Nothing quite like coffee at midnight, music, buzzing laptop, a looming deadline. This is the last week. Polishing all the parts of the project, slowly starting to piece together that final presentation. The end is nigh.

Exams – a presentation and defense in front of a panel – happen next week, followed immediately by the exhibition from Thursday. And then… it’s over.

After that? Who knows.

The photo: a parking meter on my travels – it was either the last photo I took in Vancouver, or the first in San Francisco.

There’s a whole week left, and it’s amazing how much work can be done in a week when a deadline is looming, and there’s certainly plenty left to do. Nonetheless, we had to submit text and images for the exhibition catalogue, so for a couple of days I could pretend it was all finished.
Wishful thinking….

So to recap.

The service is now called City Tickets, which intuitively seemed the best fit, vs some of the other options, most of which included some variety of responsive, city, citizen, etc, which felt a bit contrived.. The powers that be give parking tickets, now you can give the city a ticket. Also, you know – parking ticket machines, city tickets….

A description of the project as it stands – and it got only very minor tweaks before being sent to print (via Alie) – is in the previous post. It’s only 360 words. Go read it and come back.

Below are the photographs I took to illustrate the now slightly tweaked project description. It almost looks like it could be a project…

There are still a couple of logical kinks to be worked out, and plenty of things to be polished and ironed out, especially for the presentation/thesis defense that happens next week. Process-y things like service blueprints, system diagrams, etc – things that might be logically complete already, but currently take the form of back-of-the-envelope scribbles and need drawing up properly.

I’m also hoping to get some feedback from the Copenhagen Municipal authority, and to fit in at least one iteration of user testing/feedback/changes, specifically on the wording on the receipts themselves. Exactly how the service is presented also needs some work – the text on the magenta sign on the ticket machine you see above was thrown together pretty quickly and could do with some refining, to make it clear how this machine differs from a standard parking ticket machine. And more generally, the tone of voice needs to be kept consistent, as it currently veers from functional and official to a bit more informal and chatty – in my mind both are fine, but not at the same time.

Onwards, to the final push…

Not just an evolving description, of course – the whole project is still evolving. But we were asked to write a summary of the project for the exhibition catalogue by the end of this week to allow for printing before the exhibition opens, so I’ve spent most of today massaging words into some sort of description of the final project.

So – here’s what I have. It’s been edited and tweaked and poked at and reasonably polished, I think, but I’m open to feedback.

And, of course – the project itself isn’t finished, and will continue to evolve and be refined until seconds before the deadline, no doubt, at the end of next week. Writing this has been a great way to get some clarity on how the service itself works, and thoughts on the project/concept itself are more than appreciated.

title: CITY TICKETS

subtitle: WHAT CAN WE DO WITH EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE TO MAKE CITIES MORE LIVABLE PLACES FOR ALL?

project description, approx 350 words:

Urban infrastructure is often considered to be boring and technical – and is frequently ignored until it is needed or breaks down. But the choices we make regarding what infrastructures to build, maintain, and how we use them are profoundly political and cultural.

Parking ticket machines are an example of an intensely technological piece of infrastructure, and this project explores how we can use these ubiquitous boxes to make cities more responsive to the needs of those who live in them. Taking advantage of their very ubiquity together with their printing capability, this project proposes a service through which ticket machines become a communication channel between citizens and their local authorities. By taking functions that are more commonly found on websites or accessible using mobile devices, and physically embedding them directly in the urban fabric, City Tickets democratises access and makes municipal services directly available to all where and when they are most relevant: here and now.

Using the embedded receipt printer common to all ticket machines, the service engages citizens and local authorities in dialogue. Citizens can report faults – a pothole, a graffitied sign, or a fallen tree, for example – and make suggestions for local improvements – a bench here, a zebra crossing instead of traffic lights over there. The use of short forms printed directly from the machines, paired with hyperlocal maps for indicating the exact location of a problem or suggestion and ready for annotation where applicable, make submission of this information to the local authority straightforward, from where it can be routed to the right department for an efficient response. On request, the local authority’s constantly updated to-do list of known faults, suggestions, and plans for the immediate locality is made available in the same way.

City Tickets makes the bureaucratic and opaque workings of power more transparent, while redefining the balance of power supporting participatory urban planning and management processes. While cities still have a need for parking tickes machines, converting these ubiquitous boxes to also issue city tickets and focussing on hyperlocal urban planning issues, City Tickets can contribute towards making neighbourhoods more livable and cities more responsive to the needs of their inhabitants.

This description will be accompanied by a couple of images, most likely one of an existing parking ticket machine, and another of example tickets – one filled in reporting a problem, another of an area’s todo list. I’d show them to you, but I haven’t taken them yet.

Thoughts welcomed.

Between the 2nd and 5th of September we will be having a final exhibition, here in Copenhagen. You are cordially invited to join us, either for the opening or later. I hope to see some old friends and meet some new ones!

My thesis project will be there, as will the great work my fellow students are slaving away over at the moment. The show is right after our final exams/project defense, so we might all be rather tired, but I’m looking forward to talking to people about the project in a more relaxed setting than the exams! Of course, not a single project that will be there is actually finished yet, but we’re working on it…

The exhibition will be held at the National Workshops for Art, right next the the Danish Architecture Center in Christianshavn. It will open at 4pm on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010, when you can enjoy an aperitvo and a preview of the projects on display, and it will remain open until Sunday September, 5th.

