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People arewalking architectureor making NearlyNets with MujiCompMatt Jones, TechnoArk, January 2010
Hello.Hello. My name is Matt Jones, and I’m a designer. I work at a small design and invention company called BERG in London.
We make our own stuff, but we also work with people like the BBC, Bonnier and Nokia
We do product, service and media design, and produce our own products to take to market.
We also do a lot of prototyping and storytelling about possible futures, like this piece in collaboration with Timo Arnall, and AHO in Oslo for their Touch Project. It’s a film called “Nearness” that explores interactions between things that touch each other invisibly - in many ways a homage to Fischli & Weiss’s “The way things go”
Today though I want to tell some stories about possible futures within cities...
Which first of all involves telling some stories of the recent past. This is Lord Richard Rogers, who has - alongside being one of the most successful architects globally of the last 40 years - written two great books about cities and their part in building a sustainable future. You’ll notice that if you are a globally successful architect, it’s very important that your clothes, furniture and book jackets are colour-coordinated.
“Our cities are now linked, and learning...”
Late last year, I went to a talk by Lord Rogers, where he said something quite evocative. That our cities are increasingly linked, and learning. Quite a sound-bite.
It put me to mind of Roger’s early career...
Because, back in the 60’s when he wasn’t a Lord - Richard Rogers was a radical architect reconfiguring the city with buildings like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, based on radical theories of cybernetics, space, social-networks, robotics and space stations...
The radical theories of a group called Archigram...
Archigram were a group of young architects who decided to makemagazines full of their ideas, drawings and manifestos from 1961-1974,You might be familiar with their walking city project...
They weren’t just architects.They were really interaction designers.They were really software designers.
Who saw systems and services as the things in architecture that would enable behaviours, rather than just the buildings...
They even used the term “Social Software” back in 1972! That blew me away when I found that while researching an earlier talk about this area.
Essentially they were user-centred designers, working with technology to create humane exciting environments with technology... with a liberal dash of 60’s psychedelia...
Chris Heathcote / http://antimega.textdriven.com/antimega/2009/01/20/cheer-up-its-archigram
My friend Chris Heathcote thinks they were on the right track, and that a lot of the things they were motivated by and proposed are worth re-evaluating. He wrote a great blog post about how our urban technology has finally caught up with Archigram’s thinking... I used to work with Chris at Nokia and he’s a fantastic source of critical thinking about technology, place and the city.
Of course, our predictions about the future and technology, no matter how convincing - always miss some of the greatest disruptions. For instance, William Gibson, who coined ‘cyberspace’ in his visionary novels of the 80’s never once featured mobile phones. Archigram saw the car as the ultimate symbolic technology of personal freedom - perhaps today we’d say it was the mobile phone.
The car changed the development of the city irreversibly in the 20th century. I’d claim that mobiles will do the same in the 21st.
“...the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”
This is Guy DeBord. French philosopher and head troublemaker of the Situationist Internationale, who coined the term “Psychogeography”
He defined it as:“...the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”
“...a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape”
But this alternate definition cited on wikipedia fits almost exactly, for me...
“...a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...”
As a description of what we carry around in our pockets - our use and experience of the city is being profoundly changed by these things.
New Mapshttp://www.openstreetmap.org
With these new senses we can make new sense of what’s around us. New maps. This is the work of openstreetmap.org who gave a small group of people GPS units for a small amount of time and created this wonderful image of the viscera of London’s flows and connections.
Neurones
You can’t not look at something like that, and see biological, cybernetic parallels... The bottom-up building of complex, reflexive systems...
“Our cities are now linked, and learning...”
Leading to statements like Sir Richard’s perhaps.
...and servers, sensors, routers, cameras &c.
So, the smart-phone-toting citizens of cities are creating a new opportunities for urban designers to work with, and within. As Archigram said, “people are walking architecture”
SMART CITIES FROM SMART PRODUCTS
I want to talk about the opportunity that we’re interested in - it’s our contention that you can help create smart cities* bottom-up by creating meshes of smart products.
*your definition of what “Smart Cities” means may vary, I’m using it to describe cities that become better by some measure ecologically, socially, culturally - by the utilisation of information technology.
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context
...a chair in a room, a room in
a house, a house in an
environment, an environment in a
city plan.”
Another architect, from Finland in the beginning of the 20th C, Eliel Saarinen gives us our guidance.
2 xI also want to use as a starting point - two pieces of thinking from Clay Shirky.
