In Worldchanging Alex Steffen wrote up some thoughts on smart places and geospatial information tools that will interest the readers of Smartmobs.
“Properly done, great placemaking and good information architectures support each other (or, as I wrote earlier “the physical, the neighborly, the visceral and urban and the virtual, the connected, the digital and networked — these are symbiants, not competitors. The public square and wifi compliment each other. Public transportation and high density go extremely well with the kind of highly networked, extremely social lives which digital people live today.
we’re soaking in this sort of data and wireless bandwidth (and if Adam Greenfield’s right, we ain’t seen nothing yet): making good choices will mean that the information we have increasingly empowers us, both as citizens and neighbors.
What does this all mean for us as individuals, and how does this tie back to Alan’s original problem, the lack of good walking map for his neighborhood?
Well, it would not take all that big a push from where we’re standing to create a network of governmental, NGO and community resources which made it possible for the Durnings to easily:
1) Create a digital walking map of their neighborhood which included most if not all of the information Alan requests above, as well as a whole bunch of other kinds of information, should he want to know it: how heavy traffic is on certain streets; when the next bus is coming; which of stores he wants to shop at are open today and when they close; whether there are enough cabs nearby should he want a ride home with his purchases; even what streets have higher incidences of crime and might perhaps be best avoided.
2) Connect to the underlying meaning beneath the maps and both learn more and share their own insights: is there a land-use change planned for the lot down the street? What are the builders proposing there (and, with visualization software, you could even find out flows around us: how’s the local stream doing? What’s the pollen count today? How much energy are we using, how much is the neighborhood using? What infrastructure supports our lives? What’s coming out of the smokestack of the local factory (and how can we make pollution more measurable and more visible)?
4) Help us act in concert with our neighbors: how can we annotate places to spur community discussion? How can we make social software and local community work better together (and serve ends beyond getting a date or a party invitation)? Walkshed-scaled advocacy networking might be a real possibility.
5) Facilitate shared social goods: car shares, tool shares, product-service systems, stuff-swapping (freecycle-style) and junk tagging even hitchhiking.
6) Fuel local and regional economic activity and direct-to-consumer ventures like CSAs, both by making it easier to find these things in your walkshed and by helping to make it clearly from the where the things you are buying come.
In Worldchanging Alex Steffen wrote up some thoughts on smart places and geospatial information tools that will interest the readers of Smartmobs.
“Properly done, great placemaking and good information architectures support each other (or, as I wrote earlier “the physical, the neighborly, the visceral and urban and the virtual, the connected, the digital and networked — [...]
Comments
@ 01:13
And yet, I claim that we are in the progress of witnessing the
realization of such a new space. In places where computational
processes disappear into the background - into everyday objects -
both my reality and me as subject become contested in concrete daily
situations and activities. Buildings, cars, consumer products, and
people become information spaces by transmitting all kinds of data
through Radio Frequency Tags that are rapidly replacing the barcode.
We are entering a land where the environment has become the
interface, where we must learn anew how to make sense.
Making sense is the ability to read data as data and not noise. A
matter of life and death when dealing with the flowing reality of the
earth’s core: “If we consider that the oceanic crust on which the
continents are embedded is constantly being created and destroyed (by
solidification and remelting) and that even continental crust is
under constant erosion so that its materials are recycled into the
ocean, the rocks and mountains that define the most stable and
durable traits of our reality would merely represent a local slowing
down of this flowing reality.” (Manuel de Landa, 1997)
Reading this local slowing down of flowing reality has never been
easy, in fact it has never been possible. There was no way of reading
information in the data drawn by the patterns of the seismographs.
Vulcanologists could but read in particular ways that refused to turn
data into reliable information. Until Bernard Chouet, a physicist -
after five years of intensive study - saw patterns where no one saw
patterns before, decided what was data and what was not data. He
focused on a particular pattern that no one had seen before.
The design challenge we are facing now is reading the flowing reality
of our surface. How to store real-time information flows? How to
chart them? Which are our seismographs? How do we match real-time
processes with the signified that they are supposed to signify? How
to find ways of deciding what is data and what is not data in the
space of flows?