Last week the TECHNOLOGY workshop took place and Hamar response was even better than expected. We also had a workshop with students from Bergen School of Architecture, who resulted in a free lunch on Stortorget – with a cow as special guest!

On today’s Hamar Experience 11 Belinda Tato will share pictures and anecdotes from the workshop and the free lunch.

And of course, because Hamar is the star of dreamhamar, Belinda will share the spotlight with a citizen who participated on TECHNOLOGY workshop – Morten Fridstrøm. He will tell us about his experience and if the workshop was everything he expected!

Unfortunately, we will not be able to bring the cow to Hamar Experience. Nevertheless, you’ve got a date with the progress of dreamhamar on Monday, at 18:00h on http://www.dreamhamar.org/category/hamar-experience/

See you this evening!

This is going to be a very interesting week in Hamar. TECHNOLOGY workshop begins tomorrow, Sept. 27th, at 18h at the Physical LAB, with media expert Bjarte Ytre-Arne as community activator.

The workshop will continue on Wednesday 28th, with blogger Juan Freire. TECHNOLOGY ends on Thursday 29th with a lecture and a round table with Bjarte Ytre-Arne and Juan Freire from 19 to 21h.

You can still register for the workshops (dreamhamar@gmail.com) or just show up at the lecture on the 29th.

You are all invited to participate, share your ideas and meet other people interested in the future of Stortorget Square.

Belinda Tato will talk about this and other subjects on today’s Hamar Experience. Remember, you’ve got a date at 18h with Hamar Experience 10!

More info on TECHNOLOGY workshop here (Norwegian)

During the 5th social responsibility forum in Madrid organized by Net Impact and IE, I had the occasion to listen to a talk by Ashoka fellow Rodrigo Baggio, a devoted social entrepreneur and the founder of CDI - Committee for Democracy in Information Technology, a non-profit organization promoting social inclusion by using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a tool for building active citizenship.

Installed in impoverished communities, each CDI Community Center is working in partnership with existing leading grassroots organizations that provide an infrastructure, while CDI supplies free computers and software, implements educational methods, trains instructors and monitors the schools. CDI´s educational methodology is a combination of civic and digital education that seeks to help people help themselves, empowering the communities to understand the challenges they are facing and work together to solve them. Using technology to acquire knowledge stimulates the local economic development and creates jobs.

Today composed of 816 self-managed and self-sustaining community centers throughout Brazil and 8 other countries in Latin America, this large network of solidarity makes CDI´s work feasible and replicates its experience. There is an ongoing investment in staff competencies updating, knowledge exchange and the qualification of educators who come from the communities where the schools are settled.

For more information.

Across its Schools and academic centers, Harvard is embracing cutting-edge technology that is rapidly changing the nature of scholarship, redefining research, opening doors to information, fostering collaboration, and revolutionizing classroom learning.

Camera Operator Edith Young scans a rare Chinese book with the help of special, high-resolution cameras. Young is one of many digital specialists across campus who are playing a major role in digitizing Harvard.

Examples abound across campus, and often involve stitching the Schools together. Recognizing the need for more digital interactivity, for instance, the Library Implementation Work Group, building on the work of the Task Force on University Libraries, two weeks ago recommended adopting a system that emphasizes a more harmonized approach to the global strategic, administrative, and business processes of the libraries.

The University’s leadership in information technology dates back more than 65 years to the Mark I, which is considered the first mainframe computer. It was the brainchild of Ph.D. physics candidate Howard H. Aiken, who envisioned a newer, faster, more powerful calculating machine.

Technology in the classroom
Aiken’s mega-computer was the prototype that paved the way for the Blackberrys and iPods of today, the powerful handheld digital devices that are ubiquitous in Harvard’s classrooms. In those classes, the fans and adopters of such technology say, electronic devices aren’t driving education, but instead are supplementing the pedagogy.

Eric Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, has used wireless technology in his introductory physics class for 17 years. His students use clickers, their own handheld devices, or their computers to send answers to a common website that registers the responses on a screen in the front of the classroom. Mazur introduced the clickers to ask questions of students, to get them to discuss their answers in small groups, and to have them try to convince each other of their own reasoning.