Opening Hours:
Thursday 2nd, September: 4-9pm
Friday 3rd/Saturday 4th, September: Noon-8pm
Sunday 5th, September: Noon-6pm

More details, here.

Do come and say hello. I look forward to seeing you there.

Just a couple of weeks to finish the thesis are left. Fortunately, things have somewhat clicked into place at the last moment, and although I had a decision to make as to what exactly I wanted to do with all those parking ticket machines I had settled on, I finally ended up with a direction I’m happy to stand by and defend.

I had a final status-check meeting last week with my advisor, Gitte, and my head of programme, Simona, this week, in which we discussed some of the directions I’d outlined. Simona seemed concerned at my progress and where I was, but I felt comfortable with it – I’d had a thought the day before where things fell together, and had bounced them off Jacek the evening before over a beer, and I was, for the first time in ages, feeling happy with what my thesis was (is) becoming.

As I mentioned last week, I chose to take parking ticket machines as an example of devices/objects/things that exist (are ubiquitous) on the street, that combine lots of technologies, and that we don’t seem to do much with. As I wrote last week, What can we do with a box on every streetcorner (ie, has location and a direction) that is networked, contains processing power, a payment system, buttons for input and a small screen, and perhaps most excitingly, a printer (of receipts, cards, or stickers). I mean, surely we as a society can do better than print parking tickets for cars with all that?!

So. I pondered possibilities such as printing hyperlocal stamps, potentially focused at locals – I am from this part of this city, and I’m proud of it – or at tourists – I found this specific location, and I liked it, and this is what I was experiencing as I bought this stamp. I thought about the ability to print maps of the very immediate vicinity – but who is that for, really? If you live in an area, you know the area. If you aren’t from the area, you are generally there for a reason, and especially in a city the size of Copenhagen, it’s actually remarkably hard to get properly lost. There’s definitely an opportunity to print maps that point you in a particular direction – the nearest bus stop, or a randomly (or not so randomly) chosen cafe. Which leads quite quickly to ideas of local advertising of some sort, which in turn immediately runs into the issue of why anyone would want it. Still – with the possibility of hyperlocal advertising being so obvious, it could easily be added to any other concept, and it kind of surprises me that it isn’t already part of parking tickets. Some of the possibilities: “park here, take this ticket to the cafe across the road, get a discount on your latte if you buy it within the next 10 minutes” or maybe “buy a coffee across the road and get your parking for free”, or even “park here, buy a beer at the bar, and get free parking overnight – and here’s the number for a taxi company”. It could be variable throughout the day, or dependent on external factors (“it just started to rain? come into our store!”). Still, though, advertising alone doesn’t appeal to me as a focus of my thesis – it seems too directly commercial, business driven, not in any way working towards making cities more livable, solving a problem, or improving people’s experience or existence. Still – I can see it happening, and would make for a fascinating study or project in its own right. Onwards.

A direction suggested by Simona was to incorporate existing parking ticket machines into carsharing services in some sort of public-private partnership – wherever you are, find the nearest available car, reserve it, and print a map indicating how to get to it. It’s an appealing idea – freeing such knowledge from having to be either at a computer or from owning a smartphone; in many ways anything that encourages solutions that move people away from individual ownership of cars has got to be a good thing. And yet, I’ve decided not to take it further, based primarily on a gut feeling. I think my biggest problem is that it’s still car-focused, which makes the implied assumption that cars are still the best/preferred form of mobility in a city, and I don’t agree with that. An aspect I find interesting about most of the other concepts I’ve outlined, including the one that I hope to follow (below) is the statement that this existing infrastructure, which is part of everybody’s everyday experience of the street and the city, can also be utilized by those who do not drive. As Graham states in Disrupted Cities, “the construction, maintenance, and operations of [certain infrastructures] tends to privilege certain more powerful spaces and users over others.” – and I find an interesting tension in taking something that is currently clearly privileging car-based users, and creating a service using it that explicitly equally benefits those who are not. So despite the good advice, I’m moving on and putting this concept to one side.

And so, to the thought-in-progress that is my chosen direction.

I’ve been wondering for a while if my thinking about infrastructures and existing touchpoints could be combined with something related to open government data, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. Maybe something that required authentication – some sort of data that only local residents could access, or some finer grained information available at the local level than online? Or even just a generic ‘government printer’ allowing access to this data without requiring internet access or a smartphone? It didn’t quite add up, yet.

But reading a post about Code for America on the Urban Omnibus and revisiting AG’s post about Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness suddenly made something click. Systems such as 3-1-1 already exist in New York and San Francisco (and elsewhere), essentially consisting of ways (generally phone, sms, web) of informing local authorities of non-urgent matters that need dealing with – potholes, dumped trash, a fallen tree branch. They are popular among authorities and citizens, just as they are. What I am proposing is, in essence, an additional channel of communication to such a service, using parking ticket machines as distributed networked printers across a city. My first thought was, in essence, that each of these machines could print a hyper-local todolist – all the things that the local authority were aware of within the immediate vicinity (say… a 200m radius) of the machine in question, and thus varying from machine to machine. There’s an element of closing the feedback loop in this, in isolation – you can call in and report a problem, and although it may be assigned a job number and appear online, who really checks that? But knowing that although that pothole won’t be fixed for a couple of weeks but somebody knows about it is reassuring. That information currently exists in some form, whether closed off to the public, or in the case of the 311 service, available online, or via a smartphone app. And if that knowledge is suddenly available to all, directly on the street, eliminating the digital divide – that starts becoming kind of interesting.

