cityofsound

"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.

The Adaptive City

A few months ago, Scott Burnham kindly asked me to contribute to the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project he conceived and then developed with Droog Design. It is being sponsored by the city of Amsterdam and is premiering there this September. In Scott's words, "Urban Play is about placing the individual at the heart of the city’s development and encouraging creative interaction between the individual and the physical city". You can also find out more at the Experimenta site.

Scott's posting up focus pieces on some of the interventionists featured in the exhibition, starting with the quite brilliant work of Gilberto Esparza, a Mexico City-based artist who creates 'Urban Parasites', "small robotic creatures made from recycled consumer goods which wander, climb, crawl and explore the marginal areas of the city." (Check the videos at Scott's site.)

To my small contribution: Scott asked me to write something about 'the adaptive city', noting some of my previous entries, such as 'Punching holes in Ciutat Vella; adaptive urban form in Barcelona' and 'Architecture and interaction design, via adaption and hackability'. That was pretty much it by way of direction, so I had some free rein to take those thoughts for a walk, and introduce them to some more recent ideas around urban informatics and urban information design, the impact of real-time data and collaborative planning on urban form, and so on.

I've reproduced the full essay below. I believe the other contributors to the catalogue were to be Usman Haque on open source architecture and Richard Reynolds on guerrilla gardening, so it'll be worth keeping an eye on. Many thanks to Scott for his considerable patience, and for asking me to contribute in the first place. It's a relatively speculative, deliberately optimistic piece, continuing some ideas from 'The Street as Platform'. Hope you find it interesting.

Loose ends, February 2008

A few recent entries attracted useful responses, and several contemporaneous links opened up new angles on similar subjects. I thought I’d pause briefly to tie a few of these loose ends together.

The “Shinkansen to Melbourne …” story on the potential for a Very High Speed Train (VHST) link up and down the east coast of Australia generated a fair bit of buzz, and some extremely useful comments from readers. Several comments provided detailed reasons why it would be difficult, though none of them convinced that it shouldn’t happen. Have a read and let me know what you think - particularly if you have further insight or experience on large infrastructure projects of this nature. To me, it feels like a case of ‘when not if’, but a concerted effort is clearly required to help people here believe that.

Partly, this will be enabled by moves elsewhere - in that the road and air alternatives are not only being seen as increasingly out-of-step with the times, but shooting themselves in the foot (if indeed a transit system can have a foot to shoot itself in). Road traffic congestion in and around Melbourne is now reaching the breaking points also witnessed in Sydney and Brisbane (with some talk of congestion charging at last, even if not officially. It’s mildly instructive to read this piece from Mayor John So from only 2006, boasting of how ‘the car is welcome in Melbourne’, and then reflect on these subsequent and ensuing woes; and so different in tone to the Gehl proposals for Sydney’s CBD). The train service in Sydney is now being used so heavily that it’s at bursting point - almost necessitating the use of ‘push men’ - despite clear evidence of some years of under-investment. Ditto buses, which desperately need further investment but are still heavily used. This at least indicates that Sydneysiders are not that averse to public transport.

Moreover, Sydney Airport is about to close down one of its runways due to safety concerns (was due for April and now put back in the year, for reasons unclear). This will have a massive impact on the ability of the airport to service demand to Melbourne and Brisbane. Reports suggest that it’s already struggling with that. Closing this runway can only cause problems for that air corridor, and those who live along it, for that matter (I didn’t go into noise pollution in the piece I wrote, but it is of course an issue.) Meanwhile, oil prices 'surge past' 100 US dollars a barrel …