“In the end,” said Mazur, “learning and research is a social experience. It’s people, it’s not sitting in front of a book, or sitting in front of a terminal.”

Harvard professors increasingly engage their students electronically by using clickers, virtual office hours, videos and transcripts of their lectures online, and comprehensive course websites.

In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Katie Vale, director of the Academic Technology Group, and her team help instructors to enhance their curricula through technology. Together, they have created a virtual model of Harvard Yard in the 17th century and a three-dimensional visualization of a virus and its reaction to certain drugs.

“What we want to be able to do is make sure the teaching is driving the technology,” said Vale. “We want to be able to solve educational problems through the use of technology and encourage faculty to try new and different pedagogical methods, such as using clickers for active learning.”

In the HBS course “Dynamic Markets,” students emulate the New York Stock Exchange through their computers.  Joshua Coval, Robert G. Kirby Professor of Business Administration, and Erik Stafford, John A. Paulson Professor of Business Administration, developed a software program that simulates the financial markets. The program allows students to trade with each other, compete for opportunities, and learn the principles of finance.

“It’s a very powerful learning vehicle,” said Coval. “When it clicks, it gets imprinted in their psyche. The hope is that it will remain with them for many, many years.”

Martin Bechthold is a professor of architectural technology and director of the GSD’s Fabrication Lab, which is home to such digital devices as a computer numerically controlled, six-axis, robotic manipulator. Attached to a high-pressure water jet, the electronic arm blasts a mixture of water and garnet dust at, for example, a piece of marble to slowly carve it.

“Robotic fabrication of architectural components is, I think, one of the most exciting activities here with regard to the innovative use of technology,” Bechthold said.

Elsewhere, Harvard’s Initiative for Innovative Computing, an interfaculty effort, has developed ongoing projects that include the Scientists’ Discovery Room Lab. Part of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), under the direction of Chia Shen, the lab focuses on human-computer interaction. One promising project involves tabletop touch-screen technology that aids occupational therapy for children with cerebral palsy.

Efthimios Kaxiras, the John Hasbrouck Van Vleck Professor of Pure and Applied Physics at SEAS, and a team of collaborators have developed computer-generated simulations to model blood flow in the human cardiovascular system, work that may help to understand diseases.

In another example, involving a group of physicists half a world away at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, Alán Aspuru-Guzik, assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has used a quantum computer to determine the energy of a hydrogen molecule.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which created an early prototype podcast, is at the center of much of the University’s web research, exploring, analyzing, and enhancing cyberspace. And the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s (HGSE) Technology, Innovation, and Education program “prepares students to contribute to the thoughtful design, implementation, and assessment of media and technology initiatives.”

Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis buttresses University research projects with geographical information systems that use a combination of cartography, statistical analysis, and database technology. “When we try to bring time and space together, we start to be able to look at change taking place over time in many places at once, and that’s only possible with computation,” said Peter Bol, the center’s director and the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Spread of distance learning
Thanks to technology, this year students at the 101-year-old Harvard Extension School can access 150 courses through its distance-learning program. Of those, 37 are Harvard College courses, and three are HGSE courses, all taught by Harvard faculty.

Students watch streaming videos of lectures and remotely interact with classmates and professors through real-time, virtual “chat” discussion boards, as well as through web-conferencing software and video conferencing. In smaller classes, students can dial an 800 number to take part in class discussions.

“By opening up its teaching expertise to a global audience, we are demonstrating how Harvard can contribute to the public good,” said Henry Leitner, associate dean for information technology and chief technology officer at the Harvard Division of Continuing Education. “It enables busy Harvard faculty, whose scarcest resource is time, to make their first-rate teaching accessible to a wider audience.”

Stanley Hoffmann, the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, several years ago agreed to open a class that he co-taught on U.S.-European relations on the condition that it be available to students in the Extension School and at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, a prestigious French university.

“It was very instructive and enlightening for Harvard College undergraduates to learn firsthand the opinions of peer students in another part of the world.

Instead of engaging with an on-campus classmate from, say, Paris, Texas, they could discuss ideas with someone from Paris, France,” said Leitner. “It worked magnificently.”

