The street as platform, under construction

Well, more or less. Not quite the full platform imagined in that post – or this – but a small step in that direction.

I’m currently teaching a two-week class at University of Technology Sydney, on the Master of Digital Architecture degree. As per the ‘street as platform’ idea, we’re creating a multiperspectival portrait of the street, seen through the lens of data. Some of this data is derived from various sensors we’re placing around the immediate urban environment, some of it is scraped from websites or other sources. The patterns arising from the collision of these datasets are being explored through visualisations produced in the Processing language. 

We’ve got the 12 or so students blogging about their progress throughout the course, which extends from learning Processing from scratch (plus working in a web services-enabled design environment) to exploring the possibilities and vagaries of real-time data, scraping historical data off the web, and thinking through what it means to visualise patterns in urban data, from conceptual, aesthetic and pragmatic viewpoints. We’re heading towards a small exhibition based around an installation in which the visualisations are projected – so ultimately exploring the ideas of projecting urban behavioural data back into the street, as per this system diagram.

The Masters course is run by Anthony Burke, and my teaching colleagues also include Mitchell Whitelaw (University of Canberra/The Teeming Void) and Jason McDermott. We must also thank Dr. David Lowe of the Centre for Real-Time Information Networks at UTS, and those helping from afar include Usman Haque. Plus, we have a forum tomorrow including local luminaries Marcus Trimble and Andrew Vande Moere. Particular kudos also to the students, who are working incredibly hard.

Keep an eye on the students’ blog for progress updates, and I’ll post more links, context, images, notes &c. to follow, but for now, a quick word from the street itself:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2276637&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Master of Digital Architecture class 11/08: ‘Street as platform’: students’ blog