The item also featured briefly in The Architects on Melbourne's Triple R (cheers Rory). It’s just good to hear this being discussed, and most fervently by those who have experienced the likes of the Shinkansen and TGV.  To be clear about the piece: I’m not anti-car or anti-plane. Far from it. I find the New Urbanist rhetoric that attempts to expunge the car from the urban memory to be wholly misplaced and not useful, and air travel can refresh the parts other modes of transport simply cannot reach. It’s a massive shift of balance that’s important, towards the likes of a tripartite framework for rail (VHST interstate, loca/regional and then inner-city); augmented by smarter bus networks (see Curitiba, Bogota and beyond), as well as an overlay of quality pedestrian and cycle networks. Ferries, monorails, integrated ticketing systems, the lot. This, augmented by minimised air travel, and car-use that is, primarily, recreational (as Iain Borden has recently suggested). It’s about redesigning the city for public transport, and redesigning public transport for the city (see also Mitchell Joachim) - and that includes rapid links throughout the spaces in-between the cities. Infrastructure is in the news a lot at the moment, not least due to China’s extraordinary expansion, and Infrastructure Australia has recently been announced (chaired, intriguingly by a former BA boss). So watch that VHST network-shaped space, I reckon, not least for an interesting debate.

“The Street as Platform” garnered even more attention, not least because William Gibson and Bruce Sterling both linked to it. (I think I just need RU Sirius and Rudy Rucker now, to complete my Mondo 2000 Panini sticker collection. Younger readers will have no idea what I’m on about.)

With startling serendipity, Adam Greenfield happened to post a piece at almost exactly the same time, detailing his ‘central dogma’, related to his forthcoming book, and discussing many of the same ideas and issues, but from a usefully different angle. Do go and have a read (and his follow-up, which is indeed ‘On the same side of the street’). Molly Wright Steenson has also started a useful blog, which looks like it will frequently cover the work of City of Sound pin-up Cedric Price, and specifically his Generator project. One of her posts reminds us of the fundamental importance of designing the social and operational frameworks around technological systems, a point I was very keen to make in "The Street ..." (see also recent Economist articles on e-government; this sense of redesigning the systems and organisations around technology, when designing a technological system, is a generally sound tenet.)

A piece earlier this year, The Personal Well-Tempered Environment (based on last year’s presentation at Interesting South) got picked up by USA Today and FastCompany amongst others and it’s also worth checking again for the many useful comments. I’d pick out Usman Haque’s work on XML schema for communication between objects and their environment, some research from the States indicating that basic feedback can seriously improve personal energy usage, and also note a follow-up post at Headlessness and a beautiful realisation of some related ideas by The Living in NYC. I’m collating links to do with these concepts at delicious/PWTE.

I’ve had very useful conversations around much of this, so watch this space for more developments on the ideas in “The Street…” and PWTE soon, I hope.

And finally, an update on the Best Urban Places project. James, Russell and I are knee-deep in good, honest production issues for the first issue now - we’ll give a further update on that shortly. In the meantime, the group keeps growing and the photos keep coming. Please do keep them coming in, ideally accompanied by your short introductions, as issue 2 is already being set up nicely.

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.

Best Urban Places and Spaces: Update

We've been fantastically pleased with progress on the World's Best Urban Places and Spaces project that Russell Davies and I announced a few weeks ago. We now have almost 200 images in the pool over at Flickr, contributed by 105 of us. It's fascinating to see how people are interpreting the brief and are generally not following the well-trodden paths to the predictable places.

In 'production news' I'm particularly delighted to say that one of my favourite designers, James Goggin of Practise, has agreed to help out with the design of the book(s) of selected places. James is a quite brilliant designer, with a portfolio that includes work for the Tate Modern, Momus, Channel 4, V&A, as well as art directing The Wire magazine, creating the identity for the Docklands Light Railway public arts programme, exhibiting in the recent Forms of Inquiry show at the AA, and check his site for more besides. We're delighted to have him on board.

We've decided to pin a self-imposed deadline of the end of the month (31 January 2008), at which point we'll do the first selection, for the first edition. So please do join the group, submit your photos, and importantly, please describe the place in a few words, indicating why it's a special place.

Reminder: anyone can join and contribute images (if you don't already have a Flickr account, you can sign up for free here. Once you've joined the group, use the 'Send to group' function above your photo.). You can interpret place or space however you like - that's part of the fun - and they really don't have to be world heritage sites in any way. We'll publish the best in a free downloadable pamphlet form, with a more stylish printed offering for sale (though free to successful contributors). And though we do ask for a few words of description, you don't have to be Jane Jacobs any more than you have to be Berenice Abbot.