Hunting for new online tools
John Palfrey, the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and vice dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School (HLS), has spearheaded an initiative to create a “library of the future” that uses technology to help the stacks “come alive in a virtual environment.”

HLS lab initiatives include Library Hose, a Twitter feed of what’s being acquired by Harvard’s libraries; Shelflife, a web application that researchers can use to access and comment on work, using common social network features; and StackView, a visual rendering of the library shelves.

Palfrey also is faculty co-director of the Berkman Center, which in 2003 created a free blogging platform for the University that now hosts more than 700 blogs. The blogs are critical, said Palfrey, because they offer scholars an important way to exchange information, allowing researchers to engage, solicit feedback, refine arguments, and “improve the quality of their work.”

Blogs can also reveal important social and cultural undercurrents, as in the center’s ongoing project evaluating the blogosphere in restrictive societies such as Iran and Russia. With these projects, “We can gauge what the reaction is to the state — what the state is blocking, who is starting these important conversations, and who is setting the agenda,” said Palfrey.

Sharing the University’s collections
Using digital tools, the University is widening access to the massive collections in its museums, libraries, and archives, providing connections to ancient documents and prized holdings for anyone with access to a computer.

At the Harvard College Library, which consists of 11 allied libraries, items that have priority for digitizing include those that are at risk of deteriorating, that are unique, that are used often, or that are likely to fit well into existing class curricula.

A five-year collaboration with the National Library of China is digitizing the Harvard-Yenching Library’s vast collection of rare Chinese books. Another of its many projects involves digitizing more than 5,000 scarce 19th century Latin American pamphlets containing political and social commentary.

“It’s a benefit to Harvard, but much more broadly to the world at large,” said Rebecca Graham, associate librarian of Harvard College for preservation, digitization, and administrative services. “It promotes scholarship not only for the researcher and scholar, but also for those who are simply curious about a particular topic.”

Through the Open Collections Program, Harvard’s libraries, archives, and museums have created six online collections that support teaching and learning anywhere.  The collections bring more than 2.3 million digitized pages — including more than 225,000 manuscripts — to the web.

In addition, virtual visitors to the Harvard Art Museums can browse through images from its vast collections by tapping into its extensive online archives.

Harvard also has a key role in creating the Encyclopedia of Life, a one-stop information shop spotlighting the 1.8 million known living creatures on Earth, in collaboration with five partner institutions. The project is creating web pages with multimedia information, when available.

A collaboration between the Museum of Comparative Zoology and College of the Holy Cross biologist Leon Claessens is creating an online database, Aves 3D, that shows the museum’s 12,000 bird skeletons, including 3-D digital models of each species.

In addition, the Harvard University Archive is processing and digitizing 17th and 18th century holdings about Harvard in a program that carries special relevance. The documents, including papers and manuscripts from the School’s earliest presidents, shed light on the origins of the institution, and also on the country as it was struggling to come into its own.

“In this collection,” said University Archivist Megan Sniffin-Marinoff, “you see these parallels between the activities and the intellectual life and the public discourse here and in the emerging country at large, and the role that Harvard played in that evolution.”

The ambitious Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard project, under the direction of Stuart Shieber, provides an open-access repository for the work of University academics.

“We want to take things into our own hands and make sure people can read the things that we write,” said Shieber, the James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science, who heads the Office for Scholarly Communication, which spearheads campuswide initiatives to open, share, and preserve scholarship.

The program, created two years ago following FAS passage of an open-access policy, has put more than 4,000 articles online. Active for just over a year, the site has recorded hundreds of thousands of downloads.

Keeping the information highway open
What keeps Harvard’s digital engines running is a massive underlying structure that many users simply take for granted.

“There’s a critically important infrastructure that goes along with digital Harvard that people do not see,” said Anne Margulies, Harvard’s new chief information officer.

Harvard’s web system is one of the largest and most sophisticated private networks in the country. The fiber-optic backbone of the University links close to 500 of Harvard’s buildings on campus as well as the affiliated hospitals and other medical facilities. There are thousands of servers, tens of thousands of desktop computers, and uncounted mobile devices in the digital grid.

