Author: moleitau

“FOAP springs eternal” or software and psychogeography

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Man that was terrible, I must have my phaser set to pun. Anyway, Chris Heathcote wants to encode psychogeography in RDF, with a lazyweb idea he calls FOAP: Feel Of A Place.

Full-circle then, from SBJ’s “Cities are great at answering search queries” analogies for the evolution of the web that he suggests in “Emergence”.

So are our cities to be rendered obvious through technology – reduced to digital mappings of the nearest McDonalds pushed to our 3g phones? Yes and no I think is my nonanswer.

Most current visions of ubiquitous computing within the urban real are nothing more than: Cities + Technology + Ease-of-Use. FOAP starts to point to a more complex, advanced mix: Cities + Technology + People + History + Ease-Of-Abuse. This sufficiently advanced technology in the city could be magic.

There are times all of us want to get from A to B, and sometimes we want to get from A to Beowulf: to get lost in the sagas of the city.

I spent a day in the City of London last summer at the height of all the warchalking tizz with artist Heath Bunting, and Kate Rich from Mute where we followed the line of the 2000 year old London Wall. Heath dowsing for water with a twig he cut hastily from a hedge at the start of our walk, and me dowsing for wireless with a TiBook and MacStumbler. Here’s an exchange between the three of us:

“HB: Have you thought of doing a tour? Like the history of cyber or internet or electronic London. Just offer people the stories?
KR: In LA you can do tours of architecture that isn’t there any more. Norman Klein. [The History of Forgetting: LosAngeles and the Erasure of Memory http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/buch/3169/1.html & http://ucmedia1.ucxonline.berkeley.edu/sales/artshum02/ahmain1.html#movie38460]
HB: This is Finsbury Circus, the Circle Line goes underneath this. It also runs under a significant portion of the city wall. It was always interesting to me why it did that – like people said, where shall we put the Circle Line? and 2000 years later the wall has affected the route of it. This was a roundabout question to you Matt: have you any recognition that this mapping that you’re doing is influenced by more ancient networks or nodes – like wells, or meeting places, or routes?
MJ: Not apart from the obvious one: IT is concentrated in the city of London for the same reason as the powerbrokers, that is for very historical reasons. Other than that I’ve not really divined a corridor.
HB: Would they be in the same places as the first cellphone base-stations then?
MJ: No. If you think about the network engineers, they are looking for the most coverage for the most profitable groups of customers. The thing about wireless is it’s bottom up, grassroots up, no-one really plans how it emerges. So you sort of get this ad hoc collection of nodes around where people are activists.

HB: So you think that an archaeological dig of wireless networking will reveal no ancestry?
MJ: I think it would be twice removed – if there at all.
HB: I remember ten years ago, one of the first mobile phone networks only operated in the tube.
MJ: Rabbit.
HB: Rabbit, yeah. It was a really good idea: you have a phone in the office, a phone at home, in the tube you don’t have anything. Now you can’t even make a phone call from the tube. I always think it’s good to look back in history to find your ancestors. It gives you legitimacy or understanding.”

Building on other recent thoughts and efforts, FOAP’s a great idea, that could encode and encourage the understanding of cities, not just their easy negotiation.

» Anti-Mega: lazyweb idea 2: FOAP – Feel Of A Place

Online, and on the ball.

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A couple of quick links from the Guardian Online team weblog:

“TVs are changing. At one time, they were the center of home entertainment, but PCs came in and were essentially the gateway to the Internet and took their place.”

» Onlineblog: Sony looks ahead

and

“The world is full of people who spend all their time worrying about cheap, transitory things like operating systems (Microsoft cases, passim) while almost no-one worries about the hugely expensive, very long term problems of storing data in readable formats.”

» Onlineblog: BBC Domesday Book “saved”

At time of writing, their permalinks don’t seem to be working. They have an RSS feed here.

Quotehunting

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I’m trying to find a quote which goes something like, and I have almost certainly got this entirely wrong, this:

“There are two ways to make systems work: make the small enough to fix, or slow enough to learn”

Any ideas?

It’s nice to be nice.