You can browse through the entire Flickr set right here (requires Flash):

Below, a random selection of some of my current favourite images. There are many more great examples in the group, so do take a look and more importantly, contribute.

Here we have a perfect Roman square (by kjpm), the Pike Place Market in Seattle (by peterme), night in Turin (by Luca Vergano), Singapore's apartment blocks in the trees (by marc0047), a typical Tokyo scene (by Jan Chipchase), a Prague side-street (by jakekrohn), a bus in Amsterdam (by Ti.mo), and a quiet corner of Chengdu (by rogersjones):

World's Best Urban Places and Spaces [Flickr group]
City of Sound: Best Urban Spaces

The Personal Well-Tempered Environment

SUMMARY

• A real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.
• A form of 'BIM 2.0' that gives users of buildings both the real-time and longitudinal information they need to change their behaviour and thus use buildings, and energy, more effectively. An ongoing post-occupancy evaluation for the building, the neighbourhood and the city.
• A software service layer for connecting things together within and across buildings.
• As information increasingly becomes thought of a material within building, it makes sense to consider it holistically as part of the built fabric, as glass, steel, ETFE etc.

INTRODUCTION

This is a somewhat overdue write-up of my talk at Interesting South, November 2007. For expediency, you could watch the video of the presentation. (It's 10 minutes long and punctuated at the end by the intro to 'These boots are made for walkin''). This is the extended write-up with notes, references and slides.

Caveat: I've often seen this site as essentially sharing my sketchbook, so please bear in mind that what follows is no more than a sketch, and series of notes, rather than any attempt to envision a fully-formed product. Any attempt at the latter would entail these sketches being tested by a more coherent design and research process. For now, this is simply a sketch, a kind of un-built architecture (for it is architecture, of a sort), and a simple, not necessarily innovative, idea drawn up for a swift 10-minute presentation at a highly multi-disciplinary event. Please take it in that spirit. I'd like to see something like this realised as a product on the market, which is part of my rationale for publishing here. In other words, feel free to make this - or some version of this - a reality yourself. If you find that the central idea doesn't ring true, I've written in such a way that you may still find some of the references or thoughts useful.

Essentially, the idea is for a system that makes previously invisible aspects of people's behaviour visible, in order to help change individual and collective behaviour. In this case, the primary drive is towards leading a more sustainable personal life, encouraging less consumption and more contribution, also taking into account the context of your behaviour in wider neighbourhood and city. By tracking your energy and resource usage, and playing this off against possible contributions made through generating energy or resource, systems are able to build simple aggregated profiles for these aspects of a person's or household's behaviour. Using popular techniques drawn from social software, these profiles provide users with historical trends for their behaviour, and allow the profiles to be compared, contrasted and recombined with those of others. By opening up these data feeds through APIs, within appropriate ethical and privacy frameworks, unforeseen applications of this information can emerge, even enabling the 'gaming' of consumption and contribution profiles, encouraging civic and sustainable behaviour through competition. By conveying this information through multi-sensory feedback and persuasive visualisation distributed across discreet domestic interfaces, the effects of a person's behaviour can thus be discerned in the everyday.

It's a kind of real-time, responsive, itemised bill for all the different kinds of primary resource usage (electricity, gas, water, transport etc.) in your life, which also takes into account the contributions you make. A sustainable lifestyle, leaving aside the thorny definition of such a thing, could at least become a little bit more tangible.

As it concerns this somewhat over-used word 'sustainability', I wanted to start the talk with the following image of the Sydney Morning Herald to indicate that I was less interested in apocalyptic headlines or hectoring people into submission, and more interested in giving people tools and information to encourage positive behaviour, and to explore ways of taking personal control of a more sustainable way of living (More on 'Apocalypse Sydney' here).

