cityofsound

UpTheirStreet

Tom Coates reveals what he's been working on: UpMyStreet Conversations. Which looks really good. A series of networked communities linked around physical place. Good luck to it.

But something in the following excerpt from Tom's post sparks a parallel thought. Tom wrote:

"(P)eople in cities are talking less and less to one another. In fact most of us barely communicate with our neighbours at all. And the vast majority of the social spaces that we all used to share have been dismantled or evaporated. So how can we expect communities self-organise? And how are they expected to join together politically? How can they protest about problems where they live?"

This is in no way a criticism of UpMyStreet, or Tom, or even that quote, which must certainly have some truth in it. But just an observation ... that people in cities are also increasingly talking to each other using new technologies. Research I did into social/cultural/business networks in Manchester's creative industries indicated this; as did research in New York's (then so-called) Silicon Alley, where the vast proportion of email traffic was effectively 'across the street', or even 'across the hallway/office'. Of course they're particular information-adept communities, but many of those older social networks still do exist, and are increasing via tech. UpMyStreet is further adding to them. It just seemed a mistake to suggest that all communication was being eroded in cities ...

The research I did was part of work at MIPC I've mentioned before. A while back, Justin O'Connor (director of MIPC) was quoted in an Observer article around this idea that cities are becoming bereft of neighbourly communication, throwing an interesting slant on the idea of neighbours and why some prefer the physical anonymity afforded by the city, combined with virtual presence in informational networks around that city:

"...(H)e added that the results might also mirror a shift in how city dwellers build their social networks. 'We now have so many connections through email, text and even travel, that we build up for ourselves a strong network but it is not local. Many people choose to live in cities to reinvent themselves. They want to get away from the curtain-twitching and everyone-knowing-who-you-are kind of mentality and they really do not care for a close-knit community knocking on their front door.'"

The Observer: Bleak Brum is Britain's friendliest city

A Hundred Years From Now

Also just found this beautiful Collection of Aeronautical Sheet Music (another fabulous part of the Smithsonian) including this wondrous picture of the future. If only ...

[via Pete Marsh - thanks!]

CranePorn

Just found this. CranePorn.org

"craneporn.org ... is a collection of photographs of cranes ... I find cranes, especially tower cranes, to have a strange sort of beauty. The sharp vertical and horizontal lines combined with the contrast between the implied strength and the skeletal, ephemeral quality they have makes them worth my time photographing them."

[via Cormac - thanks!]

Music Metadata Apps

Tom Coates suggests an app to add to LazyWebCorp's Q1 2003 milestones - an "ID3alizer" that would enable you to batch process a lot of that pesky tag-adding we've been discussing here recently. Sounds like it might work nicely as a brute-force, lo-fi (cheap!) alternative (or precursor) to the collaborative-expert-based service I outlined previously. Would do some of the job - if it can automatically identify the track accurately (which seems to be getting easier these days, plus as Tom says, you tend to have some of the data but not a coherent, complete, usable set). Then we need something to infer the more complex metadata around music ... perhaps an extension of CDDB/FreeDB to include more information, which in turn could pull in metadata from the likes of The Covers Project, for example (which I note is going from strength to strength).

On this subject, Ben Magnetbox commented on my previous post, pointing out that the Mixmatcher project he'd worked on is very much open to ideas as to future development. He said:

"Mixmatcher is being worked on, but slightly dormant as well ... I would like it to become something more (or less?); something extremely useful behind the scenes, with just enough use and entertainment to keep people using it. I am extremely open to ideas as to how to accomplish that task, so please e-mail me if you have any ideas. Should it become like a CDDB of metadata? How do you make people want to enter in all that information?"

As the man says, email him - also feel free to post comments here. Perhaps we can come up with something.

Archigram World Rally

"The surviving members of Archigram, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Michael Webb Webb and Peter Cook will be presented with the Royal Gold Medal of the RIBA in November 2002. Honoured though they are by this, they prefer to augment the two evenings of performance by themselves at the RIBA by creating a wider celebratory event: much in the ARCHIGRAM tradition"

18-28 November, London. More details at Archinect.

iPod's Tired :( iPod's Ready :)

There are few things more crushingly soul-destroying than picking up your iPod on the way out the door, hitting play, nestling your headphones in your ears only to the hear the sound of .... nothing. As it's run out of juice. Happened this morning. Oh, and has anyone anywhere ever got near 10 hours of use out of one?

So wouldn't it better if the iPod's design more obviously communicated its status i.e. if you could tell at a glance that it was tired.

If the iPod had the shape and coloured-screen characteristics of Fukasawa's phones and glowed a particular colour and shape in order to communicate information about its status i.e. if we build on the idea of the fake 'breathing' that the TiBook/iMac does when in sleep mode, and really give it some useful behavioural characteristics. If the whole thing changed colour to grey or reddy-orange when running out of power; or the screen and touchscreen-wheel glowed a healthy green or white, to indicate that it had plenty of battery-life. Or deployed large emoticons. Or all these things.

