban development that seek to trigger or build networks of people and spaces, linking them in such a way as to provoke new civic or social enterprise and aggregate both physical assets and social capital, could well be more effective than traditional development approaches, says Barrie.
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WikiLeaks, Amazon and the new threat to internet speech – CNN.com
Excellent article by Rebecca MacKinnon, title self-explanatory.
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What is troubling and dangerous is that in the internet age, public discourse increasingly depends on digital spaces created, owned and operated by private companies. The result is that one politician has more power than ever to shut down controversial speech unilaterally with one phone call.
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See the Future with a Search – Technology Review
Sort of spooky, but simultaneously completely logical, the web is getting into predictive…
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This focus on the timeline sets Recorded Future apart from other firms trying to gain insights by mining news and other data, says Ipeirotis. “I’m curious to see when other text analytics firms will jump into the trend.”Recorded Future is about to expand its service to cover Arabic and Chinese sources. Making its indexes bigger is a major priority. “I’d like to be able to get in front of every piece of streaming data on the planet,” says Ahlberg.
As the databases covered by Recorded Future, General Sentiment, and others grow, more powerful types of analysis will become possible, says Skiena. “I’m currently working with social scientists on models to predict what the probability is that a person that gets few mentions today suddenly becomes very famous in the future, by looking back at years of past data,” he says.
UNQUOTEBe sure to check out the video demo of Recorded Future:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?gl=US&client=mv-google&hl=en&user=RecordedFuture#p/u/1/Un8toBItXdo
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