John Thackara has also noted this problem with the sustainability message:

"The house is cold, someone keeps turning the lights off, and the greywater toilet is blocked again. As a way of life, sustainabilty often sounds grim. The media don't help: they tell us we have to consume our way to redemption. The shopping pages are filled with hideous hessian bags; and ads that used to be placed by double-glazing cowboys now feature wind turbines, and solar roofs. Adding mental discomfort to the mix, politicians scold our bad behaviour as if we were children dropping litter. And preachy environmentalists expect us to feel guilty when we fail to embrace their hair-shirted future with joy."

So this is an idea to make sustainability something personal, intimate, meaningful and orientated towards positive contributions, as well as connecting the individual's actions to the wider urban context.

Postopolis!: Jake Barton, Local Projects

Note: This is a summary of a talk given at Postopolis!, taken in real-time, with minimal editing. Reader beware! Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007. Flickr group for photos here. YouTube videos uploaded here. All Postopolis! posts here

Jake Barton runs a design firm in New York called Local Projects. He says they call themselves 'media designers', as they work at the intersections between broadcast media, interactive media, architecture and physical space. It's as good a term as any for a field still emerging. Barton's background is in interior architecture, and the firm is fairly multidisciplinary. The firm's name comes from their belief that, just as Tip O'Neill used to say "all politics are local", they believe all design is local. That is, local to the specific project; there is no predetermined house style or methodology, they're platform agnostic, solution agnostic. (This is an interesting, valuable approach.)

Barton lists a few of their recent projects, such as for the Museum of Chinese and the Americas, a cellphone tour for the Statue of Liberty, and their recent hefty commission for the World Trade Center memorial museum in partnership with Thinc Design. He then goes on to outline their approach and interests – they explore innovative interfaces in physical space, hybridising between physical interfaces and online interfaces, and have been particularly engaged in collaborative storytelling projects.

He shows the Miners Story Project, which is based around a caravan in which a recording booth resides. The exterior looks like a dot matrix image of a copper miner, but as you get closer you realises each of the 'dots' is also a speaker. Thus the caravan itself is a giant speaker which plays oral histories captured within. Barton says that Making Museums Matter by Stephen Weil has been a particular influence, in terms providing inspiration for museums turning themselves inside out; or providing ways of ensuring that musuems are spaces for knowledge production, rather than just repositories preserved in aspic.

Of course, with internet-based media, this notion has been hoovered up into the term 'user-generated content', providing both a contemporary goldrush and much hand-wringing. Thanks to an earlier project, the now well-known StoryCorps, Local Projects is in the position of having helped create an almost iconic example of how to obtain user-generated content in physical space. StoryCorps was directly inspired by the influential Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects of the early 20th century. (Which is about as good a reference point as you can get.) It links with a weekly NPR show to capture oral histories. As interaction designers for the project, Local Projects worked with architects to design the listening stations that sit outside of booths, and dynamic signage. Based in Grand Central Station, the WTC and elsewhere throughout the US, they've been hugely successful, garnering over 10,000 stories. Barton plays us a few selections. (I'd actually heard these before, having spoken with Jake at IDEA 2006, but they're still hugely affecting everyday stories.)

This was an early example of user-generated content, from pretty much before the term existed within the museum/exhibit context. Additionally, the booth at the WTC is the only physical architecture on the site itself which interprets 9/11. Nobody had the green light to do an interpretative project before, but there's something about the shape of these projects, Barton suggests, that allows for a broadcasting of a message like this; to be capable of talking about 9/11 on the site.

Moving on, Barton takes us through his firm's collaboration with author James Sanders (who would talk at Postopolis! a day later): Timescapes, at Museum of the City of New York. This is a giant 3-screen projection that enables people to approach the city itself from different angles simultaneously. It's an ambitious attempt to create something which engages the numerous New York City buffs, and therefore has the granular detail that cartography really affords, as well as being approachable to the newcomer. Barton says they tried to reverse the typical paradigm in which history is communicated i.e. a neatly ordered sequence great people and great events. In Timescapes only 3 people are mentioned directly. Rather, the point of view is rendered in the map - attempting to convey the city as a series of systems, a group or cloud of actions, each affecting the next. For instance, the creation of subway lines visibly affects the subsequent creation of apartments and communities built along those lines, enabling the creation of the Bronx and Queens. This is a fascinating take on the evolution of the city, and deserved more exploration than we were able to give it, sadly.