The idea sat in my sketchbook for a couple of days, and I added bits and pieces to it, but the next big step was to link up those thoughts with the concept that why not only be able to iron out problems (potholes, broken things), but also to be able to make suggestions for improvements? To truly participate in the tiny little patch of the city in which most people exist – whether that’s home, or the way to the bus stop, the park where the dog gets walked, or near the office. To have a say in where taxes get spent. Of course you could write a letter to the city council, and maybe even get a polite response back. But having that ability embedded within the urban fabric, immediately in the spaces in question? Not holding a thought, getting home, digging out the phone number/address/website needed, but being able to contribute that thought, right where it is needed.

What all this means, in practice, is actually quite simple and mundane. Parking ticket machines are able to print a todolist of what’s in store in the immediate vicinity – known problems, maybe local events, planning applications, etc, within a tight radius of a couple of hundred meters. It can also print a simple form to be filled in by hand to report a problem or make a suggestion – but already with the location defined, the time and date registered, a map printed on the back ready to be annotated.

As Aaron Cope so neatly puts it in his presentation on the Papernet: “walking the fine line between making it easy enough for people to bother putting data into a system and still useful enough to make it worth the trouble of getting it out”. And as a complete opposite to my earlier thoughts around authentication for access to data, there’s something intriguing about separating location from identity – you have access to this because you are here, not necessarily because you are you and you belong here. Nalini Kotamraju, in her talk at Harvard’s Berkman center makes the interesting point about the different expectations of relationships that governments or local authorities often have, and those that citizens often have when engaging with e-government services; often that is made concrete by the need to log in, to identify yourself by name, address, account number, resident’s number, etc – something which I don’t envision being part of this service at all.

In my mind, it becomes a combination of the 3-1-1 service (maybe using the Open311 standard or API); Adam’s framework for citizen responsiveness; and Stamen’s awesome walking papers project + the Papernet, encountered, accessed, and contributed to through a parking ticket machine. The idea draws quite directly from each of those projects, in parts, and pulls them together into a single service – and hopefully acquires some of my own perspective along the way. I’m also hoping to make a point separate from the final concept around how we perceive and utilize infrastructure(s) and technology, too, which has been my primary approach and angle throughout the project, but that will be something to package up in the final presentation and defence.

There’s still lots of work to do, of course, and not a lot of time left to do it in. It’ll be a balancing act of explaining those projects as much as needed to make my project make sense, while fleshing out the new parts and focusing specifically on what makes this project interesting rather than just a rehashing of existing thoughts from other people. I’m still uncertain whether creating a full-scale working model (with a receipt printer inside) would really make the project that much stronger, and be worth the time and effort it would undoubtedly take, or if I can tell a strong enough (and believable) narrative with photos, video, and smaller artifacts (such as mocked up receipts/maps/printouts). A lot rests on creating stickers and decals to put on existing ticket machines, out on the street, not only to photograph and tell the story with, but also to test out the idea with users, iterate details, figure out details of the physical interactions.

Suddenly, a lot relies on copywriting, icons, and working within the constraints of the physical world, to tell a coherent narrative.

There’s just lots to do, make, create. To design, you could say. Joy!

Finally, some links.

• Adam Greenfield: Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness
• Code for America on Urban Omnibus
• Aaron Cope: Papernet
• Stamen/Michal Migurski: Walking Papers
• Open 3-1-1 Apps for iphones
• Open 3-1-1 National API
• Nalini Kotamraju on the Tension between UCD and e-government Services (talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center)

While in San Francisco I had lots of time to read and think – on and between flights, sat looking out over the bay, and sat in many, many lovely cafes with my sketchbook, laptop, and kindle. Ideas fermented and concepts crystallized in my head, and in parallel, some of my reading helped frame my thoughts in ways that I could feel happy with.

The most influential of the things I read was probably Stephen Grapham’s Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails (on Amazon). It talks about infrastructure, which is one step less abstract than the more general ‘cities’ or ‘urbanism’ framing some of the earlier texts I’d been reading had used, but still at an abstract enough level to be making wide ranging points, and I found it to be an especially useful lens through which to think and be able to relate it to my thesis.

a description from an endorsement from Saskia Sassen on Amazon: Seeing cities through the lens of infrastructure opens up a world of processes, breakdowns, and inertias. Each of the chapters brings to light unexpected features of how infrastructures fit into city life, how malfunction makes them more visible in certain cities and a state of nature in slums, how political dynamics are unleashed by infrastructures.

I highlighted quite a lot of paragraphs from the book, particularily from the introduction, which I found especially insightful. As we find ourselves in The Future, I can here share them with you.