Tasked with maintaining what is underneath the computer platform, Margulies is also helping to develop Harvard’s digital future. One aspect has already risen to the top: video.

“Currently, 40 percent of traffic on our network is video. Some predict it will be 80 in a few short years,” said Margulies, who hopes to expand the network’s bandwidth to keep pace with the rising demand for video conferencing in classrooms and streaming of courses online. “We are seeing this explosion in the demand for video, and we need to make sure that our infrastructure is able to keep up with that and support it.”

Margulies relies on support from the Harvard Academic Computing Committee, a faculty and senior administration committee that explores academic information technology issues, principles, and policies for the University.

One technology effort under way is the collaborative group known as iCommons. The Provost’s Office created the initiative in 2001 after a number of deans expressed a desire for more cooperation in online learning among the Schools. Paul Bergen, director of Harvard’s iCommons, said the group offers a suite of online resources for teaching and learning. It includes iSites, an easy-to-use web publishing and collaboration system used by about 90 percent of courses at the University.

The humanities embrace digital
Digital scholarship in the humanities is a young but robust and expanding field. Authorities say that, while past research in the humanities was largely focused on qualitative methods of inquiry, digital media and web-based technologies are being brought into the mix more often.

“There is an increasing importance of visualization in humanities scholarship, and of geospatial components like mapping and other means of organizing knowledge, rather than in narrative form,” said Jeffrey Schnapp, visiting professor of Romance languages and literatures, visiting professor of architecture, and a fellow at the Berkman Center. At Harvard, Schnapp is collaborating with the libraries and museums to explore ways to animate their archives.

For the past three years, the Digital Humanities program has worked to raise awareness of the Harvard groups that offer digital services and support. As part of that effort, the program organizes a yearly fair in collaboration with Harvard’s social science division.

At the event, Elaheh Kheirandish, a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, presented a Micromapping Early Science project that offered a nuanced look at the development of science in Islamic lands through interactive maps that chart the transmission of scientific works and concepts.

“I am interested in the ways technology can drive the research,” said Kheirandish, a science historian. “Ideally, my hope is that this work generates research questions we would not have thought of without this technology.”

This article was published by the Harvard Gazette

This week Smith, who heads WeCommune, plans to launch the first software platform designed specifically for, well, communing (if you visit, you may get a splash page while they transition). The platform’s services will allow groups of three or more people to self-organize a “commune” defined by a shared interest or shared zip code, and will provide tools for communicating, organizing and managing projects, and sharing resources.

What is commune-support software?

WeCommune is a networking platform, outfitted with commune-specific project management applications that make it much different from a social networking tool. The software enables common and practical actions – for example, a group of members can organize a buying club, set up a rideshare system, or barter goods and services. And like everything on the web, WeCommune gives users the option to extend their reach: by networking to other communes, groups can make certain assets like bartering and goods-sharing pools more robust.

WeCommune offers the basic platform free to anyone who wants to use it, and even the more complex services are available for a monthly subscription under $2. Smith hopes that by making it affordable she’ll enable communes of all sorts – from those who are already sharing, like condo associations and college dorms, to neighborhoods and interest groups.

“We couldn’t find anything out there like this,” says Smith. “We feel like if we hit a home run, we’re going to be the ultimate community application.”

Why communes need the boost

In her L.A.-based studio, Ecoshack, Smith designs small-scale, modular projects like ecovillages, yurts and tipis that “invent new ways to live lightly on the Earth.” But her real vision for sustainability acknowledges that the way people interact with one another, use resources and build community are the most important components of any environment, from eco-enclave to suburban cul-de-sac. As it turns out, a lot of people were willing to help her test her theory. When she launched a site called Wanna Start a Commune? as an Ecoshack spinoff, she quickly connected with three cul-de-sac neighborhoods in Southern California that invited her to help them start their own communes. Since then, she’s become a self-titled “meta-starter of communes.”

Almost from the first meetings of her three “Beta test” cul-de-sac communes, however, she noticed that even where there was intention, there weren’t effective tools available for completing projects in a group. Nascent communes would have ideas, for example, to create a disaster preparedness plan for their neighborhood, or to turn a neglected space into a community garden. But coordinating schedules, resources, skill sets and other components of the plan among neighbors — many of whom had never been in the same room before — was more trouble than Smith had anticipated. Software seemed like an intuitive solution.

