cityofsound

Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2010, New York

As I started writing this, it was hovering around 39˚C here in Sydney. Gusty, burning hot air. Too hot. It could not have been more different to New York, where I'd been a week or so earlier, where the temperature had been hovering around -7˚C and down to -15˚C with the windchill. I was in Manhattan for a Microsoft Research event: their annual 'social computing symposium', and this year was loosely focused on 'the city'. Many thanks to Tom Coates + Matt Jones, Liz Lawley, Clay Shirky et al for the invite.

Here are my notes on the event, with a dash of local colour thrown in for good measure.

For the life between buildings - some notes on the iPad

Many, many, many people have written about last week’s announcement of Apple's iPad. I don’t actually remember a response quite like it. Far more than for the iPhone, for instance, or for any contemporary product or service I can recall. Perhaps its omnipresence in the media is due to promise it appears to hold for the media itself. But the response outside of the traditional media also feels immense.

As for me, I couldn’t help but make a few observations - I'll try to take a different angle, at least initially, approaching it from urbanism as much as product/service design, particularly not having seen the thing in the flesh yet. To get the basics out of the way right away, yes, I think it’ll be incredibly successful. And yes, the name’s a bit iffy but will not be a problem in time because it'll be incredibly successful. And yes, it’s the first iteration of something that will be rapidly refined over the coming years.

 There’s been lots of talk of it being a ‘third’ product, in-between iPhone and laptop. To me, this reminds me of ‘third places’. That’s a Ray Oldenburg term, of The Great Good Place, and generally refers to cafés, bars, libraries etc. Thus the iPad to me feels more like a product for third places rather than a third product. Its form factor and service model is defined for in-between spaces. Although it will float around the home and the office perfectly well, it comes into its own in these third spaces in a way that that phone and laptop cannot, being either too small or too large respectively.

With this in mind, it also reminds me of Jan Gehl’s book, Life Between Buildings, in that the iPad is a device for the life between buildings. 

If we approach it spatially - in terms of context of use I mean, rather than the device itself - it becomes clear why I think it’ll be a success.

It’s a device for airplanes, taxis, public transport, park benches, coffeeshops, pubs, bars, bistros, co-working spaces, breakouts, studios, receptions, meeting rooms, plaza and piazza, public libraries, beaches and all manner of transient spaces, civic spaces. 

It’s a device for cities.

The CLOUD

Finally, an urban informatics project I worked on that I can talk about here, even if it’s currently still ‘paper architecture’ (pixel architecture?). The nature of urban development is such that I can’t yet say much about recent design work on projects (including Masdar (with LAVA), Helsinki (with Sauerbruch Hutton/Experientia), and just yesterday Seoul (with Studio Libeskind) etc., as well as various others I can’t yet mention, and building/infrastructure-level projects in Brisbane and Sydney.)

This one though - the CLOUD - is being announced today, on the BBC, by the MIT press office, via its website, on Facebook, here at City of Sound, and elsewhere. We thought we’d try to share most of the details of the project. I think it speaks to a few new ideas of what a monument could be, what a contemporary design process can be, what a structure can be, what we can do with data, and so on.

'Toward the Sentient City' exhibition, New York

Mark Shepard kindly asked me to contribute a review of the 'Toward the Sentient City' exhibition he's curated for the Architectural League of New York. As the show, which runs at the Urban Center on Madison Avenue, concerns urban informatics and all that - and features The Living/Natalie Jeremijenko, Usman Haque, SENSEable City Lab and others - I was more than happy to oblige and my review is now available on the well-stocked '...Sentient City' site, as well as re-posted below.

There was much to chew on in terms of show's ideas and implications, even though I wasn't even able to see it in person. I've offered what I hope is a constructive critique below, yet found that I couldn't address the subject without really addressing the role of architecture more broadly. And though I only really touched on that it's not a topic one can get in and out of quickly or, indeed, unscathed.

Teaching and drawing Urban Sensing

Last year I helped teach a course around 'The Street As Platform' idea on the University of Technology, Sydney Master of Digital Architecture course, working with Anthony Burke, Mitchell Whitelaw and Jason McDermott. I mentioned it at the time, and will post up some of the outcomes at some point.