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Ben Hyde has been reading “The Evolution of Cooperation”
by Robert Axelrod:

“There is a lot to chew on in this book. Facinating things about minorities, hierarchies, enclaves, etc. etc. But in the end what’s marvelous about this book is it’s message of hope. It lays an exciting foundation. In short it strongly suggests that nice cooperative behavior (with players willing to react when they are misused) is a dominate strategy over the selfish behavior of those imaginary rational men who populate so much of pop-economics.”

On Friday, we just got back some initial findings from the ethnographic study we’re doing as part of the project I’m working on which aims to encourage people to engage with civic life and politics. We got some insight into the negotiations and conversations that groups engaged in which led to understanding, and cooperation. It’s going to be very, very hard to do, but we have to be able to engender the sorts of interactions that Ben summerises in his post.

Tangent: There might be some merit in “cheating”, and designing the system with deliberate “seams”/firebreaks that encourage real-life interaction. What would the web be like if you could only make a hyperlink if you’d had at least two phone-conversations or one real-life encounter with the custodian of the targetted document?

Been hitting the “Computer Mediated Communication” literature (which is a whole new world for me. I’m still staggered at how much stuff you’re not exposed to if you hang out with designers too much) but the Axelrod book(s) look worthwhile – any other pointers?

This project is really overwhelming in the richness of research already out there and how complicated we could make it – but in the last couple of weeks we (as a team) have been trying to put aside the theory and make things as practical and as simple as possible. The initial field research – being exposed to real-life problems, and propspective users – has really given me a boost, and renewed focus. Finding posts like Ben’s has too…

» Ben Hyde: “Nice is better than mean”

A fotolog is worth a 1k of words

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After banging on about HiptopNation endlessly, it would be remiss of me not to mention Fotolog.

From Fotolog’s excellent, inspiring FAQ:

“IS A FOTOLOG LIKE A BLOG/WEBLOG?
Sorta. Blogs are generally a lot of words with a few images. Fotologs are a lot of images with a few words. Fotolog is Blogger for people that don’t write well. If a picture tells a thousand words, then doing Fotolog makes you very prolific. Some say that the web is “a writing medium” — we say that the Blogging revolution isn’t necessarily about the writing — it’s about personal, continual publishing irrespective of whether it’s publishing words or images.”

The digital divide isn’t just about access to computers and the internet; it’s about, on one level, being literate, and on another being able to think systemically, algorithmically, creatively.

At last night’s Advance for Design London meeting – ‘adaptive design’ was debated in many contexts, including how to make things so people can remake them (cf. ‘wombling’: here, here and here). Ann Light‘s presentation hit upon the gulf between those who are consumers-users and those who are creator-users [I can’t find her slides online yet – lots of good discussion about Lego was had… more later].

While there’s a debate to be had about that being ‘a good thing’, visually-oriented personal publishing is clearly starting to create bridges across these divides. We’re all unlearning what we have learnt: to be good consumers as creation gets easier, more attractive, more personal and more powerful.

Don’t know about you, but I think it would be great to have everyone over here, on this side, with the Morlocks. We have a way to go to get back to the future. What’s that whoosh? It’s the sound of the barriers to personal expression sliding away a little more…

DIYfrastructure

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Kevin Werbach writes on the worth-watching Supernova blog about “the next communications network”:

“WiFi is taking off as a grassroots phenomenon. More users leads to more access points, which leads to WiFi being built into more devices, which pushes down costs, etc. With enough density, WiFi could be the basis for the phone and broadband network of the future.”

This reinforces what Nicholas Negroponte was saying in his WiReD piece “Lilypads and Frogs” that got me thinking back in September. I clumsily married some of these things together, along with some carfreeLondon in a talk I gave on the “hypermobility” track of the “beyond the Backlash” thinktankathon, entitled “DIYfrastructure” [1.8mb powerpoint in need of annotation]

Also – Danny’s writing about the idea that was at the core of our carfreeLondon proposal:

“I think [the] largest hurdle public transport has to overcome, I think, is the feeling of powerlessness and unpredictability it induces in most people. I think you can go a long way to reducing that – without requiring any heavy initial investments in public transport itself, by harnassing this new tech.”

I made a very brief talk about at this the social software summit in NYC: DevelopingBlurryspace/Blurrytime: giving people control over their time and space through technology. More on this later. There was a somewhat similar presentation which was a little higher on style than substance by someone from Ivrea entitled “Fluidtime” at Doors7.