Today I want to share an article that was previously published in Studio Magazine. On this occasion, I would like to thank their coordination team for inviting me to join their first release.

Summary /Overview

 
Traditional media don’t broadcast what the citizens are debating or organizing on a daily basis. Nevertheless, thanks to Social Networks, people can receive information and interact in real time with others, taking part in debates and social movements; and the 15th of May in Spain is an example of this.

This new information ecosystem reduces the influence of the mass media and slowly forces local authorities to relate to citizens in a more direct and horizontal way.

This is a great opportunity to generate a new “social control” model, pushing local authorities to take public opinion into account.

The digital media offers a broad environment for communication so that the organisation of any given action is greatly improved; everything becomes decentralized while simultaneously connected and synchronized.

On the urban scale, we speak of the “Sentient City”, a model based on a technological/social ecosystem, where knowledge, collective actions, and interactions between individuals and groups are encouraged, taking advantage of the new possibilities offered by hybridizing physical and digital layers.

In reversing the supremacy of centralisation over individual actions, citizens can become aware of their power and organize themselves on the web.
We have the necessary technology, knowledge and dynamics to put in place more open processes of urban administration and management. Citizens have already started to move; and although public administration could take advantage of such independent and autonomous processes to deal with complex situations, it appears that a clear political will is still lacking.

The fragmented city

 
Today, the dimensions of time and space, which were historically strongly linked in a space-time continuum, are increasingly growing apart and becoming independent, in a fragmented spatial perception. Nowadays a large number of people are moving from one point to another of the city to reach their workplace, and go back home. The distance between these two points (spatial dimension) and what happens between them does not affect or interest these people in any way. Indeed, the only thing people are concerned with is the duration of the trip (time dimension).
The city is no longer a continuous place, but a structure of nodes connected in a network (network city). These nodes become increasingly more defined, organised and efficient and, the journeys between them shorter and faster thanks to technical progress. The spaces of a city that have no particular characteristics and a unique function, that is to say everything that is not a node, loose significance, including public spaces.

In such city – the “fragmented city” – we use low cost technologies (internet, telephone and transport) to move, to manage our social relationships, and to communicate with people with whom we don’t necesarilly share a common physical space like a neighbourhood.

Very often the complexity of one point exclusively consists in giving access to other points, hence the importance that movement has acquired today. Instead of living in a continuous space, we continuously move between discontinuous spaces (points or nodes).

This networked structure, unlike a continuous structure, reduces diversity and complexity. The less diversity and complexity, the greater the need to move. Every point has its function and identity. Everything seems more organised and easier to find. However, to find what we are looking for, we are compelled to move constantly to other nodes.

The majority of these journeys are done by means of transport, at a speed that does not allow any relationship with the surroundings. There is a starting point and a finishing point, with little opportunity for a surprise or a change. All this implies an impoverishment of the intermediate spaces, spaces that link different points: places are consequently public spaces.

In order to transform these kinds of cities, it is essential to intervene in everyday aspects of life which might appear to have no relationship with the design of public spaces in urban areas.

Our lifestyles are two dimensional: in situ and virtual. Now we are able to intervene in the new dimension, what we commonly call “virtual” or “digital”, . As the sociologist Manuel Castells says “Everything we do, from when the day begins until it is over, we do it with internet […] the connexion between in-situ (not real because reality is virtual and in situ at the same time) and virtual is established by us. There are not two different societies, there are two kinds of social activities and relations within ourselves. We are the ones that have to search the best way to arrange and adapt them.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info

Public Space, Sentient Space

 
According to Daniel Innerarty, in the city the homogeneous and non changing area is nothing more than an extreme case within a global area of connected local multiplicities. Instead of neighbourhoods, local networks are developed, and public debate takes place in a virtual area. In this scenario, streets and squares have ceased to be the main meeting areas.

Internet seems to offer an alternative “space” for social relationships as compared to “traditional” spaces. This can be seen as a problem leading to empty public spaces; or on the contrary, it can be considered an extraordinary opportunity to strengthen social relationships by creating the necessary budgets to improve the vitality of public spaces. Today the Internet is the “place” where community models of management are being experimented.