This year, I'm helping teach a course called 'Urban Sensing' at the University of Sydney, as part of their graduate program in Interaction Design and Electronics Arts, working with Andrew vande Moere (of Information Aesthetics fame), Elmar Trefz and Gabriel Ulacco. It's in broadly similar areas to 'Street As...', concerning urban informatics, sensors, visualisation and architectural interventions driven by such things. It's longer in duration though, and this one includes fabrication of what Andrew's currently calling 'contraptions', via CNC machining etc.

We're doing various things, but last week I tried a technique with them that I've often used myself. Writing on photographs of an average street scene, we asked students to imagine all the data that could be derived from the scene via sensors (in the broadest sense of the word), and then go on to sketch interventions or hacks into those scenes, drawn from such data sources.

Robert Miles Kemp (Postopolis! LA)

Robert Miles Kemp’s talk was always interesting and occasionally spellbinding, most of all when showing the work in responsive robotic structures. His videos of simple blocks self-assembling into what he called “nano-architecture” are quite extraordinary (sometimes eliciting a collective delight similar to that of The Living at Postopolis! NYC). Kemp situated this within a wider context of interactive and informational architecture, centred around his work at Variate Labs and renowned new media deisgn firm Schematic (and his blog, Spatial Robots) described in a consistently interesting talk, covering many of the primary themes in contemporary interface design - and indeed extending the idea of where and what interfaces are.

'Soft infrastructure superpowers': Lift09 presentation

Saving me from having to transcribe my presentation, the very well-organised Lift09 conference got Swiss French Television to film all the talks. So please see the embedded video at the end of this entry, or here on Vimeo.

When I finally got to deliver this speech, I'd been travelling for some time without rest, as previously noted (and indeed, as described at the beginning of the talk). So perhaps understandably there were a few points I accidentally missed out, or stumbled over.

• Firstly, the reason I was dwelling on the airline story so much is that it's the commercial model underpinning contemporary aviation - a model I see as part of soft infrastructure - that leads to poor service, not any particular technical issue as regards hard infrastructure. Boarding the passengers whilst doing the safety checks on the aircraft is a manifestation of how close to the wire airlines have to run things. Equally, there is little or no redundancy built into the system, due to the particular financial models underpinning them, which are in turn expressions of underlying social, cultural, political fabric. When something goes wrong, therefore, it causes very large ripples through that soft infrastructure of service and system, in turn.
• The effect of bike-sharing networks such as Vélib' and Bicing, are so key to me as they indicate how soft infrastructure can utterly change the perception of the city - in this case the sense of mobility, effectively warping physical distance - without altering much in the way of hard infrastructure.
• The closing video, which people always find compelling, is lifted from a fantastic advert for the Madrid Metro, which I discovered on SuperSpatial a while ago. I re-edited, and replaced the soundrack (using a bit of Jacaszek, I seem to recall). I'm not sure who created the original advert, but it's a beautiful piece of work and I usually try to declare its provenance. Here I forgot/ran out of time. I deploy it to illustrate the promise of informatics in terms of seeing through the hard infrastructure to the activity and behaviour of the city itself, the way people actually use the city. Here's my cut of the video:

I can't show much of my work in detail due to the stage some of the projects are at - and the nature of those projects - but they'll all make it out here in time. Thanks to Keynote's effortless integration of video I now use clips heavily in presentations, but that makes it a little tricky to easily share talks afterward. The camera crew often neglected to capture the screen, so missing out on a few of the videos. So for the record, here are a few of the videos used during the talk:

"Network + network + network = network". Lift09 conference, and Geneva

It's a crisp clear Swiss winter day. Geneva looks beautiful in the pale sun. That sun, which feels like a slowly failing 20 watt bulb, is the second clearest sign I'm a long way from the New South Wales I left behind on Monday afternoon. The clearest sign is that it's -2°C here, which is essentially 32° difference to the Sydney summer day I departed from. I wear a coat for the first time in almost 2 years.

It's my first time in Geneva, surprisingly, but being amidst the effortlessly elegant Mittel-European urban form again is a delightful confirmation of certain beliefs after getting all-too accustomed to the New World sprawls of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Bikes, trams, 4-5 storey apartment blocks, pocket parks and quietly civic squares everywhere - it's all so right, even given that Geneva is far from the best example. The other, more institutional bits of Geneva feel more like one's living amidst the giant sets of Tati's Playtime, which a part of me would be entirely happy to do.

