Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
Reading Notes on Urbanism
September 20, 2011
Assuming the Terminator’s superhuman environment analysis capabilities are/were/will be in the future built on top of an ecology of networked objects, shouldn’t he have been in data roaming when he visits 1995? I wonder what his bill looked like that month…
Some notes on readings for my Urban Experience in the Network Age course.
Networked urban objects are in our future. The bike racks will talk to street lights, which in turn talk to each other, to our GPS display, the parking garage and the coffee shop. All with data. We can begin to imagine the attributes that the objects might logically possess and express, and how this might augment and improve our experiences within an increasingly dense and complex environment. Much like the authors of the DOM, there will emerge parties that will establish the object models of each and every one of the countless items that exist within our public urban spaces – and as a byproduct, also creating an object model of the city itself. Because of this diversity of objects, the expertise needed to craft such standards will be that much broader and require greater involvement from an entire community of thinkers – something a private and proprietary effort (i.e. IBM, Oracle, Cisco, etc.) would necessarily fail to achieve. What is more, any proprietary effort is suspect in that it aims to capitalize upon and possess a “product” – the data created by the individuals living within the space – which it can be argued are in fact the creators and collective owners of such a “product” and thus should have rights of access and do with it as they see fit. As our sense of anonymity is lost in the urban environment, as the city’s “capacity to act as a chrysalis for personal reinvention” is undermined, by creating the platform of our public networked devices using open standards “we will collectively stand that much greater a chance of winding up with networked places that reflect something of our own local values and traditions, wherever we live and whatever those values might encompass.”
Similarly, here we explore an imagined narrative of a fully-functioning networked urban environment using existing technologies. Imagined in that the narrative assumes ubiquity of the existing technologies. It’s a little tedious and not overly exciting, but paints an accurate picture of the world we could be living in. Far from ideological purity, the narrative paints a messy mash-up of open and closed, cutting-edge and legacy technologies, helpful and broken systems. This is the world we are entering and arguably in already. The real world is a tangled mess, and it’s about to get even nastier.
What do our flocking behaviors look like when connectivity is distributed unequally? Can we look to the history of social networks, our surrender of personal information and the ways we protest functionality as a good model for how a closed system might be monitored and held in check? Should we fear this:
Would an open data system with applications built on an API prevent or encourage this? Consider the iPhone vs. Android markets. If we look at this imagined narrative, much of the scenes look as they do today to the un-augmented senses, with much of the communication taking place invisibly. Should the occupants of the streets be made aware of sensors, their location and intent? Consider the iPod and how Mac products hide their functionality in favor of placid consumption.