I believe it is important to reconsider the city as something built by everyone, and to see public areas as the ground where this process can take place. Today we have tools available that are able to act as a catalyst for participatory dynamics that were previously impossible to coordinate. There are increasing examples of processes of creation by citizens, linked to the use of new technologies. It is undeniable that Internet is a key factor contributing to changing the society. That being said I believe it is obvious that we cannot think of public space without taking into consideration the potentialities of these technologies, how they are used and how they can be an added value.

We should begin to talk about a new type of public space, a hybrid space, where technology could become a catalyst for hybridising dynamics between activities that are not traditionally connected or that are located in other (private) spaces.

Juan Freire explains this clearly: “The differentiation between spaces and physical and virtual communities is outdated. We are witnessing a hybridising process which modifies our individual identities, communitarian and territorial. Internet has contributed to the development of global networks, but paradoxically it has had a less noticeable influence in local spheres. However, digital technologies modify radically the way in which we are organised and we relate to our environment so we are already living in territories where the digital realm is as important as the physical. The hyper-local networks and hybrid public spaces are the new realities which we confront with the advent of Internet and digital culture in our local environment”.

According to Juan Freire the crisis of public (physical) spaces in urban areas is also due to the lack of (open) design, giving the citizens, once more, the opportunity to take a real interest in its use. It has also brought into debate concepts such as “hybrid spaces”, to refer to the opportunities that the hybridising of the physical with the digital sphere offers in public spaces.
We can grant the assumption of the existence of a digital skin that characterizes public spaces and devote ourselves to defining its qualities and characteristics. Instead of “hybrid” I like to use the concept of “sensitive”. “Sensitive space” refers to the “living” character of these spaces; to their capacity to promote a two-way relationship with its users, to catalyse hyper-local social networks and to visualise information related to the environment in a transparent manner.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info

Social networks and Self-organization

 
If we analyze the increase in the use of social networks on the Internet we realize that we are witnessing a process of change that will lead to the disappearance of the current dissociation between digital and in-situ identity.
Most people can continue living in complete normality without having to take care of their digital (identity) presence in social networks. Nevertheless, it is highly probable that in a few years time the concept of identity will inevitably integrate both the digital and the physical dimension. Consequently, each person will be forced to take as much care of their digital identity as of their physical identity, something that many people have been doing for some time already.

We must take several specific factors of this new kind of identity into consideration such as its peculiar time dimension. The building process of the digital identity over time leaves a footprint on the web, a visible footprint that is accessible to any user. The end result is an identity that is perceived as a sum of the past (footprint) and present identity.

Generally we control our public image by showing at each time only what we wish. However, when our identity leaves a footprint on the internet, we no longer have exclusive control over it but it is shared amongst friends and acquaintances (namely the peer group).

Each person that knows me can publish information (photographs, texts, etc…) that are directly or indirectly related to my identity without the need of my approval. This is what happens in most of the social networks.

Certainly, my digital identity will be entirely integrated in the learning process and will be increasingly associated to a physical space; that is, the idea we had about a parallel digital identity that is detached from reality does not, I think, interest anyone: in fact we do not even have time to create parallel identities.

Our identity is not only formed by way of the information that my friends and I have published, but also through the information that my devices publish. An example could be the use of services like Foursquare that allows me to upload posts in my social networks about my location at any time, taking advantage of the internet connection of our mobile phones.

To explain this phenomenon Tim Berners-Lee mentions Giant Global Graph, this means, the future Semantic Web with which we shall go from gathering the relationship between people to focus on the relationship between people and their interests (documents). Thus, if the “Internet” has allowed us to connect computers and the “Web” has allowed us to connect documents, then the “Graph” will allow us to link the documents (places, objects, etc.) and the people. So we could define the Graph as the third level of abstraction, taking into account that in each layer (Internet, Web, or Graph) we have handed over some control only in order to reach bigger benefits. A direct consequence of these dynamics is the definite statement of a (unique) identity on the web that can be recognized by any agent, person or application.

This unmistakable digital identity facilitates the development of innovative social hardware projects based on participation of a non-collective nature, where the dynamics of collaboration are the result of individual action and interaction. We are progressively discovering the self-organisation of informed societies that are capable of revolutionizing their own structures taking advantage of the virtual mirror phenomenon that enables the association of information on a given situation with individual decisions.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info based on flickr images by garpa.net & See-ming Lee

Control and decentralization

 
Social networks reinforce a new type of control: a decentralized control operated by a diversity of independent individuals that collaborate, using shared and mobile capacities of calculation and communication. Information and Communication Technologies do not present a solution, but an opportunity to improve our ability to manage territories. ICT’s can be used for many different purposes. On the one hand their enormous capacity for processing data can be used to centralize all the information and try to “solve” urban complexity; but they can also be used to open and decentralize decision-making.