The current power-indicator is too small, too variable, too abstract, and too invisible at a distance. This kind of information could be communicated by visible behaviour:

Now you know why I don't work with Jonathan Ive, but you see what I'm getting at.

Design for Ubiquitous People

Adam Greenfield's v-2 gets a redesign ... one of the smarter sites around just got smarter. As are his design notes on the project - honest, humble, but smart. As ever, the major achievements are invisible ("fully XHTML1.0- and CSS-validating, Section 508-compliant, RSS-feed-equipped, text-resizable" etc.), which leads us on to ...

Adam points to a startling representation of the digital divide in NYC, indicating wireless access points cutting off above 110th St. Sobering stuff.

But he also writes a quite brilliant piece around his experiences at the Ubicomp 2002,

Adam picks up a theme he'd previously mentioned, based around Matthew Chalmers' notion of seamfulness, which I'd meant to report on here but just ran out of time. Adam plays this idea (of making connections visible) off against that of Naoto Fukasawa's "design dissolving in behaviour" (although I'm not sure they're that oppositional/unconnected - and I'd guess Adam isn't either. Fukasawa asks for "not leaving traces of the designer" which is not necessarily the opposite of Chalmers talking of "seamful systems (with beautiful seams)" and suggesting that we'd better explore such approaches before heading for seamlessness by default. The system shows its seams, where necessary/useful/enlightening, rather than the designers showing theirs, perhaps). [Seamful Ubiquity wiki]

What Adam fundamentally reminds us is that we design for real human beings (not personae, no matter how good they are). Relating his (positive) experience with a real people's stories (True Tales of American Life), we could equally look at (negative) warnings that no matter how good our systems are in abstract, we're building for real people e.g. "two-thirds of commuters at London's Victoria Station were happy to reveal their computer password in return for a ballpoint pen." [as reported in The Economist recently - req. registration, possibly not free]

I'd rather accentuate the positive side of heterogeneity too though ... Either way, a real understanding of individual people is more relevant than ever, given the challenges and opportunities of ubiquitous computing. Last word to Adam:

"Thankfully, real ubiquitous computation arrives at a moment when we have the formal and methodological ability to account for this variability and imperfection. We've learned, the hard way, that ethnographic studies and contextual inquiry and repeated rounds of user testing improve our designs immeasurably, by forcing us out of the position of godlike arrogance we tend to adopt as designers (frequently without noticing) and into a more collegial relationship with the people we build systems for."

[v-2: Ubiquitously Yours]

Structure of Feeling

In the paper Cottonopolis and Culture, thanks to my co-writer Justin O'Connor's insight, we began to wrestle with Raymond Williams' idea of "structure of feeling". I then stopped being part-time academic and became a full-time designer and stopped formally pursuing that line of enquiry. My interest in 'place' was sublimated instead by sampling it into designs, popular psychogeography, and now this. But I've meant to return to Williams' idea and assess whether it was relevant for the practice of design - particularly if we think there's any currency in really imagining there to be online spaces.

I've not really progressed at all, but I'd be interested if anyone else has experience or knowledge to share here, or feels up to the challenge.

Structure of feeling can be quickly defined as "the distilled residue of the organization of the lived experience of a community over and above the institutional and ideological organization of the society" [further defined here]. This clearly links to looser ideas around psychogeography, and must certainly relate to design. Particularly urban design ... as in, what sense of a community exists and pervades over time? What is immediately discernable about a community within a particular space, based on their repeated interactions and shared understanding over time? How does the space engender these shared histories? And so on. All of those questions would seem to be valid of online communities and spaces too.

Cottonopolis and Culture

The Jones also points to an interesting supplement in The Guardian, Cities Reborn. Matt picks out a quote from Phil Griffin about the influence of popular culture on cities, and coincidentally, I'd recently dug out an old piece I co-wrote when working at the Institute for Popular Culture in Manchester a few years ago (a former colleague had asked; I had to convert it from some old ClarisWorks; it was a slow news day etc.).

It too concerns the effect of popular culture on cities, in response to a book that had just appeared on Sheffield and Manchester, and had - in the opinion of Justin O'Connor and myself - neglected exactly that dimension of city life. I'm posting it here as some might find it interesting. It was published in the journal City in 1997.

Cottonopolis and Culture: Contemporary Culture and Structural Change in Manchester [pdf]

Fabric

Matt Jones observes the urban fabric becoming visual sampling material for camphones. Really nice idea, in which you draw from the canvas of the city, creating images on your own phone's canvas, then stitched together into visual narratives over time, with your buddies and the city implicit in the creation (see also the hiptop stuff Matt's been tracking).

But then see also Ben Hammersley's points about the phone companies and their usual incompatibility - something generally absent from the sf Matt rightly points to as precursor. I guess interoperability didn't make for very interesting reading.