Fabulous stuff from Anne Galloway about a 'people tracing' project in Amsterdam. People-tracing? Sounds to have surveillance overtones, right? No. This is about mapping the movement of people through the city, in order to define the city itself. I saw some very interesting (and very beautiful) related work by David Rokeby and Michael Awad at the Doors 7 conference: video-based research, tracing the movements through Piazza San Marco. Actually employing the CCTV network to sense the density of flows through that particular space, adding and subtracting movement rates to detect patterns of activity (pigeons, tourists) or stillness (street furniture, some very bored or uttterly entranced tourists) - extracting a level of intelligence from the mass movements of people over time.
In a sense, this sparks thoughts of both Johnson's Emergence and Brands How Buildings Learn, in terms of watching well-worn paths develop over, around and to the side of designed spaces. And yet, as Anne notes, extrapolate these paths and flows up and we have an image of the city - enable a multiplicity of voices to adorn this multiplicity of movement, and we have the city itself:
"THIS is social computing ;) What/Where/When/Who is Amsterdam? Amsterdam is the ever-changing - personal and collective - movements of the people. These movements are traced in real-time, and projected into the past and future. Add the ability for users to simultaneously create/witness/collect memories and myths - of the lived city - and we're good to go!"