Clay Shirky:Situated Software /http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
Clay Shirky describes in his essay “Situated Software” - the phenomenon of many informational tools being created cheaply that are locked to a local context. http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
Clay Shirky:Permanet Vs Nearlynethttp://www.shirky.com/writings/nearlynet.html
Combine this with another essay from Clay - where he decscribes something he calls “The NearlyNet” http://www.shirky.com/writings/nearlynet.html
“Call the first network "perma-net," a world where connectivity is like air, where anyone can send or receive data anytime anywhere.
Call the second network "nearly-net", an archipelago of connectivity in an ocean of disconnection. Everyone wants permanet -- the providers want to provide it, the customers want to use it, and every few years, someone announces that they are going to build some version of it.
The lesson of in-flight phones is that nearlynet is better aligned with the technological, economic, and social forces that help networks actually get built.”
“[the] nearlynet is better aligned with the technological, economic, and social forces that help networks actually get built.”
In this essay, Clay compares large top-down efforts to create all-encompassing infrastructure with more nimble, individually-driven patch-works of technology and ‘self-service’: “[the] nearlynet is better aligned with the technological, economic, and social forces that help networks actually get built.”
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context
...a chair in a room, a room in
a house, a house in an
environment, an environment in a
city plan.”
If we consider Saarinen and Shirky together, we might conclude that we set about transforming our cities with technology by building a stack of ‘situated software’ and ‘nearlynet’ type efforts – small pieces, loosely joined, each considered in its next larger context…
MAKING SMART CITIES BOTTOM-UP WITH PRODUCTS
Which leads me to the main subject of my talk, pursuing ‘smart cities’ bottom-up by designing smart products…
'Ubiquitous computing' (or 'ubicomp') and the 'internet of things' remain academic visions, and the products that might be seen to have come to market are no more than curios mainly that are sold to niche markets.
So here’s a somewhat contentious opening gambit. Ubicomp is a bit hampered by its visionary beginnings.
[I don’t mean to pick on Steve Mann, even though I’m using an image of him to illustrate this point - but the brilliant furrow he’s ploughed for many years is somewhat symbolic of the ‘jetpack’ visions of ubicomp that pervade the discourse.]
UBICOMP NEEDS SOME MUJI
We need a different starting point from the technodeterminist. I think that we need to start from a simplicity and desirability - Ubicomp needs some “Muji”.
I’m using the products and ethos of the Japanese retailer “Muji” as short-hand. For accesible products that have a degree of simplicity and desirability to them. I’m also a big fan of Muji’s designs.
Able to be appreciated as cultural, design objects rather than technology.
They should be tasteful, simple, clear, clean, contemporary, affordable, in order to be invited into the home.
By injecting some Muji into the world of connected objects, they might find their place in the home. And the City.
They should not be ubicomp, they should be MUJICOMP.
MUJICOMP
I ran a short workshop at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Summit in January this year (2010) about “Mujicomp” - it was full of practitioners, makers and theorists who have had lot of experience in the field of ubicomp, urban computing and connected objects - the reframing of the discussion that “mujicomp” was interesting and fruitful I thought. I loved Mike Kuniavsky’s (http://orangecone.com) assertion that we ‘abandon functionality’ as a tactic...
(ALMOST)MUJICOMP
And there are number of designers and engineers pursuing what we might call Mujicomp already - the Wattson by DIYKyoto is an excellent example of a connected object that is beautiful and useful. “I make energy saving easier, and I’m gorgeous.”
(ALMOST)MUJICOMP
This is Wattcher by Marcel Wanders - it’s another energy monitor (the ‘hello world’ of home-automation?) simple, unobtrusive, attractive. I’d say this is very mujicomp!
(ALMOST)MUJICOMP
Here’s some early attempts at Mujicomp from BERG.
This is a 10cms tall plastic version of me - called Availabot. The availabot is a small likeness of me that plugs into the USB port of a computer, and when I’m online or chatting to you, it would stand to attention. When I’m not it would fall slack to the table. This gives you some idea of the attention I’m giving our conversation, in the physical space you’re in.
(ALMOST)MUJICOMP
Availabot video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0voYnEjFcQ, and there’s more on the project at http://berglondon.com/projects/availabot/
BBC
Olinda
(ALMOST)MUJICOMP
This is another connected-device product for the home we’ve done: Olinda. Olinda is a radio, that is modular, connects to the internet and enables you to tune into radio stations that a small group of your friends or family are listening to. More on Olinda here http://berglondon.com/projects/olinda/
EXTERNALITIES & THRESHOLDS
One thing about these objects though, aside from the functionality and delight the object it self might produce - they can generate externalities, that might be viewed as positive or negative - building platforms - or pollution. Also, through the range within they can effect our behaviour, they create thresholds in our environment...