The aim is to research on how ICT’s allow us to define an urban administration structure where discontinued points of control exist in an environment of self-determination (appropriation) and liberty. This is an idea that is close to the definition of tensegrity that Buckminster Fuller mentions: “islands in compression inside a tense ocean“.

The introduction of digital technologies within the physical space enables the development of new communication dynamics and relations between neighbours that improves the cohesion of local communities and their quality of life, offering a feeling of greater security.

Thanks to new technologies and to some cultural “mutations”, systems and worlds that were previously closed and not very transparent, are now open to the participation of agents (and people) who are external to their organisational structures. Citizens become more available to participate and collaborate because they are better informed and they are finally considered as useful partners for the urban administration. Architects and urban planners can reasonably begin to work keeping in touch constantly with citizens, “sharing” their decision-making “powers”.

To explain this phenomenon we can refer to the concept of “long tail” coined by Cris Anderson. The Internet and the digital environment have changed the (power) distribution laws and the market rules. The present political and economic system is based on a pyramid structure where the power (or the economic or creative potential) of many is considered inferior to the power of those that stand on the highest part of the pyramid. There is a new system based on the addition or accumulation of all the small potentials (or powers) of the mass of citizens that, thanks to the systems of communication on the internet, can equal or exceed the power (or potential) of those who are in a privileged position today. These are the old markets of masses and the new niche of markets that are pictured at the top and the bottom of the well known graph of statistical distribution.

The presence of a centralized identity is not needed when the control and feedback devices allow the actors to visualize or to become aware of the consequence of their actions. The unconscious self-organisation phenomenon becomes conscious and intended control when the individuals are allowed to understand the effects of their actions. The concept of tensegrity comes in here when it refers to an administration model where decentralized and centralized decisions are joined, avoiding the appearance of any closed and omnipresent control dynamics.

Reversing the supremacy of centralization over individual decisions, citizens can become aware of their actions and intentionally coordinate them. This process may help to restore the necessary legitimacy and credibility to the interventions that take place in degraded urban areas.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info

Towards participation: Accountability and open data

 
“Participation demands an information system, an observatory and indicators that will regularly reflect the situation of what we consider as key variables to establish our evolution, that should be accessible and comprehensible for citizens” (Agustín Hernández Aja, 2002)

In 2002, Hernández Aja, Urban planning professor at the Universidad Politécnica in Madrid, describes the essential assumptions for citizen participation. A decade later, communication models and administration dynamics that bring us close to these assumptions start to become popular.

I would like to highlight (point out) accountability and the Open Data movement.

Approaching the term accountability we can create an ecosystem of communication and transparency that can enable citizens to demand responsibilities from governing bodies. This would help us to reach the objective of decentralizing control, which is necessary for a true democracy.

Open Parlamento (openparlamento.it) is a great example of how to work to achieve accountability. It is a web-based tool that enables distributed monitoring of the work of the members of parliament in the Italian parliament.

The web page offers lots of information on draft legislation, and in general, about all the activities in the Parliament. Most interesting of all is the distributed monitoring system that allows for control of every Member of Parliament’s political activities. Every citizen can “adopt” a member and publish all their declarations and confront them with their parliamentary activity.

We can imagine this same system applied on a local scale, where citizens have greater organization capacities and power to exert pressure. The control to which all the local administrators would be subject to, would be so intense that they would nearly be obliged to start up a transformation of the administrative structures towards a more open and participatory model.

The Open Data movement is an important drive towards achieving transparency over public administration. Open Data consists of making Public Administration data available for the public, such as data related to projects that are financed with public money or managed by public institutions.

The aim is to take advantage of the data that the public administrations do not want or do not have the capacity to analyze. Releasing this data enables any person or organization to build new consultation and visualization formulas, to simplify, diversify and even to enrich the initial information.