“The group members said, ‘isn’t there an iPhone app for that?’,” she remembers. “And these aren’t 21-year-olds; these are older people, too. I had to solve a technology problem.”

Smith tested out versions of existing social networking software, including Ning and Yahoo! Groups, but didn’t find the functionality that she was looking for. So she sat down and designed her own, with the help of collaborator Matt French and programmer Josh Cain.

An unlikely champion

Smith doesn’t live in a commune herself, and defines herself — somewhat ironically — as a loner. But her comfortable distance from the subject has given her a more objective lens for understanding community – how it works, and what gets in its way. She’s been studying community since the mid-90s, when she explored it in her master’s thesis at Harvard, under the tutelage of master architect Rem Koolhas. Smith found herself in China in 1996, a turbulent time characterized by extreme real estate speculation and the burst of a housing bubble. She focused her research on one intriguing social pattern: as groups of rural villagers moved to the cities in droves, they would often move collectively into one concrete apartment building, and re-create the community structure. Smith found the process fascinating. In her words, “They would take these global pieces of architecture as their own, and make them very local again.” (Her thesis, To Get Rich is Glorious, is published in the collection Great Leap Forward.)

The community solution, Smith says, “allowed these people not only to be housed, but to be housed in these tight communities where they could flourish…it gave me hope that, in fact, local cultures would be able to fight globalization and stay intact.” Now, she says, in the face of the global economic meltdown, she still sees hope for community-based solutions. Ultimately, she thinks, a worldwide trend toward resource-sharing could be just the medicine the economy needs.

It certainly seems like the right platform could touch off a communing revolution. But here’s a thought: while we’re in the kickoff phases, it might also be time for a new term that defines this particular brand of resourcefulness. Smith chose “commune” because it’s actually pretty versatile (she cites Wikipedia’s definition, “a community in which resources are shared”). But even though great, innovative ideas, practices and cultures emerged from communes in the 60s, the word itself remains pretty loaded with counter-cultural connotations that don’t seems as universally sticky in 2009.

Is the 21st Century commune a strategic collaboration? Or does the stretchiness of communal resources make for elastic living? We’ll work on some new language from our end, but in the meantime, call out your best ideas for the new communal meme in the comments.

Finding community (by any name) isn’t that difficult, Smith says, but it can involve looking for things that aren’t obvious to most people.

“You need to understand that your community isn’t necessarily your group of best friends. You need to ask yourself, ‘do we have a shared value set so that we feel comfortable planning projects and sharing resources over time? Do we have people of various ages who feel comfortable sharing their skills? Do we have a social infrastructure for getting things done?”

source: www.worldchanging.com

This interview is in the framework of a Phd research about new technologies and hybrid cities. It aims to demonstrate how this new tools can revitalize public spaces at the city.

how would you define public space?

I understand a public space as an area or place that is open and accessible to all citizens without discriminations; Nowadays public spaces have their digital counterparts where people gather, share, and engage with each other and their environment.

how would you describe public space at our cities nowadays? (problems and qualities)

The integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies in everyday urban settings and lifestyles is transforming contemporary public spaces. In consequence, it may not only matter how good the physical infrastructure is, it is the software infrastructure that also affects how individuals experience it. The ubiquitous technologies (e.g. mobile phone, RFID, sensors) that afford us new flexibility in experiencing public spaces are simultaneously providing the means to reveal our dynamics through the collection, classification, storage, and dissemination of recorded knowledge constituting a city.  However contemporary public spaces are not only about technology, they are also about interaction designs, about taking into account the wider context of organization, systems and people, and even legal and political contexts, belief systems and social and cultural fabric. If we do not understand these aspects, we are prone to make the same mistakes as those originated by past visions that relied on the fascination around the hard infrastructures and reducing cities and their spaces to systems.

what would you change at public spaces ? (proposals, solutions)

