(fuente foto: www.youcoop.org)

The four first projects we will present today are the first in the list: Destiny Florida in Destiny, Florida (USA), Dockside Green in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Godrej Garden City in Ahmedabad, India and Elephant & Castle in London Borough of Southwark, England.

Destiny Florida
This project is connected to an interesting strategic plan called: How shall we grow? Witch think about the future of the cities in 2050 in Florida.

A prototype for future cities, Destiny will be a forward-thinking Environmentally Planned Community of Today™ operating with minimal impact on the environment and a hub where the latest clean technology innovations will emerge. While Destiny’s boundary is marked by 64-square miles, its footprint is much smaller, with a compact design and a focus on preservation. Destiny will preserve more land than it uses. Through its creation, many thousands of acres will be protected, forever safe from development. Destiny will only utilize previously disturbed land, leaving untouched and pristine open space intact.
The idea of creating a sustainable, self-contained urban center outside of existing city borders was developed and adopted in the Central Florida Regional Growth Vision. The consortium of organizations identified areas in the Central Florida area where independent, self-sustaining urban cores could be created to halt continued sprawl from existing cities.

Dockside Green
Maybe the most completed overview of the project in this website.

While there have been eco-residential and eco-industrial developments in the past, none, to our knowledge have incorporated such a wide range of uses as Dockside Green.

A model for holistic, closed-loop design, Dockside Green will function as a total environmental system in which form, structure, materials, mechanical and electrical systems will be interrelated and interdependent – a largely self-sufficient, sustainable community where waste from one area will provide fuel for another. Here you will find a dynamic environment where residents, employees, neighbouring businesses and the broader community will interact in a healthy and safe environment, reclaimed from disuse and contamination.

Godrej Garden City
There is no website, I only find those images, not very charming, about some Green?? skyscrapers in the website worldarchitecturenews.

Godrej Garden City is a 10 towers project comprised of 20 storey skyscrapers and above. Recently supported by the Clinton Climate Initiative’s Climate Positive Development Program, the project has been chosen as one which demonstrates urban growth in a ‘climate positive’ way.
Being located at the fast emerging central suburb of Mumbai – Vikhroli, this property is at the heart of a dynamically evolving city. Of the six A-type towers, four towers already completed and occupied, the four B-type towers are set for construction this year. Most rooms overlook the scenic landscape of the verdant mangrove stretch and the distant hills of Ahmedabad in India. The property is judiciously embellished with amenities selected to serve aesthetic and practical concerns, keeping contemporary living standards in mind. The residential towers are earthquake-resistant, constructed using computerized ready-mix concrete and corrosion-resistant steel reinforcement.

Elephant & Castle
Probably the most interesting of this selection, because of the regeneration of a big communication center in London Borough of Southwark

.
Elephant and Castle’s strengths include excellent transport links, including two zone one tube stations, an overland rail station and hundreds of buses each hour.
Although often perceived as being deep in south London, Elephant and Castle is further north than Victoria and closer to many of London’s key attractions such as the Houses of Parliament and London Eye than, for example, the West End.
The area lies within walking distance of central London’s economic, cultural and commercial centres. Elephant and Castle also occupies a key position within Southwark and has the potential to become the borough’s flagship location.
Its accessibility, proximity to the city, extensive public ownership of land and diverse population all provide a powerful base for regeneration.

This is our last daily playlist at the office, from now on we’ll post weekly or monthly playlists, so the first music brain-storming ends up here… the bright side is that weekly or monthly playlists are smoother and rested, and we have more time to select tracks for everyday work…

spotify:user:eiza1980:playlist:0iZq0jYXYYnqCggogvts9w

1. Throw in all the bits of info i need to talk about (ideas, media)
2. Develop my narrative by layout – not completely as a mind map, but more as a design-layout process, clustering, scaling, etc.
3. Then preform the talk from this map by zooming and rotating around.

As he, and computer scientist partner Peter Halacsy managed to sell many large project using this technique, and more and more friends borrowed the original flash file, they started to develop an editor, which becomes the WYSIYWG model for zooming / panning. And with scale one can really give depth to the presentation. By this time Prezi.com – the startup company has been founded.

Design thinking
We believe the core of our venture is to help people become better at using design thinking for their ideas – to be able to use visual thinking to develop them. We know its a long shot but this is our direction nevertheless.

Future
Our goal is not to add features, but eliminate most so its as intuitive as possible when people arrange their ideas, texts, media, and develop a narrative. Much like doing that on a coffee table.

And finally, who we are
We are a small company from Budapest, a dozen dedicated young professional from coders to designers.  Initiators: Peter Halacsy, a computer scientist who teaches at the department of media studies and communications, Adam Somlai-Fischer an emerging artist / designer (one of the New York based ID magazine’s top 40 youngsters worldwide)

Some more Press links about Prezi:
Prezi on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=prezi&aq=f

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/20/prezi-is-the-coolest-online-presentation-tool-ive-ever-seen/
http://lifehacker.com/5219662/prezi-makes-a-zooming-map-of-your-presentations
http://2009.thenextweb.com/finalists/
http://mashable.com/2009/04/05/europe-social-media/
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/04/the_best_business_model_in_the.html

Twitter is currently echoing the excitement of open data advocates and data geeks alike, due the release of data.gov, an open and free web repository that aims to provide public access to US Federal Government datasets. Or, in official terms: “The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government“. However, while this means that the data has finally become freely available, it is certainly not yet accessible or even understandable for lay people. The huge homepage banner “Discover. Participate. Engage.” therefore seems a bit hollow, as long as there are no interfaces and visualizations to really allow the general audience to explore the knowledge and insights hidden within. We are therefore all curious when and what online data visualizations will soon exploit this opportunity to bring data closer to people!

