Urban computing and situated technologies
I presented some thoughts on technosocial devices of everyday life (pdf) at 2006’s Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium and anyone interested in the intersections between new technologies, urban form and social life should check out the first Situated Technologies Pamphlet: Urban Computing and its Discontents by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard.
The Situated Technologies Pamphlet series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How is our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities? Situated Technologies Pamphlets will be published in nine issues and will be edited by a rotating list of leading researchers and practitioners from architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media study, performance studies, and engineering.
Adam also recently announced his intention to self-publish his new book, The City Is Here For You To Use: Urban form and experience in the age of ubiquitous computing:
[The book] assumes that emergent technologies like RFID, mesh networking and shape-memory actuators - all of which are explained for the non-technically-inclined reader - will simply be part of how cities will be made from now on, and seeks to understand what impact they’re likely to have on metropolitan form and experience.
You can think of it as a substantially expanded investigation into many of the themes and concerns raised in our pamphlet Urban Computing and its Discontents, notably:
- How will our understanding of the city change when touchless payment infrastructures, “intelligent” access-control systems and dynamic advertisements are the stuff of everyday urban life?
- How might we use these new technologies to create liveable, humane, sustainable and vibrant places?
- Will we be able to do so while managing the inevitable new orders of frustration and inconvenience they’ll occasion - to say nothing of their unsettling, inherent potential for panoptical surveillance and regulation?Through interviews, case studies, analysis and illustration, The City Is Here makes the case that these technologies can help us rediscover public space, then suggests how we might use them to reclaim that space as a common good and a resource for all.
Along related lines is in-between-ness by Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer and Karen Martin
Research on the design of future technologies has been recently directed toward the identification of what space and place mean in relation to people and ubiquitous technologies. However, mostly the workplace and the domestic sphere have been well defined and studied so far, with a smaller number of projects focusing on social spaces. We believe these categories only address a narrow range of people’s daily experience. More specifically, the transition from one place to another has not been much considered, yet it is these transitions which structure people’s daily life as a continuous flow rather than a series of discrete moments. We are using the concept of in-betweenness to explore these passages between meaningful places and events.
In-between spaces such as public transport, lobbies, shopping plazas and underpasses are typically overlooked and relegated to the background; only by virtue of their unimportance are they considered to be related. Rather than classing them as the void between more ‘meaningful’ places, we are considering them in their own right. Our approach to in-between-ness consists in exploring different aspects of this concept through applied design projects and a series of workshops.
See also:
Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation edited by Marcus Foth
The Porous City: Art Claiming the Urban Void conference
Digital Urban - The Visual City (pdf) by Dr Andy Hudson-Smith
Adventures in Urban Computing (pdf) and Urban Computing and The Temple of Doom (pdf) by Einar Sneve Martinussen
- Anne