The presence of the soft infrastructure and its logging capabilities implies that we are at the end of the ephemeral; in some ways we have new means to replay the public spaces. This potential echoes very well with the recent interest of urban planners and designers in unconventional data sources. Currently land use and space activity data are mainly collected through very traditional means with people paid to perform manual count. These non-longitudinal data limit the emergence of evidences from the statistical relations with variables (e.g. What is the effect of physical layout on movement? How do people use the space?). With the increasing availability of soft infrastructure the process of data collection is improved. For instance, it allows to better model time, space, and behavior as investigated in the domain of simulations. In contrast, we are also ahead of conflicts to reveal or hide unwanted evidences, when new data can be used to the detriment of some stakeholders. Indeed the retrieved information might not be of primary benefit of each individual who contributes to a census. Moreover, some of this information can challenge political decisions that were previously taken based on assumptions or limited survey data. For instance it might lead to a decrease in the offering of public transport in an unjustifiably well-connected public space.

This end of the ephemeral calls for new approaches to privacy issues. In many domains, there is an ever growing number of personalized records which are being collected in public spaces, and at times disseminated in the databases and customer management systems of businesses, organizations, and government agencies that service modern living. In fact, these digital footprints have become inevitable in contemporary society and also necessary if we wish to enjoy many modern conveniences; we can no more be separated from it than we could be separated from the physical shadow cast by our body on a sunny day (Zook et al., 2004). The growth of our data shadows is an ambiguous process, with varying levels of individual concern and the voluntarily trading of privacy for convenience in many cases.

In summary, at the same time as ubiquitous geoinformation gives us new means to map and model human dynamics, it will also challenge current notions of privacy and make the object of study much more fragmented, dynamic, and chaotic. The challenge will be to appreciate and use the complexity and richness of ubiquitous geofinformation without crystallizing into authoritarian structures.

how do you think new technologies influence on public space’s changes? (hybrid spaces)

The ubiquitous technologies that afford us new flexibility in conducting our daily activities are simultaneously providing the means to study our activities in time and space. Indeed, the logs, fruits of these interactions, could reveal elements of human and social use of the ubiquitous technology itself and people’s mobility and travel behaviors. These latter evidences could be employed as indicators of the evolution of the attractiveness of the public spaces amongst other things (Girardin et al, 2009).

In other words, the aim is exploit the information membrane hovering over the physical fabric of public spaces to shift the urban design and planning practices from the speculative predictions and accommodation to more factual observations and improvements. Besides my work on urban attractiveness indicators, other research groups have been using a reality mining approach to derive specific characteristics of urban dynamics (Kostakos et al., 2008). A major challenge in this type of approaches is to draw a clear understanding of the boundaries and biases of the data. Nevertheless, these works support novel ways to describe public spaces leading to an approach we would coin as “human/database urbanism: It could consist in the use of:

The qualitative analysis to inform the quantitative queries: This approach first focuses on people and their practices, without the assumption that something computational or data process is meant to fall out from that. This qualitative angle can then inform a quantitative analysis to generate more empirical evidences of a specific human behavior or pattern. A few approaches in that domain address this perspective. Williams et al (2008) for instance argue that our understanding of the city could benefit from a situated analysis of individual experiences within cities, rather than taking particular urban forms as a starting point for the study of urban experience.

The quantitative data mining to inform the qualitative enquiries: In that approach, the quantitative data help to reveal the emerging and abnormal behaviors, mainly raising questions. The qualitative angle then can help explaining phenomenon in situation. The qualitative approaches actually requests to ask the right questions to learn anything meaningful about a situation.

In conclusion, beyond a utilitarian perspective, we have to consider the promises and hopes around these future cities and their informational membranes. If researchers and practitioners offer citizen better awareness of the dynamics of public space and power to influence their design and evolution, this does not mean they will accept the gift. Indeed, taking the example of citizen-science (Paulos et al., 2008) and volunteer-generated information (Goodchild, 2007), citizens might just not be interested in the collection of data, and the opportunity might increase the divide between the people who are able to participate and those who are not or do not.

Interview: video.

References:

Girardin, F., Vaccari, A., Gerber, A., Biderman, A., and Ratti, C. (2009). Quantifying urban attractiveness from the distribution and density of digital footprints. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructure Research, 4

Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as voluntary sensors: Spatial data infrastructure in the world of web 2.0. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, 2:24–32.

