Ambient Informatics

Copenhagen:

additionalmaterialcph.zip

Scotland:

additionalmaterial.zip

Below you’ll find our itineraries for Copenhagen and the Scottish Highlands. These are still tentative so I will try and get the final versions out a.s.a.p.

Copenhagen:  itinerary-for-copenhagen.pdf

Scottish Highlands: itinerary-for-highland.pdf

Stay tuned!

We’d like to start putting together some ideas for Copenhagen and the Scottish Highlands.

Start by working individually. Based on the material we’ve given you and that which you collected, what is your proposed vision for the Copenhagen/ Scottish Highlands project?
While working on your proposal find a time to get together with your teammates to discuss the various ideas and get some feedback. During the group discussion keep this in the back of your mind: “Is there an all encompassing approach that unites the different proposals?”
 
For our next meeting we’re having Bill Mitchell as a guest so please prepare a presentation of your ideas/ proposal to present in class. I know some people were a little upset at our last meeting because we ran out of time and didn’t see all the presentations. With that in mind we will not have a reading for next week and use the full three hours for your presentations and an informal discussion with Bill about the various proposals.

some pix I snapped today…

This is starting to feel like a reoccurring pattern where we have a guest speaker, I make a point of listening in on the discussion and then let it all out in the form of postmortem thoughts about what has been said. So, pattern or not, we are creatures of habit and after our talk with Antoine Picon I have a few things on my mind.

I want to start by saying that I’m truly grateful to Antoine for coming in and talking to us and I thank him for being amusing and provocative and opening the door for us to challenge those provocations.

Antoine Pic(k)-on me

As I mentioned, I liked the fact that Antoine was amusing and provocative. I think he was trying to bring the discussion down to eye level and avoid any philosophical or higher level debate. I personally feel that it was the right way to go and when things are important and close to the heart you want to push away the clutter and talk from the heart, kinda like a good therapy session and in that sense I think Antoine was acting as our therapist, reflecting our frustrations and questions so we can learn to confront them ourselves. Having said that, I think that the overall approach of his discussion reminded me of arguments I had with my little sister when I was young, where anything I’d say she’d say the opposite. I think Antoine made a remark about how being able to contradict oneself is his privilege. That was sort of disappointing to me because it’s the sort of debate tactic you take when you do not respect your opponent or you think you are above him intellectually. It’s the rule which breaks all rules, i.e. how can you discuss something with someone who has no static opinion?

Just Do It! 

Another thing I find troubling is the role historians play in our society. My mother used to say to me when I was younger that if I don’t have anything nice to say about something or someone I shouldn’t say it at all. Historian such as Antoine have been watching our day to day “struggle” from a distance, analyzing past data and trying to infer from it about the future but not really getting involved. I’m not saying this about a specific historian or all historians for that matter but as the general approach taken by historian as to their role in our society’s evolution. Antoine mentioned historians as being pessimistic and I think that’s a valid perspective but one doesn’t have to be either pessimistic or optimistic but rather futuristic. What is it you can contribute to that future? other than a catastrophic promise? How is your insight to the past help us understand important steps towards the future?

Towards a non-modernistic approach

Antoine’s paper “Towards a city of events” plays on the name of one of the greatest modernistic manifests in architecture written by Le Corbusier called “Towards a new architecture” first published in 1923.

As I pointed out in class after Antoine’s talk, this is a very deterministic approach, a sort of problem-solving attitude that was prevalent in the beginning of the 20th century. The architects of that time were faced with the implications of the industrial revolution and desperately sought after way in which it could affect architecture. They did ask the big “whys” and how what they were doing was going to change the world and promised to solve all its problems. They dreamed up manifestos and theories about how the home was a “machine for living”, how the city should be divided into layers to accommodate all modes of transportation, and proud workers could enjoy cheap, industrial, customizable housing that would be grouped in mega-structures and leave enough open space for parks and recreational areas. Yes, they covered all their bases, tackled all the big “whys” and if you ever take a trip to Israel and walk through some public housing projects built in those days and under that spirit, I’m not sure you’d approve of how they answered those big “whys”. Big “whys” can be daunting, they can kill a creative process before it even starts, I agree with Antoine about the importance of being critical and reflective about your work but sometimes you “Just do it!”. Sometime you can’t see so far ahead to know that your this-won’t-save-the-world project might actually spark an idea in someone else’s brain and his idea has the ability to make a larger impact on the world. Maybe your idea was just a catalyst? I think Antoine advocated a very linear way of thinking and if i can be sure of anything today is that we are not living in linear times. Even the way he points out his examples of cartography, going from one era to the next shows his linearity where I would rather follow non linear models of history such as Manuel DeLanda’s “A thousand years of non linear history”.

Mapping the discourse

As Antoine mentioned the Renaissance map of Paris I thought to myself “what came first, the city or the map?”. Was is the difference between a plan and a map? could the map of Renaissance Paris been a catalyst for changing the city? Maybe it started out as a map where its maker added all these details and beautifications which caused the city planner to adopt it as a new plan for the city? Maybe the maps generated by SENSEable will one day have the power to trigger change in urban form and policy, maybe it’s just a matter of coming up with the right procedure and technology to do it? How’s that for a big “why”? Pfff….and I though I would have to kill myself with boredom.