In Spain, within this new tendency, the Open Data Euskadi project should be highlighted. It is part of the Open Government initiative of the Bask Government: a website dedicated to the exhibition of public data in a re-usable format, under open licenses. On an urban scale, two projects stand out that have been activated by two Spanish cities; Zaragoza and Córdoba. They are beginning to take their first steps in the world of Open Data.

I am convinced that citizen pressure will force all the big cities to join this process of openness and transparency.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info REAL-TIME CITY | a proposal for Smart Turin by HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés.

Open source and Network Awareness

 
As we mentioned previously, reversing the supremacy of centralization over individual actions, citizens can become aware of their “power” and begin to organize in networks.
We have the technology the knowledge and the dynamics available to introduce more open urban administration processes. Citizens have begun to move; the administrations could take advantage of these autonomous and independent processes, to manage very complex situations. However, a clear political will is still lacking.

Probably the administrators have managed to delay the transition towards a new participatory administration model, thanks to the indirect or even direct support of what is known as the “fourth power”: the media. The current information system still offers the administrators and the “powerful” a wide opportunity to manipulate and control certain processes.
The emergence of a more distributed information model is beginning to offer to any citizen the possibility to produce relevant local information. A communication ecosystem based on social media is born.
This new information ecosystem can reduce the influence of the mass media and therefore force the local administrators to enforce accountability regarding the decisions that are taken. The administrators will be compelled to relate to this new, more horizontal and distributed form of communication: an opportunity to generate “social control” that can improve transparency and force the local administrators to take the public opinion into account.

A clear example of what is being presented here, are the latest citizen mobilizations that are happening in Spain. After the 15M demonstration, an organized and authorized event, many occupations took place in numerous squares in the whole of Spain. These camps were organized in a matter of hours using Twitter and Facebook. It is impossible to exert control over these information flows and action catalysts like the occupations. Steps have been taken towards a model in which governors and administrators are going to have to understand that they cannot continue to ignore the citizens while they defend the interests of others.

We are witnessing an innovative construction process of a new communal and public sphere; the development of a new model of public space that we have called “sensitive space”. Traditional media don’t communicate what we the people are debating on a daily basis, nonetheless, thanks to Social Networks, people can receive information and interact in real time with others taking part in debates and social movements, the example of the occupation of public squares is an example of this.

It is interesting to note that the in-situ (on-site) realm is absolutely essential and how the digital media is simply offering a wider environment for communication so that the organisation of any given action is greatly improved; everything becomes decentralized while at the same time connected and synchronized.

These processes seem to be nearly inevitable. Once they are established as natural local administration processes then we will be speaking about a more favorable environment, for an Open Source City, that is, a city open to everyone’s participation.

Flickr image by Julio Albarrán

This article was originally published in urbanohumano.org and Studio Magazine.

Su autor, Fran Castillo, propone dos líneas de desarrollo: Por un lado, un sistema de monitorización que permita obtener datos del consumo del espacio en tiempo real, y por otro, una interfaz que muestre de forma gráfica esos datos de una manera comprensible para el usuario, en formato realidad aumentada.

El proyecto, actualmente desarrollado en forma de gráficos y prototipos, ha sido propuesto en la plataforma de financiación colectiva Goteo para recaudar los fondos necesarios para el desarrollo de dos productos:

Producto A: Aplicación de ahorro energético doméstica

El sistema contará con una interfaz simple, donde el usuario introduzca su consumo energético actual mensual en euros y el consumo energético actual mensual que desea obtener en el mes en curso. Con estos datos la interfaz informará del consumo instantáneo actual y el acumulado en el mes en curso, para que en base a esta información y realimentación se pueda actuar en consecuencia y conseguir el ahorro mensual objetivo.

Producto B: Aplicación de ahorro energético en pequeños entornos industriales

Además de lo descrito en el producto anterior, el sistema contará con varios puntos de medición de consumo (hasta 5), de tal manera que se podrán identificar diferentes zonas de consumo y equilibrarlo, teniendo en cuenta (si procede) consumos de stand-by.