Kostakos, V., Nicolai, T., Yoneki, E., O’neill, E., Kenn, H., and Crowcroft, J. (2008). Understanding and measuring the urban pervasive infrastructure. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

Paulos, E., Honicky, R., and Hooker, B. (2008). Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, chapter Citizen Science: Enabling Participatory Urbanism. Hershey.

Williams, A., Robles, E., and Dourish, P. (2008). Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, chapter Urbane-ing the City: Examining and Refining the Assumptions
Behind Urban Informatics. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global.

Zook, M., Dodge, M., Aoyama, Y., and Townsend, A. (2004). New digital geographies: Information, communication, and place. Geography and Technology, pages 155–176.

Fabien Girardin is a researcher and engineer at Lift lab, a research agency he co-founded. He studies and provokes the interplay between urban infrastructures, ubiquitous technologies and people practices. His research employs qualitative observations to gain insights from the integration and user appropriation of technologies in urban environments. Subsequently, Fabien mixes the gained knowledge with engineering techniques to foresee and prototype ideas and solutions for designers, urban service providers, city planners and decision makers.

He holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Digital Communications from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain and an engineering degree from the Biel School of Engineering and Information Technology, Switzerland. Along his academic journey, Fabien was also affiliated with the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, USA to lead the development of analysis methods of spatio-temporal records generated by human interactions with urban pervasive infrastructures.

I would be grateful for any suggestion and contact of other people who might be interested in being interviewed about public spaces and new technologies.

Domenico Di Siena

Selection of a maximum of 10 projects to be collaboratively developed.
Through a program of reflection, research and production, the use of open hardware and software tools in a collective and interdisciplinary manner will be explored, in order to create technological prototypes with success in the Media from different perspectives: playful, creative and critical.

The call is aimed at artists, magicians, engineers, musicians, programmers, designers, architects, hackers, psychologists, or any other person interested in presenting a project on this topic.

Led by: Julian Oliver (New Zeland/Spain), Clara Boj and Diego Díaz (Spain), Kiko Mayorga (Peru)

In Lima (Peru), from October 10 through 24, 2008
Project Submission Deadline: August 31
Open Call for Collaborators: September 17
Project Submission Deadline: August 31
Open Call for Collaborators: September 17

More information and complete call guidelines: http://medialab-prado.es

Project Submission Form:
http://medialab-prado.es/article/interactivos_lima08_magia_y_tecnologia_-_formulario_de_inscripcion

Contact: interactivos08@medialab-prado.es or interactivoslima@ccelima.org

Organized by the Spanish Cultural Center in Lima (www.ccelima.org) / The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation [Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID)] & Medialab-Prado – Área de las Artes del Ayuntamiento de Madrid.
In collaboration with AECID.

Official website HERE, full description of the project THERE

The Wikibivouac is a collaborative map which reappropriates space to create new uses of the city. The wiki element of contibutions from anyone aggregates information for improved transient occupancy of place. We understand the value of a local resident’s recommendations and guidance – when this infomation is pooled and accessed a visitor attains a greater understanding of the true availability of resources and locations shown on a static map.

The Wikibivouac project launched as one of the ten selected projects at the Medialab-Prado’s Inclusiva-net event. Project hosts ZOOM Architecture and Damien Masson (CRESSON research lab) joined collaborators Chameleon, Cristina Braschi, Antoine Petitjean and Diego Cerda with the aim of developing the Wikibivouac concept for the duration of the event.

To do this, the ZOOM team initiated the Hunting Days sessions, worldwide searches for locations of a particular resource – free, drinkable water points, one of the most critical resources to human existence. The first step was a venture into the streets Madrid in search of a free source of potable water. Discovering a fountain in the park, team members shot video to illustrate the potential uses of the resource, integrating the scenes into an instructional video introducing the hunt and demonstrating the use of the interface to enter the points by street address or GPS coordinates. Data fields provided a way for hunters to enter info about the point, the way to access it, the times it is available, and other descriptive information. By the end of the first Hunting Day, (57) free drinkable water points had been entered into the database, and appeared in the worldwide map, with concentrations in Paris and Prague. When clicked, the points displayed the desciptive information which hunters had entered.