“Whilst sometimes taken for granted—at least when they work or amongst wealthier or more privileged users and spaces—energy, water, sewerage, transport, trade, finance, and communication infrastructures allow modern urban life to exist. Their pipes, ducts, servers, wires, conduits, electronic transmissions, and tunnels sustain the flows, connections, and metabolisms that are intrinsic to contemporary cities. Through their endless technological agency, these systems help transform the natural into the cultural, the social, and the urban.” – location 172

“with what happens when the infrastructural flows or metabolisms of the modern city, which so often come to be considered so normal that urbanites may even come to see them as culturally banal, invisible, even boring, are suddenly interrupted or disturbed.” – location 197

““Cities are the summation and densest expressions of infrastructure,” write Herman and Ausubel. “Or, more accurately, a set of infrastructures, working sometimes in harmony, sometimes with frustrating discord, to provide us with shelter, contact, energy, water and means to meet other human needs.”” – location 241

“linear notions of a series of societal “ages,” shaped deterministic by a march of successive infrastructural innovations, and the tendency to fetishize new pieces of gleaming infrastructure, work to obfuscate the continued importance of less glamorous and long-standing infrastructural circuits of the city. Such thinking thus works to deny the ways in which multiple infrastructure systems tend to intimately rely on each other in producing the wider circulations and metabolisms of the city.” – location 266

“Indeed, when infrastructure networks work best, and succeed in reaching mass adoption as the basis for styles of urban life, they tend to become progressively both more “ordinary” and less noticed.” - location 322

“the widespread tendency within popular discourse and social science alike to cast these systems as apolitical, “boring,” or merely “technical” domains that can be satisfactorily partitioned off within the worlds of specialist engineers.” - location 516

“that the construction of spaces of mobility and flow for some always involves the construction of barriers for others. […] The construction, maintenance, and operations of a transport, water, energy, or communications grid tends to privilege certain more powerful spaces and users over others.” – location 524

A few other things from my delicious:

San Francisco Spends $25 Million To Test ‘Goldilocks’ Parking : NPR and SFpark overview video : An interesting scheme showing infrastructure adapting to (semi) realtime data, and a lovely video explaining it. The video especially is really interesting regarding my thesis and how to communicate it.

Fixing the Bus System : Artsy Techie: “what’s the point of building connected, smart urban appliances when you can provide smart applications on mobile phones”. I may have been wrong – there is value in creating solutions for all, directly in the fabric of the city.

The Urbanophile » The Mark of a Great City Is in How It Treats Its Ordinary Spaces, Not Its Special Ones

New York City Aims to Improve Lives of the Elderly – NYTimes.com a really interesting tiny intervention with interesting story around it. Truly “design dissolving in behavior” – it only becomes interesting from a design perspective when the intent is known/the story told.

Are Modern Cities for People or Cars?: Scientific American Podcast

Those are some of the more recent and more relevant things I’ve picked out, but there a bunch more things I’ve been reading at http://delicious.com/dotx3/thesis .

After the industry project, I had a week and a bit, and then I went on a trip to north america: 10 days in San Francisco, preceded by a couple of days in Vancouver. No eureka moments, but it was good to be in a new place, a different context, have those braincells be shaken around a bit – several things crystalised in the back of my head while I was away.

Before I left, I was in a bit of a rut. I’d done lots of analysis, reading, understanding. But… now what? Where was my intervention, what was I designing, what was the point of all this? Was I hoping to iron out some grittiness in modern life, fix something that was broken? Where was the interaction design angle? Was it all a load of techno-determinist nonsense, with the best possible outcome to be a strong argument for why I hadn’t done anything? And, from a personal perspective, as a thesis – where was the joy, where was the thing that would make people smile, think it was clever? Where was the poetry in what I was doing – and if there wasn’t any, should there be?

While I was out there, I met with lots of people – some who had taught us, others who had connections of one sort or another with CIID or Ivrea. In some ways it was an opportunity to see studios and companies, make connections. But it was also a great excuse to meet interesting people, discuss design with them, pick their brains as to places I could possibly work in the future and what kind of work I might want to do. Most immediately, though, it meant I had to explain to people what my thesis was and hone something approaching an elevator pitch for it – and in the process, get them and myself excited about it. There’s the old Einstein quote “if you can’t explain it simply, then you don’t understand it well enough” – never was it more fitting.

Anyhow. I read some more. I sat in lots of lovely San Francisco cafes with my sketchbook and my (new) laptop, trying to make sense of all of those questions. A lot of it went back to the very first thoughts Simona gave us when we set out on the thesis: what do we want the thesis project to be, for ourselves?

Before I left, things were very open, but I knew time was ticking – I wasn’t sure what I was focusing on, and I was lacking constraints. Pedestrian crossings, parking ticket machines, and post boxes intrigued me, each for different reasons, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with them. I left with the thought that maybe I’d do a set of three small sketches of services/ideas, rather than focus all my energies on a single one.

Every now and then, I have to remind myself of what was probably the key slide in my midterm presentation, which kicked off the thesis period. Having introduced the areas of ubicomp and urbanism, I stated that I wanted to focus in on something mundane – updated for the 21st century. Take something really boring, and see what we can do with it. So whenever I think to myself… what the hell am I doing, is this really boring. Erm, well – yeah, maybe, on one level. But as part of a bigger picture, maybe it becomes interesting again. There’s something interesting in the mundane, the everyday, that is often ignored and forgotten, especially in a world of design that is always looking for the newest and shiniest.