Hertzian TalesHertzian Tales, Anthony Dunne p101“...Radio, meaning part of the electromagnetic spectrum is fundamental to electronics... All electronic products are hybrids of radiation and matter... Whereas cyberspace is a metaphor that spatialises what happens in computers distributed around the world, radio space is actual and physical, even though our senses detect only a tiny part of it.”
“IMMATERIALS”“Immaterials: the ghost in the field” by Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze: video here: http://berglondon.com/blog/2009/10/12/the-ghost-in-the-field/
Jack Schulze: “We want to understand RFID, to see it. To have a literacy in it, a dialogue with the antennae and radio space as one would with any material.” The investigation reveals the very threshold of the immaterial field.
MUJICOMP
Mujicomp should seek to make legible the externalities and thresholds that the ‘immaterials’ it is made-up of make possible.
(ALMOST)MUJICOMP
Here’s a Fon phone/router. If you’re familiar with Fon, you’ll know it’s all about offering externalities and thresholds - that is, it creates a secure public hotspot for people to use a portion of your home bandwidth. The phone/router itself is pretty normal innocuous there’s no clue as to it’s purpose apart from the great big fon branding.
It’s quite an abstract notion perhaps - which is not made any more concrete by the object. How might a future object that creates such an invisible public/private threshold manifest?
How might we show that this object creates infrastructure? Should it?
“Call the first network "perma-net," a world where connectivity is like air, where anyone can send or receive data anytime anywhere.
Call the second network "nearly-net", an archipelago of connectivity in an ocean of disconnection. Everyone wants permanet -- the providers want to provide it, the customers want to use it, and every few years, someone announces that they are going to build some version of it.
The lesson of in-flight phones is that nearlynet is better aligned with the technological, economic, and social forces that help networks actually get built.”
“[the] nearlynet is better aligned with the technological, economic, and social forces that help networks actually get built.”
Which brings us back to Clay’s conception of the “nearlynet” - what is the role of design in making the assemblage of ‘nearlynets’ desirable, and hence, accelerating their scale?
MUJICOMPfrastructure
How might we design for mujicompfrastructure!
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context
...a chair in a room, a room in
a house, a house in an
environment, an environment in a
city plan.”
…how might the design of connected objects should be and can be considered in the next larger context - to create bottom-up “smart cities”
PORCH-COMPUTING
At the Microsoft Research gathering I mentioned previously – we talked about ‘Porch-Computing’…
PORCH-COMPUTING
…literally considering smart objects and services that could act at the threshold of public and private, in the same way that a porch or stoop modulated the spaces between the street and the house. Semi-private/Semi-public computing.
PUBLIC/PRIVATE SMART SPACES
We had very little time to delve into it, but it seems to me to be a very rich space to start to investigate. From practical problems like RFID-tagged refuse leading to the current obsession in the UK press with recycling ‘surveillance’, to more behavioural and architectural-psychology-related questions of threshold, issues of security and identity... the list goes on.
“DOORWAY” by Simon Unwin
It’s one of the richest areas of literature to mine as well, which helps... This is a fantastic book by one of my old architecture professors, Dr. Simon Unwin called “Doorway” http://www.studio-international.co.uk/books/doorway.asp
Simon Unwin, Doorways
“Entrances are things here things are delivered or left for collection. The postman delivers mail, the milkman leaves a bottle of milk on the doorstep. The waste-disposal officers of the local authority collect the garbage and black rubbish bags from our front gates. Entrances, doorways, gates represent that interface between the private realm of the individual or family, and the public services that help support them.”
Here’s a quote from Dr. Unwin’s book “Doorway”, which illustrates the richness of the doorway as a place to investigate connected objects, services, spaces and the city...
NOLLI MAP OF ROME
I think that visualising these thresholds between the privately-owned and the publicly-used - the services and the objects that connect them, the desire-lines that connect them – will lead to not only to more interesting, desirable outcomes for what was known as “ubicomp”, but also for the cities that it will slowly, but surely start to inhabit.
This iconic map of rome - the ‘Nolli’ map - shows all the interlinked ‘public’ space in Rome - the piazzas, and the interiors of churches as a continuous space.
If we consider what we might aggregate ‘bottom-up’ nearlynets from these personally-desirable objects and services, we will create a more reflexive and rich connected layer in the cities of the near-future.
JANE JACOBS
"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."
While all the time bearing in mind the words of Jane Jacobs…"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."