Hence Sunlight Labs has just launched, in partnership with Google, O’Reilly Media and TechWeb, a contest called “Apps for America“, including $25,000 in awards.” The contest submissions will also show the creativity of developers in designing compelling applications that provide easy access and understanding for the public, while also showing how open data can save the government tens of millions of dollars by engaging the development community in application development at far cheaper rates than traditional government contractors.”

If you are interested in data.gov, you might also like USgoXML.com, another index of web services and XML data sources that have been provided by the US government.

You might also want to know that today was also the launch of the Open Government Initiative website.

More information and (mixed) reviews about the data.gov website can be found at Huffington Post, Wired and ReadWriteWeb, and probably at many more news outlets very soon.

European Union, what are you waiting for?

source: http://infosthetics.com/

Medialab-Prado issues a call for the presentation of papers to be publicly presented during the 4th International Inclusiva-net Meeting. This edition will focus on an analysis of “peer-to-peer” networks and network processes, highlighting the social potentials of cooperative systems and processes based on the structures and dynamics inherent to these types of networks.

Selected papers will be presented within a program that will also include invited lecturers and debates.

Many topics will be addressed such as P2P networks as a way of democratizing access to culture, legal issues and controversies, educational and artistic applications, their role in the emergent countries, as well as other perspectives that make a broader reflection on P2P networks possible.

More information and submission form:
http://medialab-prado.es/inclusiva-net

Here we go with the next delivery…

spotify:user:eiza1980:playlist:4Z7uxOl0c4qexuHdbu01Ux

from http://www.playpumps.org
Access to clean drinking water is critical for human survival and is an essential ingredient for improving the lives of those living in poverty in developing countries.
 And yet:
More than one billion people worldwide do not have access to clean water.
Water-related diseases are the leading cause of death in the world, taking the lives of 6,000 people a day, and are responsible for 80 percent of all sickness in the world.
40 billion hours are lost annually to hauling water, a chore primarily undertaken by women and girls.
All this can change

A life-changing and life-saving invention – the PlayPump® water system — can provide easy access to clean drinking water, bring joy to children, and lead to improvements in health, education, gender equality, and economic development.
The PlayPump systems are innovative, sustainable, patented water pumps powered by children at play. Installed near schools, the PlayPump system doubles as a water pump and a merry-go-round for children.
The PlayPump system also provides one of the only ways to reach rural and peri-urban communities with potentially life saving public health messages.
While children have fun spinning on the PlayPump merry-go-round (1), clean water is pumped (2) from underground (3) into a 2,500-liter tank (4), standing seven meters above the ground.
A simple tap (5) makes it easy for adults and children to draw water. Excess water is diverted from the storage tank back down into the borehole (6).
The water storage tank (7) provides a rare opportunity to advertise in outlaying communities. All four sides of the tank are leased as billboards, with two sides for consumer advertising and the other two sides for health and educational messages. The revenue generated by this unique model pays for pump maintenance.
The design of the PlayPump water system makes it highly effective, easy to operate and very economical, keeping costs and maintenance to an absolute minimum.
Capable of producing up to 1,400 liters of water per hour at 16 rpm from a depth of 40 meters, it is effective up to a depth of 100 meters.

Exploring New Visualisation Tools for Community Participation in the
Transformations of the Built Environment

Pop-Up Landscapes and Wiki Urban Planning Workshop
26-27-28 Feb 2009 – Hangar Barcelona

Thursday 26 & Friday 27 February 17h-21h
Saturday 28 10h-14h 16h-20h
Presentation : Saturday 28 20h30

Participation : 50 euros
Inscripciones : activitats@hangar.org

Workshop leaders :
Teresa Dillon (IRE/UK)
lok Arquitectura (PT/ES)
Tuomo Tammenpää (FI).

Drawing on case studies taken from the Poble Nou neighborhood, participants will use visualization techniques developed as part of the Pop-Up Landscapes project and Wiki Planning to explore how mixed media techniques can be used to create a visual toolkit for citizen participation in urban planning.

Pop-Up Landscapes is a locative and interactive media installation and research project exploring the construction of landscape in relation to transformation, interdependency and survival. The project combines landscape photography and sensor technologies to create an interactive triptych composition within which direct, photographic impressions specific to different locations can be inputted. Developed by the Finnish architect Peter Tattersall, Wiki Planning is part of a wider attempt to consider what the implications of web 2.0 might be on architecture and planning, and whether or not social media (and phenomena arising from it) might be used to make urban planning more participative. Combining the visualization techniques employed in Pop-Up Landscapes, along with the Wiki Planning method, the participants will develop a series of visual maps and architectural sketches to be publicly presented at Hangar on Saturday 28th of February.

Teresa Dillon: http://www.polarproduce.org/
lok Arquitectura: http://lok-arq.blogspot.com/
Tuomo Tammenpää: http://www.misusage.org/
Peter Tattersall: http://www.dodo.org/