So for those things that I said had crystalised. My renewed focus is purely on the parking ticket machines, as an example of especially dense connected technological black boxes that seem pitifully underused. What can we do with a box on every streetcorner (ie, has location and a direction) that is networked, contains processing power, a payment system, buttons for input and a small screen, and perhaps most excitingly, a printer (of a reciept, card, or sticker). I mean, surely we as a society can do better than print parking tickets for cars with all that?!

Once again, I’m a bit torn as to whether I should work on just one use, or if the concept – rethinking our use of existing infrastructure – is better served by doing a set, most likely of three separate ideas. I have pages of sketchbook filled with half-baked (and few fully baked) ideas, but I’ll let them settle before sharing them. The key questions, for all or any of them, are twofold: one, what specific questions are openned by choosing each idea, and where/how does user research fit into answering any of those, and secondly, what exactly will be the final outcome and what, logistically, do I need to do to get there in the few weeks I have left. A video requires certain things, a physical model requires others. Maybe some more complex graphics will take time to put together. From now on, time and efficiency is of the essence. With coffee, focus, and some good luck, I’ll get there.

I will still need to get excited by it, even if the object/service/outcome itself is mundane. I’ll just have to remember – it was meant to be mundane, on one level. The bigger story I tell around it is what will define whether I can lift it away from that, and get others and myself excited by it.

Weeks 8 and 9 were scheduled pauses: we had an industrial project planned, our last “class” – half of us worked with Nokia, the other half with Lego. We were also very lucky to have that project bookended by two open lectures – the first by IDEO co-founder and now director of the Cooper Hewitt in NY, Bill Moggridge, and the second by the wonderful metaphor-sketching Bill Verplank.

I can’t say much about the Nokia project – it’s currently under the wraps of an NDA. It felt like a distraction from our theses (and it was, obviously), but I think that in the end we did some really strong work, which hopefully we’ll be able to show properly in due course. Each of our projects was very different – in scope, in style, in approach – which was really nice to see come together in the final presentations. I was working with David, and we battled to do the smallest possible thing – and I think just about pulled it off, even if we made our lives difficult by choosing to work on something invisible and was focused on people’s subconscious!

But it was really humbling to have the two Bills come to speak: together they coined the term Interaction Design; Moggridge helped design the first laptop and founded what is now one of the world’s biggest and most respected design firms; Verplank worked on the first real GUI at Xerox and spoke casually about having discussed and argued over things that now seem completely normal (the desktop metaphor; files going in folders; what happens when you send something to the printer; etc ) -not to mention his amazing style of drawing while speaking, resulting in a wall-long roll of paper being covered in notes and sketches over the course of his lecture.

So these couple of week were a complete pause, thesis-wise, but with a good excuse.

Maybe some thoughts fermented in the back of my mind, without me noticing…

last week I organised and ran a walkshop on network urbanism here in Copenhagen.

This was the description:

…a slow and considered walk through a reasonably dense and built-up section of the city, looking for evidence of the networked digital in the physical urban environment, and vice versa.

More specifically, we looked for:

• Places where information is being collected by the network.
• Places where networked information is being displayed.
• Places where networked information is being acted upon, either by people directly, or by physical systems that affect the choices people have available to them.

In the end, we were a about 15 people, slowly walking the streets of Copenhagen, meeting at Sankt Hans Torv in Norrebro (top left of the map, above), and walking across the lakes towards Norreport Station, before looping back to debrief and discuss at Plan B. If you saw a group of people earnestly studying a metal cabinet or staring up at a building, with cameras pointed at something seemingly nonexistent – that was us.

These are some quickly jotted down thoughts and some of what we saw and talked about.

“It’s all normal”

One thing that struck me was that individually, very few of the things we saw and discussed were all that interesting or felt revolutionary. To me, at least, it was more the fact that at the end of our near two hour long walk, we had not once had a lack of things to point out. And almost all of it was normal; individually, usually not worth a second glance, but as a whole an impressive array of technology with both huge impacts and even greater potential (both positive and frightening).

The Future is Now – and we never noticed

Added to that was the number of things that I introduced as “imagine if, in the near future…” which, it turned out, somebody in the group had seen implemented, had worked on, or in a couple of cases, had as part of their normal existence.

Imagine if the entry systems to your apartment were networked, and they could be opened or you could be individually blocked remotely. Oh wait – one person could open their doors using their mobile, and another had a key with an integrated RFID chip that could be disabled by the building administrator. All introduced benignly, of course – “in case of theft”, for example – but the possibilities are clear. There’s a definite inflexibility to systems like that, removing the possibility of discussion, and encouraging bureaucratic implementation of rules – “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do”. Ultimately, of course, it’s hard to argue with a computer. Computer said no, indeed.

