New Scientist reports on a breathtakingly exciting development - 'writing' messages in the air via GPS technology i.e. pinning a digital informational note to a piece of physical space. Imagine the data i/o the City of London right now, but it's effectively imperceptible in the physical infrastructure. This makes this layer of the city detectable/usable. Aren't we talking a potentially incredible development in urban form here? Recall the great Archigram quote (Peter Cook?): "When it rains in Oxford Street, the architecture is no more significant than the rain" - this extends architecture into a world of clouds, storms, rain - but of information ...
Also, from my p-o-v, the information design challenge to end them all. We thought the Web was tricky:
"But the prospect of every place on Earth being crammed with invisible electronic notes, questions and suggestions (and maybe even graffiti) conjures the spectre of an information traffic jam as big as cyberspace itself: what happens if 10 million people are using all of these devices in the same country at the same time? Crouch isn't unduly worried. There are open questions about scaling up the prototype systems, he admits, but the new messaging technology is grounded in current Web technology. It creates no new problems, it just taps into the old questions of how to design and manage a growing infrastructure for the Web. It is largely a question of managing hardware and being very careful about balancing loads between servers. "It's a challenge, but it all seems feasible," Crouch says."Well, I'm as optimistic as the next early adopter, but this design 'problem' is already blowing my mind. Just imagine walking through a dense cloud of text messages and homepages? More on HP's CoolTown project [via Chris Jones - thanks!]