Their new project is on the building of the city itself - and how the city is evolving in contemporary life. It's in relation to Bloomberg's 'Plan NYC 2030', and the idea that 1 million new people will move into NYC by 2030. (Barton pauses to reflect that the last talk on Lagos, where they're growing by a million a year, is "very humbling" in this context.) Working with the AIA's Center for Architecture in New York, it's called the Public Information Exchange, or PIE AIA. (Barton says they pronounce pieaia.org as 'paella'. Oh ho.)

It's a project to foster some kind of "proactive dialogue between all those involved in public architecture", as Barton puts it. There are a few sides to this. He says "when I talk to museum people, I usually talk about broadening the space for dialogue. When I talk to architects, I say this wants to be the MySpace for architects." Essentially, the site enables architects and planners to upload photographs, images of models, plans, schemes for new buildings in New York, and then draw commentary from all involved, including the public. Every image has comments, prompted by questions which can be set by the architects, and thus encourages a deeper level of engagement than merely 'thumbs up or thumbs down'. When I asked Barton about the quality of comments, he replied that so far things have gone well. That is perhaps in part to the excellent design of the interactive space.

(Personally, I believe that quality design encourages quality responses from users, just as design for public space or public housing encourages civic behaviour. I made this tenuous analogy between British post-war public housing and user-generated content a few years ago.)

Barton states that it's not designed to be a wiki-style system for co-creation. He doesn't believe in the "collaborative creation of architecture ... I think that's a fallacy", he says. But architects can use it as a tool to get research, to ask the questions that you want to know of the public, or other stakeholders. It enables architects and builders to promote aspects of the project like LEED certification, or go beyond that. It's designed for both the small playground just built in your neighbourhood, to public street furniture, to major private projects.

A huge yellow stripe gives emphasis to public commentary on the page, making clear a balance between the projects and their stakeholders. For Barton, this project should form a widely distributed, "open memory" around architecture.

(In my professional opinion, it's beautifully done. Each building has Google maps integration, further links, space for a variety of renderings, and at this early stage anyway, excellent engaged comments from users. It's contemporary without being clichéd. There are only a handful of projects uploaded at the moment, but it looks to be an excellent, scalable example of integrating architecture with the web. There are some nips and tucks required but nothing major. All it needs now is far more use than the project currently has; go to it NYC-based architects and planners.)

In a nice touch, the yellow stripe is also clear in the physical manifestation of PIE, at the Center for Architecture's Public Resource Center, located at 536 LaGuardia Place, between West 3rd Street and Bleecker Street. There are public access workstations, designed by Grimshaw who recently did street furniture for the city.

Barton asked the Postopolis! crowd whether people would use it. A few of the architects in the crowd put their hand up. Others would use it stakeholders or users, and it's clear that that's where the value is. Barton notes that collaborative projects like Architecture for Humanity are really architect-to-architect, as good as they are, whereas this is for users of architecture too. Architects may need some convincing, despite the 'Myspace for architecture' tag, as these issues of consultation, and a form of ongoing post-occupancy evaluation are deeper than the lack of a platform. But at least it now has a platform, in New York at least.

This project seems emblematic of Local Projects' approach – rooted, considered, elegantly open, and specific to the problem at hand – and Barton's talk gave us an imaginative yet pragmatic illustration of the potential in the overlap between physical and digital spaces.

Here's a video excerpt of Barton's presentation:

Postopolis!: Panel on sustainability, with Core 77, Metropolis, Treehugger and Inhabitat

Note: This is a summary of a talk given at Postopolis!, taken in real-time, with minimal editing. Reader beware! Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007. Flickr group for photos here. YouTube videos uploaded here. All Postopolis! posts here.