First…

We kicked off at the first stop on our route: a brand new and fully automated parking facility, still in the testing phase. Cars are driven into a small building onto a platform, where the driver leaves it – the platform then descends underground, leaving the car on a shelf along a couple of hundred others. For a starting point, there was a complete overload of the networked digital: multiple security cameras; kiosks; RFID authentication; payment systems; space/full indicators; automated entry and exits. and on, and on. By complete fluke, a car entered the facility just as we arrived, and we watched in awe as it descended into the abyss – it turned out that this was a test, and the driver was one of the people running it, and he was happy to stop and chat with us, answering our many questions. An unexpected bonus!

Micronetworks

Lots of the connected things we saw (entry systems, CCTV cameras, various displays) seemed to function on their own, nominally closed, networks, constrained within a building or area. But increasingly, it’s cheaper to simply route stuff over the internet, and we spoke a bit about the opportunities and dangers that might bring, especially with the knowledge that any security or encryption can be broken.

Bus stops and bicycle counters

Some of the bus stops in Copenhagen have counters indicating when the next bus is due, but we couldn’t quite figure out if this was based on the timetable; most recently reported location (it’s two stops away, which is about 4 minutes…); or real time data reflecting traffic, delays, etc. What we were all sure of was that a 4 did not equate perfectly to 4 minutes in the real world!

One of Copenhagen’s most famous attributes is its cycle culture, with the bridge we walked over being one of the busiest cycle lanes in the world. About 15000 bikes go over it every day – in each direction. We know this because there’s a counter and display at one end, counting every day, and a yearly total. It’s great fun standing near it and watching cyclists go past, checking what number they are, and also to find the sensor embedded in the asphalt of the cycle lane and figure out how to manually trigger it (it involves hopping, mimicking two wheels passing over in quick succession).

Physical, fallbacks, information shadows

During our walk were looking for elements the networked digital, but most of the things we saw were bits physical evidence: boxes, cases, sensors, devices, out on the street. A lot of those had numbers, codes, or barcodes on them, presumably to link that particular physical object to a database somewhere – linking it to its information shadow. It was interesting that there were often two or more on a single device: Parking ticket machine 6712 was in area code 3310, for instance – different IDs for different purposes, perhaps in different databases at different companies. In this case: Siemens made (and serviced?) the device; the local authority had them installed and enforced the parking; a third party was in charge of the mobile service that ran on top of the ticket machines).

We also had an interesting discussion about the very physical plaques around the city, many of which predate the existence of computerized databases, but were also forms or evidence of information shadows. Some identified infrastructure (there’s a water pipe here, 0.8m down, with these details…), while some included a code for looking up elsewhere, such as the metal plates with a code which was neither the address/house number, nor the postcode. One argument was that things like this would become obsolete, as location data becomes ubiquitous via mobile devices – surely, a handheld device can know what types of pipe are where? But equally, there is something timeless and failsafe about a cast metal plaque attached to a wall. Technology inevitably fails; physical things do not. (at least they fail differently, I’d say). Fallbacks are useful.

Recharge

We stood gawking at an Electric Vehicle charging station (one of the rather handsome Better Place ones by NewDealDesign) with an attached electric car, which was installed as part of a pilot programme in Copenhagen. While many cars are networked and digital in many ways as it is, a system like this makes it that much more explicit: there’s authentication when you charge, when you start the car, while driving. It “updates”. Conceivably, it can also be turned off. Why would there not be a ‘kill switch’? (see: Prius brakes, 2010). But who gets to control it? Better Place? the car manufacturer? the police? the government? Your partner?

Trust

There was some interesting back and forth about trusting people or trusting “the system” – which do you check more: the change handed to you by a cashier, or the notes dispensed by an ATM? We were split about 50/50, but interestingly, all of us trusted one or the other – but rarely both.

Flow and Priorities

Traffic lights have long been considered as part of a system rather than individually, sometimes even dynamically adjusting to real time traffic data. I remember as a kid having my mind blown when somebody explained the concept of a green wave to me. But we also considered the large cabinet near the intersection which apparently contains the relay switches used to control the lights, and can also take control if the network connection fails for some reason and revert to timers. (interesting aside: apparently you used to be able to pre-empt the changing of the lights by listening to the clicking of the relays switching before the lights themselves changed). Along some streets in Copenhagen, the green waves are calculated for cyclists rather than cars, and can be overridden by the approach of an ambulance or police car. Perhaps buses and public transport should get preferential treatment; maybe more environmentally friendly cars should have priority, too? Why not be able to pay to increase your ratio of green lights? Perhaps specific brands of car should find all lights at green, if they strike a deal with the city? Where does it start feeling uncomfortable?

Bookending with overload

The last major point of interest was around Norreport Station, a relatively major transport hub where the Metro, S trains, Intercity trains, and buses all converge on one messy island between lanes of traffic. As well as multiple indicators of imminent arrivals (of all the different systems, on lots of different screens), there were maps (geographic and stylized system ones), a taxi rank with hyper-connected taxis always in attendance, and a complex traffic junction.

There was also a set of embedded lights in the cycle lane (below), which flashed in some sort of sync with passing cycles and the upcoming traffic lights. We couldn’t quite figure out the system, but it did something most times a bike passed (or we hopped and danced nearby), but seemed to vary depending on what the light ahead did.