The relative proximity of Africa, rather than that of South-East Asia, is visible in the faces around me on the streets. The flat northern European colour-scheme of white, brown, grey and black across the textures of stone, brick, bare trees and filigreed overcast sky is a subtle and beautiful counterpoint to the intense light and rich colours of Australia. I'm lucky to live in both these worlds.

I also encounter 3 examples of haughty Swiss brusqueness in quick succession, from airport to taxi to hotel, which is a shock after the naturally easy-going and friendly Australian service culture. Still, I'm back in the country of my birth and I can live with this. My Swiss-ness is something I've continually over-stressed, entirely out of proportion to the <2 years I spent here after my birth in Zürich, and have spent much of my adult life adulating the likes of Josef Muller-Brockmann, Le Corbusier, Max Bill, Jan Tschichold, Herzog & De Meuron, Peter Zumthor, Claudio Sulser. The coffee's predictably poor, given its French heritage, but I can forgive almost all these foibles given the sheer delight of being in a country with the world's finest array of door handles, locks, window fittings and banknotes.

This is the pleasurable sense of disorientation I'm feeling. The less pleasurable aspects are due to the fact it took me 4 days to get here, when it should've taken just over 24 hours. This is due partly to 3 malfunctions across 2 different planes on the runway at Bangkok airport, but mainly due to the ineptitude of British Airways and Thai Airlines, which shuttled us backwards and forwards from runway to airport hotel numerous times. It was a bravura performance of truly appalling 'customer service', a cavalcade of unthinking, desperate, flailing, inhumane incompetence, all too familiar when encountering the raw edges often left exposed by global capital.

The journey ends up being Sydney to Bangkok to Hong Kong to London to Geneva, the last 4 airports all experienced within in 1 day. Despite the intense fatigue, hassle and frustration - which eventually left me drained of anger and resolving into a zen-like state of near-calm, as if the body itself was beginning to fade - I did at least get to explore Bangkok Suvarnabhumi (pretty good; wonderful concrete alongside giant  stretched-taut silver canvas loops; not enough places to sit; over-staffed shops (not a bad thing necessarily); no wi-fi), Hong Kong (night-time descent along the lights of Macau; currently being re-modelled but still delivering a sense of massive; cavernous escalator-threaded atria; great automated transit; old people working everywhere; good shops and good food; good free wi-fi all over the airport), London Heathrow Terminal 5 (disclaimer: Arup worked on it; actually surprised by how much I liked it; also good automated transit; the finish of many details was very good; beautiful exposed structural details; the shops entirely out of kilter with the times (a glance down the departure lounge: Prada, Harrods; Dior; Mappin & Webb; Smythson; Tiffany & Co ... all predictably empty); wi-fi everywhere but not free and therefore not used) and finally Geneva (classic small European airport; functional, efficient and pleasingly so; concourse roof being remodelled presumably; no need for automated transit or shops; surrounded by Alps and so a wonderful arrival:departure experience.)

The 4-day journey is actually much longer story, which I'll spare you in detail, but it did inadvertently provide me with the opening few minutes of my speech at the Lift 09 conference. For that's why I'm here in Geneva.

Monocle: design notes

It’s a year or so after launch of Monocle and things are going very well, both in print and online, so it's time for me to move on. Having worked with Tyler Brûlé and the rest of the Monocle team to breathe life into the project, creating the first volume of the magazine and iterations of the website and steering it through its first successful year of operation, I decided to leave, and departed at the end of March 2008. The project is up and running, with good solid foundations. Thus, others can run the daily business from here on in.

With that, I thought I’d pause to reflect on some of the design and strategy choices I made with Monocle.com and share them here. I’ve often tried to be ‘transparent’ about the work done on projects here, in the hope that it stimulates useful thought or conversation in other projects elsewhere, and partly to facilitate my own reflections on work. None of what follows is rocket science, and it’s not the place to look for thoughts on 2.0/3.0, social software, or urban informatics. That would be in the accounts of different projects. But if you’re interested in the honest craft of website work, almost deliberately old-fashioned ‘classical’ web design - and how to ally this with innovation in magazine publishing - the following should provide a decent account of several of the key decisions in this particular project.