We switch formats again at this point, as Jill Fehrenbacher moderates a panel on sustainability, featuring Allan Chochinov of Core 77, Susan Szenasy of Metropolis, Graham Hill of Treehugger. Jill had asked readers of her blog to contribute questions, which was a nice idea, and a few of those questions made it out. Equally, it was a free-flowing conversation, particularly driven by the energy of Chochinov and Szenasy. I've switched from my usual method of documenting these talks to give a sense of the conversation here, by pulling out the quotes that stuck. Those in speech marks are verbatim, as I heard it; the other text is the gist of what was said.

How and when did you wake up to this notion of sustainability?

Susan: "At the beginning! I was born in post-war Hungary, and learned from the very beginning about conserving things. That has never left me."
Allan: "A good awakening was when I started teaching and saw just the nonsense that people were bringing in." Good designers are always sustainable, but the "drive to create stuff is just so powerful," and dangerous.
Graham: "Two squares of toilet paper! Grew up with real hippy parents." Efficiency was there from the beginning.

Key elements in sustainable design

Susan: Not sure we're ready to answer this question coherently. "We start evaluating wood in relationship to steel to wood to plastic, and so on ... We don't know what we're doing yet. Look at location, extraction, shipping etc. There's no answer right now, so keep looking. It's a pitiful, small body of knowledge at this moment."
Graham: "Size." We keep building these massive buildings. We need alternatives to that, but they need to be stylish too, as "ugly things get torn down". There's quite a list: multifunctionality, repairability, transportation issues etc.
Allan: "Look at how it's used."

How has blogging affected design discourse?

Susan: "There's a lot of nonsense up there." "It's more exposure with less knowledge than ever before". People are "showing their lack of education and lack of understanding of the subject ... Every time I look at some of those responses, I cringe." (Later she clarifies she's mainly talking about user comments on blogs.)

Graham: "Made it more of a dialogue. Has an overall positive effect, if you think things tend towards the good."

Allan: There is this issue of the ratio of signal to noise. Our mandate at Core 77 is "predicated on the fact that we're going to serve the global design community, and show them products. (But) most products are a problem."

Susan: "I'm not negative about bloggers, but the result of the blogging and the dialogue that occurs is what upsets me."

Jill: "It's one of the most flummoxing issues that we have. We get many comments, but they can be very uninformed. But people are passionate about something."

Graham: "People don't read very well online. Some of the comments may be made at 11pm, after they've had a few! But comments are a very small segment of who is reading." Perhaps there's a technological solution here, in terms of people rating each others' comments etc.

Allan: "It's an emerging medium. Comments is an issue for all us."

How to enable change?

Susan: Families are "adding to their fleet" by adding another small 'green' car, as a nod to sustainability, without getting rid of their other two SUVs! "This is something we're not going to consume our way out of." But in terms of over-consuming, "it's not the loin cloth thing ... I live very well in 400 square feet in New York City. Well-designed, incredibly compact space. Design comes into this."

Allan: "First we need to recognise ourselves in the wholesale poisoning of everything." Notes his love/hate relationship with designers. Thinks there's something more in what John Thackara and Bruce Sterling have been writing about. Thackara's notion is "use not own". For example, the power drill is used for probably four minutes of its actual life, on average. If one is shared, that's more effective.

Susan: "Industrial design as a practice seems clueless in terms of the environment ... Even the graphic designers are talking about sustainability. Where are the industrial designers?"

Allan: "Systems are important." Designers need to see that a product should be sensitive to its ecosystem, to see the lifecycle of product, to see the product's construction holistically. The rest should get out of the business.

Graham mentioned Alonovo.

Susan: "The rating systems – LEED et al – are interesting as they draw attention to it. But I don't think designers should work to a checklist. People who are doing breakthrough work are going past LEED and have never even tried to a LEED rating, as they've been doing that kind of work for years."

Graham: "In business, what gets measured gets done. And we're beginning to measure it, so that's really important."

Allan: "The thing is almost accidental; the thing can serve people, it can save lives, but to (think of things) to treat design as an end – that we're going to make things – well, when they create more consequence than the value of the thing?"

A question from a punter:
As interesting as it sounds, and possibly valuable, tracking a product through its lifecycle is also horrifying. Sometimes you don't want to know the life history of a product?