With the first hunt complete, focus shifted to the development of the openlayer tool which drives the Wikibivouac. Some points displayed at inaccurate locations. Developer Sami improved the accuracy of point placement from the interface, also creating a custom blue icon to represent water point locations. The points were shown by default on a black screen, but if users clicked the small plus-sign in the upper right corner, a small menu appeared which gave the option of viewing the points on two different map views.After selecting the theme of the second hunt, a second instructional video was produced, keeping a humorous tone to encourage hunters to search for free warm spots where one can find shelter through the night. Again the object of the hunt was a free, available, underused resource important to human survival : warm spots.

Future developments of the Wikibivouac could feature points of any particular theme – places in Los Angeles where edible ripe fruit can be collected from public sidewalks, for example. It seems clear that temporal availablity and real-time updates will be important in future development, creating a map which better refelects the territory in the moment.

Other possible uses include the ability to create and share a custom sequential tour.

Collaborator Chameleon is currently designing a tour of Madrid with instructions for traveling through selected points at particular times of the day, to maximize the offerings of the city with the least amount of waste and expense.

Damien Masson is exploring the idea of location-specific blogging, allowing users to enter points into the map from a personal blog via RSS.

One imagines a future when the Wikibivouac will support many custom uses, outputting information to groups or individuals by text messages to PDAs, including time-sensitive itineraries, or definitaions of temporal locations – shared points of reference better reflecting the cosmopolitan community’s shifting view of the landscape.

source: www.zoomarchitecture.fr

Monsieur Hulot’s struggels with the all-automatic environments in Jaques Tati’s Mon Oncle and Playtime

or the artificially intelligent computer HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s cinematic milestone 2001: Space Odyssey, that takes over the control of a spaceship and deliberately murders all human astronauts.

And now think of the opposite -there are at least as many fine examples. The plot runs as follows: Technology is going nowhere and we’re back to basics. Rock bottom. Ground zero. No nothing. Mad Max Style. Walden. Water world. The Day after tomorrow. Nature calls!
The other day I was watching a short 1980′s children’s animation film by czech illustrator Zdeněk Miler with my four-year-old son, in which a little Mole – the protagonist of the story – arrives in super-modernistic, remode-controlled house of a young technophilic man. In this automated surrounding the Mole falls asleep and dreams that all oil reserves have been spent and the world is going back to a primitive community. We watch him and his fellow animal friends live in a happy anachronistic unision with the the former technological-progress-believing-house-owner, who over the course of the story now turns into a prehistoric hunter-gatherer-type-of-guy. Camp-fires are lid inside the living room in the cold of winter, fuelled by the house’s carpeting and interior and frolic dances are performed outside at the wake of spring. My son just loved the idea – especially the part with the indoor fire – and it did require some clever arguing on my side to convince him not to imitate the Mule and his gang.

Now French director Claude Faraldo pushed the envelope of the urban-caveman-theme even further in his bizarre and controversial comedy Themroc, featuring Michel Picolli as blue collar worker who snaps one day, and sends himself back to the stone age. He does so by smashing down the outside wall of his bedroom and blocking up the entrance door to create a cave. Shouting, bablling, grunting and howling throughout the movie, Picolli’s character has by the end of the film commited incest with his sister, killed, cooked and eaten the local policeman and started a trend with his antisocial behaviour, which turns out to be surprisingly attractive to the ordinary people around the city. If you ever had the urge to bark at people out of sheer frustration or satisfaction, then this film surely comes recommended.

Well, the argument has been around for a while. Remember, Freud’s ambitious work on culture and civilization and its discontent? The only reason we are able to live and work together in harmony, he argues, is because we enslave our libido. Nothing but sexual repression. There’s a Themroc slumbering within all of us. Back to the Cave, Brethren. The answers to this situation are manifold and range in its extreme from seclusion to assault, from Thoreau to Kaczynski. In any case, with technology and human knowledge exponentially growing we are confronted with the need for answers to questions we can hardly formulate.

Lukas Feireiss