During the course of an insanely busy year there are many other key decisions that just occurred and aren't noted here - most of them, in fact. And of course some that are confidential. Nor is this particularly structured. Nonetheless, it contains early sketches, outlines of strategic thinking and some insights into decision-making, tool choices and design practice. I hope you find what follows to be useful or interesting.

Context
As someone put it, Monocle was probably the most blogged about magazine last year. It was written about offline a lot too, but I won’t dwell on the magazine specifically here, except where it relates to the design and production of the digital services. (For a bookended account, Monocle's editor Andrew Tuck wrote about the launch and Tyler and Andrew were both recently interviewed a year on.)

Many were too quick to judge perhaps,  but others were less so and considered responses emerged throughout the year. Reception varied wildly, as one expects, but leaving aside the reception for the magazine and brand overall, the website itself often received much critical acclaim, for which many thanks. The likes of Eye, Print, BusinessWeek, MagCulture and Design Week all suggested we were onto something with our integration of print and web specifically. I’ve mentioned the Eye article before, but the Print piece by Andrew Blum was particularly sharp in identifying the Monocle.com difference. While the new media commentators often mistakenly looked for a 2.0 platform play, Blum noted our attempt to bring quality back to the table, trying to use a new platform to reinvigorate broadcast journalism itself. Similarly BusinessWeek spotted that the “web component (is) more like TV than print”. It actually feels somewhere between the two, but that was the intention.

Perhaps more importantly, the user figures have grown healthily throughout the year. Unique users and time spent on the site are all doing fine, but I knew from the BBC that getting the broadcasts into iTunes would be the thing that really extended the viewership of the programmes, our primary purpose. When we added BBC radio podcasts to iTunes they really thrived, and sure enough, since November 2007, viewing figures have been doubling month on month for Monocle’s movies, driven by iTunes’ ease-of-use. We’re now shifting terabytes of editorial each week. If you have audio or video material, the value of iTunes at this point cannot be stressed enough. It’ll be interesting to see how that platform develops.

Best of all, we hit number 1 in the iTunes News & Politics chart just before Christmas 2007. It’s hardly the most rigorously calculated chart in existence, but still an achievement, I think, to have the likes of the rather more well-funded and well-established Economist, Guardian, BBC, Reuters and Sky trailing in your wake through December, even temporarily (with the first four there having an average age of over 100 years or so, and our brand barely 10 months old at that point.)

So for an entirely new non-mainstream brand, with a no-celebrity policy allied to serious global coverage of subjects that are often little known before we cover them, I’m very happy with the favourable response from readers and viewers. We’ve covered e-Sports in South Korea, the animated title sequences of Kuntzel+Deygas, Narcotecture in Afghanistan, Tezuka architects’ Fuji kindergarten, Lexus’ brand issues, Paula Scher on Brand America, the train from Istanbul to Van, the CEO of Lego, the Tällberg Forum, the 2007 Salone industrial design fair and Frankfurt Motor Show, slow food in Turin, our top urban design solutions, mayoral summits in New York, photojournalism from Murmansk, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe and Abkhazia, and much more besides, Plus, we got name-checked by Lupe Fiasco.

The street as platform

[Image courtesy of Timo Arnall]

I was recently asked to comment on ‘the street of the future’; a response for a quango responsible for the built environment and a government department responsible for transport, roads and so forth. Which means it's really the street of the near-future. I didn’t have enough time to write something short, so I dashed off the following, and I’m really posting here as a note to self, rather than an attempt to deeply discuss the everyday informational street circa 2008. Still, I hope you find it useful or engaging. The photos don't relate directly but create a kind of composite illustrative city nonetheless.

It’s deliberately grounded in the here-and-now, more or less, so it will seem rather old hat to some of you. Which in a sense it is. And in another sense, it isn't. But either way, this was a better strategy for the task-in-hand, and in imagining the scene below, via a kind of narrative, it's still remarkable to even sketchily consider how much data is already around us, and is near-invisible to traditional urban planning perspectives. And I'd suggest that this data beginning to profoundly affect the way the street feels. Some quick analysis follows the narrative, raising a series of questions for governance, legislation and the public-private partnerships that also constitute the contemporary street.