A life less ordinary

And one last thing about life being boring. I understand Bo’s remark because he’s Danish and they’re lives are perfect (just kidding Bo…) but using “boring” as a parameter is just wrong in my opinion. I would suggest “Intensity” as a quantitative indicator for our lives. Yes, our lives today are more intensive than they used to be. Information is addictive but it has always been. Gossip is one good example of that. Women doing laundry on the banks of a river some hundreds of years ago is an example of that and if they had iPhones they would not stop doing the laundry but rather keep gossiping from home. Men would do it from the village’s pub and having more ways to communicate doesn’t necessarily mean they would stop going to the pub and their lives would suddenly become boring but it would enable them to stay more connected. If anything, our addiction to information should be regarded as a sign of us being intelligent life forms, in constant search for information and ways to expand our knowledge. I think using “Intensity” to describe our lives is a way to create a base for comparison between different times in history when life was less intensive than today or to describe one person’s day as a function of intensity. Intensity also hints to the existence of the “Event” which Antoine pointed out and could be thought of as an atomistic unit of data.

I have many more bits of thought running around in my head but I’ll leave it for now as is and maybe see if this blog generates any threats on my life?

CPH team
Sangwook - Urban form
Brian - People
Ben - History
Lena - Events
Christine - Media

———————————————-

H&I team
Aydin - People
Andrew - Urban form
Wen - Events
Rebecca - History
Mingxi - Media

Hi everyone,

I realize that there’s a shorter time span than usual within which to complete something for our next meeting but let’s make the most of it. We have two more meetings until the trip and we’d like to use that time to start thinking about the site-specific project. Now, it doesn’t mean that you’ll need to have a finalized project proposal by the time of the trip but you should have some ideas running around in your head so you can use your time in Copenhagen/ Scotland to explore those ideas further.

This week we’re having Dennis Frenchman as our guest speaker so please read his paper about the “Digital Mile” project in Zaragoza:

zaragozadigitalmile.pdf

As for the project proposals we’re going to do it “Pecha Kucha” style! Our “Pecha Kucha” session will include your short presentations of visual images, please keep your text to a minimum. The topic of the presentation is “Profiling” and what it essentially means is we’re taking our sponsor city/ region (Copenhagen/ Scottish Highlands) and breaking it down into 5 sections: People (who are they? where are they from? etc), Urban Form (How is the city built? How did these forms evolve? etc), History (When was the city formed? What changed through the years? etc), Media (How is the city portrayed in the media? News papers, internet, movies, television, etc) , and Events (What are the traditional events in the city? What are they about? etc). Please pick one of these sections as your topic for this week’s presentation and let me know so we can avoid duplicate work.

I’m also posting a link to an INFOPAK I’ve prepared with some material about Copenhagen and the Scottish Highlands to help you get to know these places:

infopak.pdf

I have plenty more material on the Scottish Highlands which I will leave a copy of at SENSEable lab if anyone wants to take a look. Please contact Bo if you have any questions about Copenhagen.

Good luck!

This is a movie which is kinda old (2004) but I think might be of interest to the workshop but also as good way to kill an hour and a half.

Here’s the synopsis:

Ten years ago, after being accused of a hideous murder of a mother and her twin daughters, Sean Veil became paranoid, filming himself along twenty-four hours a day to have an alibi if necessary. The small time psychologist Saul Seger became a famous forensic profiler and writer with the case and every now and then he accuses Sean Veil of the crime. The reporter Katie Carter believes in Sean’s innocence. When the body of the missing Mary Shaw is found, Sean has to prove where he was five years ago. However, the tapes that can prove that he is not guilty have mysteriously disappeared from the storage shelf and Sean suspects that Saul has stolen them to incriminate him. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sean Veil is an ultra paranoid murder suspect who takes to filming himself round the clock to provide an alibi, just in case he’s ever accused of another crime. Problems arise however when the police do come calling and the one tape that can prove his innocence has mysteriously disappeared

And some links:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363095/plotsummary

http://www.fancast.com/movies/Freeze-Frame/7349/main

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTYW1mvbUMI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR0XheK-dVo&feature=related 

What do you think?

I was thinking about the discussion that came up after Adam expressed his opinions on the scene from Minority Report, where Tom Cruise is running through a shopping mall and all these holographic commercials are aware of him, trying to get his attention. Well, this might be a low-tech version of that but if you ever went to India, Sinai or any sort of Mediterranean market for that matter, you’ll see store owners standing at the door of their store shouting at potential customers “Hi mister, come in here!”. Some of the more aggressive ones walk alongside as you pass their store and urge you to come in. How about that for aggressive marketing strategies? So going back to the scene from Minority Report, I guess in a way it’s a kinda of futuristic Mediterranean market.

I think marketing is part of our life and consumerism is what defines us as a capitalist society. Whether we like it or not, it’s what makes the wheels of our economy turn. From a social perspective I would say that a shopping mall is just another environment, characterized by a high level of marketing information. As a person I can choose whether I want to put myself in that environment/ situation or not. I also believe in the natural way society balances itself, i.e. if such marketing strategies as offered in Minority Report end up making people feel their privacy has been violated, then those people will stop coming to shop at that mall, stores will not make a profit and the technology, no matter how innovative it is, will be thrown out.

Personally, I feel uncomfortable in Mediterranean markets, mainly because my privacy is “violated” every time a store owner yells at me to come into his store. I kinda like the idea of the high-tech version of that store owner who knows what I like and what I don’t, the option to shut him off or maybe just customize his yelling…

Just a reminder that our next meeting is on Friday, February 22nd at the usual time.

On the menu:

1. A guest talk by Professor Antoine Picon from the GSD at Harvard (see assignment #2 for required reading)

2. Presentations of assignment #2

3. Group discussion