Susan: "The question of what it means to be a private human being is very important."
Allan: "All this talk of ubicomp. Big trouble. But green!"

A good panel, even if it occasionally meandered around some well-trodden paths. There are questions around whether some aspects of discourse around sustainability movement can have an almost pious attitude, as perhaps these things should've been done right all along. But I found the reaction to this last point, about a memory of products, particularly interesting. Adam Greenfield has written of how to gracefully, ethically build these systems – or at least what to look out for – in terms of ubicomp.

Personally, I think there's huge value in devices being aware, and this may change things as much as anything. I think we can design systems, devices, scenarios which convey one's behaviour, and this can change behaviour. This was the subject of my talk at the first Design Engaged conference, back in 2004, noting that using a pedometer makes you walk more, using Last FM makes you listen to more music, more carefully. Using smarter versions of devices like Wattson and iSave, and networking these, aggregating data over time, as per well-designed social software (that respects the individual), and conveying behaviour through a range of interfaces and scenarios, digital and physical/sensual, woven into the fabric of spaces we inhabit ... Well, that may help things along a little bit.

Echoes of Matt Clark's preceding talk, and Duncan Wilson's Drivers of Change work with Arup's Foresight Innovation and Incubation team again. This might sound like a technological solution, but I don't mean it to be perceived that simplistically. Obviously the cultural, infrastructural, political aspects have to align too. Something this panel made very clear was that these solutions must be holistic.

Aula 2006: Movement

In a couple of days, I'm off to Helsinki to attend Aula 2006, discussing various topics unified by the theme of 'movement'. Here's the spiel:

"Aula 2006 is an event about the direction of society, culture and technology ... The theme Movement points to mobile 2.0 (mobility meets web 2.0), the overlapping of the physical and the virtual, and the social movement-like nature of new technologies. On a personal level, movement is about not staying still but taking action to shape the big global issues we face in the future."

I'm giving a swift presentation at an event on Thursday (quite possibly around vernacular architecture, Ville Radieuse, John Cage, 'Lost', new musical experiences and coordinating media movements), but the public event on Wednesday has good speakers and demand has been such that it's moved to a larger venue, so if you're in Helsinki, do come along.

Aula 2006: Movement

UPDATE: Here's the PDF which accompanied the (8 minute) talk I gave earlier today. I'll try to add some notes soon, as without a script it may not make much sense! (Insert joke here)

Download aula.pdf

Some great presentations today too. The following talks are the ones still fizzing around my brain: Saul Griffith, Matt Jones, Timo Arnall, Aditya Dev Sood, Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, and Tyler Brulé ... but pretty much all contributions were interesting, and complemented each other very well. Congrats to Marko Ahtisaari, Jyri Engeström  and the other organisers; an excellent event.

FURTHER UPDATE: Here's a related post from shortly afterwards, and here's the full written version of the talk, with images.

Why Lost is genuinely new media

Notice: If you care about that kind of thing, many of the following links will feature spoilers, particularly for those watching at the pace that Channel 4 dripfeed the UK releases of 'Lost'.

I've been as impressed with the way that the creators of Lost have enabled interaction around the show as with the show itself. Perhaps 'enabled' could be replaced with 'coordinated' or even 'manipulated', but strategically, the call-and-response relationship between the form of the show and the unfolding interaction across varying platforms would appear to indicate a very sophisticated understanding of contemporary media indeed. To aid communication, I've attempted to illustrate this process with a hastily-produced graphic score (below), but first, some set-up ...

A while ago, I wrote about a theory of using the ripples made possible by new media, to enable a trackable 'social life of a broadcast', based on our work at BBC radio. What Lost has done is far beyond that, truly raising the bar for much mainstream media. Again, it's ever clearer - frankly it was at the time - that all those late-90s Flash experiences, grown out of early-90s CD-ROM experiments, were largely facile attempts at 'new media experiences'. Lost is a far more ambitious piece of media, which uses the entire web as its canvas and its entire audience as its creators. I'd suggest this piece of work - Lost, when viewed in its entirety - is truly new.