There was more, of course. The roofs bristled with mobile phone masts and TV aerials. The main streets were carefully kept an eye on by a patchwork of carefully placed cameras of various sorts. Wind-sensors ensured awnings weren’t blown down – but could they also be utilized for hyper-local weather reports? They could be aided and abetted by the rain sensor we spotted up high on a building…

Plan B

We finished the walk and took over a corner in the cafe/bar Plan B with various micro-brewery beers, where we discussed what we had seen, argued over some of the implication, scribbled on a couple of large maps, and darted off on countless tangents. We veered from the arcanely technical to the more abstract and philosophical, and covered a lot of ground. For me personally, though, this part had the most potential and perhaps failed to live up to it – we had less of a plan, had thought about it less than the walk itself, and thus lacked much of a structure or framework to lead the discussions. While it may have lacked some focus, it was nonetheless a great way to round off the walkshop.

We ended just as the sun was making it’s way towards the horizon, in that slow Scandinavian summer way.

Acknowledgments

Thanks a lot to Ulrik and Jesper, who helped plan and run the walkshop – it wouldn’t have been the same without their perspectives and knowledge of local culture and quirks. Also a huge debt of gratitude to Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim of Do Projects, firstly for developing the walkshop model in the first place, then, when I inquired if there might be one in Copenhagen any time soon, suggesting that I run one instead, and finally for all their support in the run up to the walk itself.

Also, of course, many thanks to all the people who came along and joined us in sharing and discussing networked urbanism last week.

The last couple of weeks were supposed to be a straight clean run at the thesis, pushing it onwards – wherever onwards might be. The idea is that we’re moving towards concepts or a concept. Enough thinking, seems to be the message; start thinking about and by doing.

Somehow, that invitingly empty stretch of calendar ended up being littered with distractions, some external and imposed, others self-created.

Still, there’s some progress, even if it was in fits and starts

I started listing and categorizing the infrastructure I’ve been looking at and documenting.

The list runs to 24 things at the moment, although I’m still occasionally adding to it. That’s what already exists and is in widespread use, in my world at least. Some are standalone, some are low tech, some are dumb (bollards, zebra crossings, tourist maps). Others are high tech and connected (parking ticket machines, ATMS). Others have moved imperceptibly from one tp the other (think: traffic lights, bus stops). Some stand alone, others are parts of systems, and others still are almost completely intangible (network connectivity of various sorts).

All fit somewere on the following continuums (continua?) or discrete categories.

• temporary/permanent
• mobile/static
• dynamic/static
• small/large
• tangible/intangible
• enabling/constraining
• input/output
• individual/collective or aggregate
• public/private
• synchronous/asynchronous
• standalone/connected

In addition, I’ve been annotating each item, object, system, and category with what kind of data it creates, collects, displays, or reacts to… counting people, traffic flows, light, weather, available parking spots, etc.

In an effort to turbo charge and hopefully complete the research phase of the project (and soak up some ideas if they come up!), I also organised and ran a Systems/Layers walkshop, in the mould set by Adam Greenfield, here in Copenhagen. It went well, but I’ll write a separate post about that. Suffice to say it went smoothly, people seemed interested and glad to have come, and there were some really good discussions both during and after the walk. I took notes, many photos were taken, and I hope to sum some of it up in the next day or two.

One thing it did show me, though, was that I think I’ve reached the end of thinking about existing systems, at least as far as the final project goes – I don’t think I’ll have any great eureka moments, nor will a deeper understanding necessarily help moving onto concepts and, ultimately, some sort of implementation. I feel like I’ve got a good enough base, a solid knowledge of existing ’stuff’, and now really need to move onto building on top of that base. At the very least, I need to create constraints. That’s something nobody can really help me with – I just need to decide on some constraints, choose a direction, and run with it. There are no right or wrongs – not really even better or worse – just choices. And I need to sit down, me, my head, and a blank sheet of paper, listing some of the options, choose some. And then, onwards.

Although I have a fuzzy idea of what I’d like to come out at the end, and I know where I am at the moment, I need to find a smooth transition from one to the other. I need to find the toggle switch, and flick it to ‘implement’.

For better or worse, though, the next two weeks will be filled with the final industry project, this time working with Nokia. While I’m looking forward to it as a project in isolation, it’s also a distraction from the final project. Although I am hoping to get a couple of thoughts together, I’m basically writing off the next two weeks as far as the thesis goes.

Every week I put a thick red line through a postit on my wall, indicating another week passed. The number of empty remaining postits is dwindling.

Time is ticking.

Next week [edit: that was Thursday 17th] I’ll be running a Systems/Layers walkshop here in Copenhagen. For more details, and to register, go here.

The short blurb:

Systems/Layers: CPH is a walkshop held in two parts, exploring networked urbanism. It will happen next week, on Thursday evening, rain or shine. You are cordially invited to join us. The first section will be dedicated to a slow and considered walk through a reasonably dense and built-up section of the city, looking for evidence of the networked digital in the physical urban environment, and vice versa. After about 90 minutes of walking, we will gather at a convenient “command post” with food and/or drink to map, review and discuss the things we’ve encountered.

I initially emailed Adam Greenfield a couple of weeks ago, asking if he was likely to be able to run one in Copenhagen any time soon. To my great surprise, he replied suggesting I run on, instead. So, erm, here we are. So it’s very much inspired by the walkshop he and Nurri Kim (as Do Projects) developed and ran in Wellington, Oulu (Finland), and Barcelona, and they’ve been great in supporting us in making this happen.