Está basado en tecnologías abiertas como Arduino Energy Shell, y sus resultados serán liberados con licencia de código abierto para que cualquiera pueda hacer uso de ellos y contribuir a su desarrollo. Como comenta Fran Castillo, este proyecto es además parte de un enfoque general más ambicioso que propone una manera diferente de entender la red de infraestructura energética:

Este nuevo modelo de red eléctrica inteligente, en oposición al modelo tradicional de red eléctrica jerárquica, plantea el diseño de un sistema energético descentralizado, donde cualquier usuario puede convertirse en un nodo generador y distribuidor de energías renovables. Open Energy como entorno de visualización genera nuevas representaciones no perceptibles de la dinámica de comportamiento eléctrico de los humanos en su entorno habitable. Estos sistemas de visualización en tiempo real nos posibilitarán adaptar los patrones de conductas de consumo en relación a los niveles de consumo registrados, así como la adaptación del consumo en relación a los precios en tiempo real.

Proyectos como este son muy deseables en este momento, en la medida en que conocer el funcionamiento de la infraestructura energética es el primer (y necesario) paso para poder actuar sobre ella y mejorar tanto su uso como su funcionamiento, acercándola a un ideal de sostenibilidad energética difícil de alcanzar con los enfoques actuales.

Página del proyecto: openenergy.francastillo.net
Página en Goteo.org: open energy

De acuerdo con los propios autores:

Openarch es un prototipo real de una vivienda inteligente. La primera vivienda diseñada desde el inicio para incorporar una capa digital que conecta la casa y sus elementos a Internet. Sus habitantes participan y se incorporan a una nueva vida conectada y digital. Es flexible y gracias a su capacidad de transformación se adapta  a cualquier condición que requiera el usuario.

La capa digital a la que a partir de ahora llamaremos D.OS (domestic operating system) incluye una serie de elementos que permiten a los usuarios estar conectados con cualquier persona o espacio, controlar los elementos de la casa mediante el movimiento del cuerpo, realizar conferencias desde la casa, conocer el consumo eléctrico en cada instante, activar cualquier electrodoméstico desde el trabajo, compartir en video y en directo las recetas de cocina con el resto del mundo, crear tu propio plató de TV en el salón, etc.

Openarch || FILM from Openarch on Vimeo.

La vivienda está diseñada para permitir la máxima capacidad de modificación y adaptación a las necesidades del usuario en tiempo real, como parte de un estilo de vida más dinámico y cambiante.

Más allá de la domótica, incorpora desde su propia concepción varios sistemas que permiten al usuario interactuar no sólo con la vivienda sino con la ciudad, con otros usuarios y con la Internet de las cosas, todo a través de una interfaz integrada con los propios elementos arquitectónicos y los objetos cotidianos mediante sensores y sistemas de visualización proyectados.

De este proyecto nos gustaría destacar dos cosas:

Lo primero, que se trata de un claro ejemplo de la aplicación consecuente de los principios de la cultura abierta. Desde la transparencia del proceso, que ha sido comunicado por los desarrolladores en su blog, hasta el hecho de que ser un prototipo real, habitado durante el propio proceso de testeo: lo que podríamos llamar una obra arquitectónica en versión beta. Lo que vemos no son montajes digitales ilustrativos (perfectos e ideales pero irreales), sino fotografías y vídeos directos del sistema puesto en uso, con todas sus deficiencias y capacidades. Acostumbrados a ver terminar el trabajo de los arquitectos el mismo día en que la obra se pone en uso, es interesante encontrar proyectos en los que las pruebas, los errores, los aspectos a medio definir y las mejoras sucesivas se comunican con el mismo valor o más que el resultado final, y son puestos a prueba con su uso cotidiano.

El segundo aspecto más interesante es que, frente a proyectos de investigación y desarrollo similares emprendidos por grandes empresas y universidades en búsqueda de patentes comercializables, Openarch está basado en sistemas de hardware y software open source, empleando estándares abiertos y componentes que permitirían a cualquiera desarrollar su propia versión del sistema, ponerla a prueba, mejorarla y contribuir así directa o indirectamente al desarrollo del proyecto.

Os animamos a visitar la web y revisar detenidamente los contenidos explicativos que incluye, así como a seguir los avances del proyecto en sus siguientes fases de desarrollo.

Fuente: openarch.cc

Between gratified walls, a massive steel structure, flat screen monitors and a speaker’s podium hosts guests and events that critique and inspire new ideas about 21st century creative urbanism. I had been meaning to visit the BMW Guggenheim lab since, while in Germany this past summer, a friend told me about it’s opening. After New York, the structure and monitors will be traveling to Berlin, and then on Mumbai. In fact, the structure and events are scheduled to travel around the world to 9 major cities for the next 6 years.

