Space & Culture

My dissertation looks at how pervasive computing and locative media practitioners treat cities as interaction design spaces and publics as co-creators, so I’m always interested in how people are envisioning future cities. Dan Hill recently pointed to the Living City project, in which three alternative and parallel futures are explored:

Living City is an ecology of facades where individual buildings collect data, share it with others in their social network, and respond to the collective body of knowledge.

Living City is a definition of air as public space and building facades as public space.

Living City is a full-scale building skin designed to open and close its gills in response to air quality.

Watch the video.

Ever since the Ontario Ministry of Energy resolved to use Smart Meters as a means of promoting “conservation culture” I’ve paid closer attention to all the ways in which energy consumption can be made visible and, presumably, actionable. For example, in a recent presentation Dan discussed his ideas for a “a real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.” In his notes he lauds how certain systems “allow you to learn from personal behaviour, in a sense, even to reinforce patterns of behaviour. The best services here act as a side-effect of your behaviour; that is the product is simply a manifestation of your behaviour, providing a measurement of it.”

While I’m also quite impressed at how beautifully some behaviours can be exposed–check out Dan’s presentation for some sweet examples–I have to admit more than a little skepticism towards the assumption that exposure equals (positive) action, and I worry about what all this means in terms of accountability.

Getting back to the idea of Smart Meters, I was immediately struck by the government’s claim that the programme would “enable consumers to make buying decisions and lifestyle choices.” The unstated implication here is that responsibility for conservation is shifted, almost exclusively, to the consumer. While this may not seem important, it is connected to broader societal shifts in which individuals, rather than governments, become responsible and accountable when things go wrong–and that is a big deal.

I remember when recycling bins were distributed to all households in Red Deer, Alberta in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Some people were so put off by being told it was their responsibility to take care of garbage that they used the blue boxes as flower planters and placed them on the front lawns for everyone to see.  That may not be my idea of productive political action, but I now have no problem imagining groups of people refusing to become energy conservationists, or forming exclusive consumer identities around their ability to pay higher prices for electricity.

In any case, whether we’re talking recycling or energy conservation, by putting the onus on individual consumers to modify their behaviours, the bigger issues of industrial/commercial/institutional dumping and energy consumption are also effectively hidden. Combined with the devolution of accountability, I think that “conservation culture” takes on less than ideal characteristics that no amount of elegant design solutions can fix.

- Anne

This entry was posted Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 9:33 am and is filed under Architecture, Art & design, Cities & urbanism, Everyday life, Power & resistance, Production & consumption. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.