And what will become of the lot on Houston and 2nd? As I am currently researching the temporary use of vacant urban spaces, this question had been on my mind. I arrived in New York, serendipitously in time for the “What’s Next” discussions at the Lab. it turns out, the vacant lot owns a history of transformation efforts that extend beyond this past summer and BMW or the Guggenheim’s involvement. First Street Green, a local community organization made up of neighbors and friends of the area, has been trying to clean up and redesign the lot as community space for several years.

I choose the right time to visit. The day’s events kicked off with an address from First Street Green’s President, Robert Graf, who spoke a bit about the history of the 33 East first street site and their efforts to work with New York City Parks and Recreational facilities (who has owned the property since the mid 20th century) to clear and adapt the space to neighborhood needs. Next, friends of First Street Green, architects Jorge Prado and Silva Ajemian of Todo Design, presented a potential blueprint for the future of the site. Melding local neighborhood interests and the larger interests of New York City, they suggested a simple split-level architectural design: half community center and half park-space that would integrate the activities on the bustling Houston street with the first street neighborhood.

Then a representative from Art in the Parks, a project headed by the Department of Art and Antiquities, gave a presentation about the type of sculptures and installations that have been showcased throughout New York’s parks in the past. This presentation was meant to suggest the potential for the space to be used for arts viewing. A young, neighborhood boy raised his hand – and then the real discussions began. “What about the kids?” He asked, “we don’t want to look at sculptures, we want to play sports in our neighborhood”. It was quickly acknowledged that whatever becomes of the space, it will have to meet the needs of the surrounding residents, first and foremost.

It seemed the perfect transition into the presentation “It’s My Park”. The Hester Street Collaborative and Partnership for Parks were presented by Jordan Pender, who explained placemaking - the community benefits of citizen involvement in urban development plans. Along the same lines as the What If Cities initiative at Ecosistema Urbano, Partnerships for Parks now has an online interface called “People Make Parks” which encourages communities participate in the design of their park, incorporating tools like “Design Hoops”, “story map”s and “wish objects”. Lastly, Graem Sullivan, director of the School of Visual Arts and The Pennsylvania State University spoke about the significance as Space for making place for questions.

After a lunch break and a on-site game of Urbanology (it’s great, play it online here), the activities on site switched to a visioning wall workshop. Several tables laid out giant foam puzzle pieces and writing and decorating tools. Speakers, listeners, and passer-bys were encouraged to write their own ideas about what could exist in the space post-BMW/Guggenheim Lab. The puzzle pieces took structure, and the sculpture chart grew in idea potential that raged from Mobile Gardening to Music performance.

The puzzle pieces, we were told, would be presented to the 1st street community, who would lay the ideas in order of preference. The site’s development would depend on this input.

I observed two major take-away points from the First Street Green day’s activities:

First, the potential in the flexible use of raw spaces. Architects Prado and Ajemian suggested a “soft “structure for their proposed community center. Natural materials and a simple structure would allow for later construction or deconstruction. In other words, the architecture of the site could be planned from the beginning to adapt to neighborhood needs. Art in the Parks suggested the idea of installation, not murals or permanent sculpture to share the space. This art form could temporarily expose the neighborhood (and New York’s visitors) to contemporary visual art during periods of the year that the space is unsuitable for lengthy outdoor activities.

Second, the potential of socially engaging tools to integrate local (and larger) communities in urban development plans. These tools give all members of the community, regardless of age or educational status, the ability to impact the future of their shared space. Community members will likely care even more for a space they’ve invested thought into. The more stakeholders in a project, the less likely it will fall into disuse or vandalism.

Ecosistma Urbano is well acquainted with the notion that fluid communication between designers and the communities in which they work is one of the most important aspects of 21st century, sustainable urban development. At DreamHamar’s digital and physical labs, similar social tools are being introduced.

The history of the 33 East first street is, in itself, proof of the potential in communities to develop grassroots urban change. Until mid-October, if you’re in New York, I highly recommend checking out the BMW Guggenheim lab

If you’re in New York some months, years from now, it will interesting to see what becomes of the 33 East first street site as well.

Next you can watch (in spanish) a short video presentation we recorded at the office:

At Whatif.es you will find the following content:

• A presentation of the application, its purpose, its features, etc. An the sidebar there are some widgets with download links, last blog entries, Twitter activity (@whatifopen) and the Facebook page among others.
• The last 2.0 version of whatif.w, available for download together with the installation instructions as a WordPress theme that will allow you to turn a blog into a participatory application.
• A demo with which you can interact entering test messages, navigating through the results, etc.
• The blog of the project, where we will be publishing news, articles and all kind of related contents.
• The changelog and the roadmap, containing the work already done as well as the future goals for the coming versions. We would love you to contribute to it with your ideas and wishes!

The website is adapted to the new graphic identity of the project and is completely bilingual: from any page the visitor can click on the EN-ES icons on the upper-right side and get the content and the interface translated to Spanish or English. We believe that the extra effort we are putting into the translation will be worth it if it allows us to reach a wider international community of potential users and collaborators.

Although the website is currently centered on whatif.w, we will be including the new versions in development: the mobile application whatif.m for Android (also planned for iPhone), the plugin that will connect it to the online version, and any related one.

During some time from now whatif.w 2.0 will be tagged as beta. This is just a way of saying that the application is already usable but may still contain error or things that need some polish and won’t probably be visible until different users begin to test it under various conditions. During the first weeks we will be paying special attention to any doubt or problem you have in order to improve this version, and we’ll be opening soon a space for debate as well, for your suggestions to be implemented on the coming version 2.1 and following ones.

Note: The Whatif WordPress theme itself isn’t translated yet, we will be doing this over the next weeks. If you want to help us with it, contact us and we will gladly give you all the support and acknowledgement.

We encourage you to visit the website, to subscribe to the blog feed if you’re interested, and to send us your impressions. We hope that those of you who have some WordPress knowledge will get your hands on it, install it on your web hosts and even modify it to adapt it to your tastes or needs. We will be creating a collection of projects done with the help of this digital tool, sharing modified versions, thinking of ways to improve it, hoping that as time goes by there will be growing a small development community around Whatif and the project itself will become alive.

In a recent coffee-break in Ecosistema Urbano we have been discussing the project for City of Culture of Galicia by Eisenman Architects and one of us used the expression “Bilbao effect”. Inevitably, this reminded me of a post I had written some time ago for the blog complexitys (HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés) and I would like to share my ideas with our readers:

A recent article on ArchDaily talked about our ‘in progress’ footbridge at La Roche sur Yon.
We’re pleased to be a subject of interest for a such an important architecture website, and what we appreciate even more is the public feedback and the list of comments left, which have inspired some interesting reflections about our work here at HDA.
I would particularly like to share some thoughts on the idea (or even obsession) of “being original” in architecture, the meaning of copying someone or something, and what this could imply nowadays, in a time when everybody is talking about copyright and how it’s changing with new communication technologies.

This is a very complex subject and I don’t have any firm ideas or theories, but I would like to use this post just to share some thoughts on it.
In the article I’m referring to , the 80% (maybe more) of comments have a “this project looks like…” format, that’s why I’m mindfully using the word “obsession” above.
My first reaction was to think that these comments were negative, simply because they were saying that at HDA we are not original. But when I heard my principal Hugh Dutton saying happily “they’re comparing us to Calatrava, that’s great!”, I understood that my interpretation was very subjective.
In fact, being original has something of an obsession for architects, but today it’s maybe becoming an antiquated attitude.
With a bit hindsight, it’s quite crazy to think that a lot of architects (am I one?) are always looking to be original and different. I would dare to say that architects with an originality obsession are much more common than the ones with the obsession of simply doing a good project. My perception is that this is in some ways linked with making money in architecture.
If society is looking for spectacular contents, it’s quite evident that “show business” architecture is encouraged. Maybe I’m not being original if now I mention the “Guggenheim effect” and that’s why I want to be the first architect who talks about the Guggenheim side effect, defined as a phenomena of replacing architectural meaning with spectacular contents.

“Suddenly there is this great titanium-clad mountain in front of you”
Doesn’t this sound as a show business language?

But maybe this is coming to an end: as @ecosistema says, “Architecture is not sensationalistic anymore. Helped by a double crisis, the one of the real estate agency and the financial one, sensible architecture is now born”.
I totally agree with this vision of architecture, and I also would like to add that the coming of a more sensible architecture is also helped by new communication technologies, as I think that architecture will soon need to redefine itself as is happening with music or movies on the web.
For music, there is a great example we can use to clarify this point: Spotify, a new web-based music browser supported by big music labels, is reinventing the music business, as it’s selling a service which allows you to listen to a large quantity of music, rather than to sell you CDs or songs.
I’m starting to wonder if we shouldn’t set out something similar for architecture.

I believe this obsession for originality comes directly from the need to sell an image rather than a design service.
This reminds me of when Domenico (Ecosistema Urbano office) said “I wish everyone copied our Ecoboulevard project all over the world” as then the office would have become the world reference for this kind of project.
That’s maybe the same wise and contemporary thinking we find, in an easier form, in one of the last comments (by PB) on the ArchDaily post: “Looks incredible – I wish more plebeian structures were this beautiful…If it’s a good solution, why not copy it when it? As long as it is well done and carefully conceived.”

[ For italian readers who knows Baricco's novel "I barbari", I invite you to read this on barbarian contemporary architecture. ]
Credits: photo taken on Flickr by him: thanks.

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The post received a lot of comments and I especially love the one by our friend Ethel Baraona:

I have not more to say that I completely agree with you. It’s time to forget the idea of the star-architect and re-think architecture as it always have been. Frank Lloyd Wright used to say “I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen”.
So, we architects just have to give ourself a chance to work hard in a more human and sensible architecture.

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See the original post on complexitys

QR-code del Arteleku

Presenté este proyecto para el taller INTERACTIVOS `09 del Medialab y ha sido seleccionado. Es un proyecto abierto y la idea es que pueda mejorarse a lo largo de las dos semanas de taller.  Del 16 al 30 de Julio en Donosti, y aún esta abierta la inscripción para colaborar.

Sensorización de un edificio público y visualización de datos en tiempo real, en un espacio físico concreto, a través de códigos QR.

Se utiliza el Arteleku como base arquitectónica sobre la que desarrollar el proyecto. Para investigar la repercusión, en el uso diario de un edificio público, del conocimiento en tiempo real de datos obtenidos mediante sensores de movimiento y de datos introducidos por los propios usuarios. Se trata de trasladar proyectos de urban informatics a los edificios, y dar un paso más en la hibridación de la arquitectura. La inmediatez de la información, y por lo tanto la inmediatez en la toma de decisiones puede cambiar la manera en la que organizamos los edificios, permitiendo estructuras mucho más flexibles, directas y espontaneas.

Los códigos QR permiten hacer click en un punto físico. A través de aplicaciones como Beetagg (para iphone) sacar una foto del código equivale a entrar directamente a una pagina web representada por el mismo.

código de la pagina del Arteleku

El proyecto se dividirá en 4 fases:

1. Sensorización de los flujos de visitantes en las distintas estancias del edificio.

2. Visualización de los datos a través de una página web creada para el taller y que permita cruzar la información generando diagramas de flujos.

3. Acceso a los datos desde el mismo lugar donde se producen, a través de códigos QR colocados en cada estancia. Cada código tendrá una pagina web asociada donde se visualizarán los datos correspondientes al lugar físico donde se coloca. No solo datos producidos por los sensores, sino todos los datos relevantes que existan en la página web de Arteleku y que los propios usuarios del edificio puedan introducir sobre ese lugar. Todo el que se conecte a través del QR-code podrá introducir datos, mensajes y comentarios que aumentarán la información que se obtenga sobre los distintos lugares del edificio.

4. Finalmente y habiendo producido suficiente información, se realizará una valoración de los datos obtenidos y un debate en el que discutirá sobre la repercusión de la hibridación en la parte tangible de la arquitectura.

Este proyecto no esta cerrado y pretende propiciar un punto de partida sobre el que trabajar y poder desarrollar de una manera abierta, herramientas para transformar la arquitectura convencional a través de la tecnología. Crear un debate, mediante un proyecto abierto, sobre la repercusión de la hibridación en la arquitectura física.

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

Here we go with the next delivery…

spotify:user:eiza1980:playlist:4Z7uxOl0c4qexuHdbu01Ux