I’ll be co-running it together with Ulrik Hogrebe, a native of the city, next Thursday evening, and we’re really looking forward to it. On the one hand it should be fun, but I’m also hoping to get lots out of it for my thesis, which basically builds on this.

More details, registering, etc, see: http://www.mayonissen.com/walkshop/

…and maybe, see you there.

So after several weeks of various distractions, we’ve finally been able to take a run at the thesis, and give it some much needed focused attention. We were also asked, by the end of the week, to have a neatly formulated thesis statement of intent; a design challenge.

Monday I met with my advisor, Gitte, and bounced some ideas for next steps and possible constraints back and forth. It was interesting and inspiring, as ever, but as there hadn’t been much (or any) real progress since our previous meeting before Lift, it was lacking any real… oomph. On Tuesday, I had a long talk with Matt Cottam, and a shorter chat with Timo Arnall, who were in the studio to review theses.

I seem to have become rather fixated on infrastructure as a starting point, or as something that’s interesting and rarely discussed in a design sense. Infrastructure, and where and how it becomes visible. Which is fascinating to think about and discuss, but is kinda difficult to find solutions, concepts, ideas around. So I’m on the hunt for constraints, things to push me, things to push against. Matt suggested thinking very specifically about who’s interests would be involved – challenged, threatened, strengthened – by the injection of technologies into the urban fabric, and who would have the scale, existing base, and business incentives to actually introduce them. We narrowed it down to government/municipal, private utility companies (esp. energy and water) or transport (esp. buses), communications (is that a utility, too?), building developers, and advertising. What kinds of incentives would there be from that side, and what incentives exist or could be created to engage an end user? For example, I don’t want to create a service to just more effectively pump advertising at people (even if that might be a very successful and profitable venture), but I’m fine with that being part of the equation, if I can make it a more equal one, somehow. That took us onto incentives, transactions. Might there be something interesting around microtransactions? Not just micropayments of currency, but perhaps a small service rendered or information contributed (information = power = profit?) for a small service in exchange? Charging a phone, network connectivity, super-localized weather or traffic information?

The key challenge with any of this is to find a balance, where the needs and business requirements of a stakeholder (company, organisation, institution) are met whilst always keeping in mind the perspective of the needs and aspirations of city-dwellers or -visitors.

I’m really keen to zero in on something really small. Maybe it’s making something mundane make that little bit more sense, do that little but more. Maybe it’s creating a moment of happiness or a smile in amongst the stress of city life. I want my outcome to be functional, not an artwork, or sculpture, or statement, or a critique or conceptual intervention. But if it can have the power to make somebody smile or think, then that’s a plus, in my mind.

Still: more constraints needed. No real spark as yet, but I’m working on it: it’s not just gonna land on my lap!

Phrasing a design challenge is hard, especially with the knowledge that, ultimately, the end result will be judged against it, looms overhead. That was our task for the end of last week, as part of a longer document spelling out our thesis intent, describing our explorations to date, and laying out research and projects in the field. Most of those were just simple braindumps, but the design challenge was new. A fine line to tread, as well: too broad, and it’s useless; too tight, and I risk missing my (self-assigned) target. If anything, I erred on the side of broad, big, everything. But boiling it all down to a sentence or two does serve to focus the mind.

There are magnificent bits of infrastructure just lying around (thanks russell). If we assume that every element of the city is creating and collecting information, what exciting services can we create by combining these emerging opportunities? The key challenge is to find an overlap between what is possible (or conceivably possible in the near future), the needs of stakeholders, and the needs and aspirations of the visitors and inhabitants to the city.

The short version: There are magnificent bits of infrastructure just lying around. If we assume that it’s all connected, what exciting things can we do with them?

With some good heads-down thinking, some user research, some brainstorms, and a walkshop coming up fast, I hope to find out! Hopefully sooner rather than later…

That plan of weeknotes happening on an, ahem, weekly basis didn’t really last long, did it? In my defense, not much has really moved on regarding my thesis in the last couple of weeks, for two main reasons.

Firstly, I was in Geneva at Lift, and since returning to Copenhagen we’ve been fully engaged with an industry project. So it still feels like I need get a proper start on my final project, even as time is ticking.

So a quick catch up:

The time at Lift was great, and although it was to some extent a week I spent not really directly thinking about my thesis, it was good to let some of the thoughts to date swirl around and ferment, and there were also some overlaps between some of the talks and my current thinking. Thanks to Russell for the reminders not to forget analogue friction and that there are magnificent bits of infrastructure just lying around. Perhaps that’s my thesis in a nutshell – make better use of that magnificent infrastructure, in some new and wonderful way.

Industry Project 1

In the weeks since coming back to Copenhagen the thesis was put on hold while we switched attention to the first of two industry projects we’ll have.

Working with Jacek and Shruti was great, and I’m really happy with the outcome – the overall idea, our strategic positioning for the client, the flow of the presentation, and perhaps most of all, the video we created as a ’sketch of the future’ as a standalone piece of communication. Sadly, for the time being at least, the work is under the wraps of an NDA, but hopefully it’ll either never be shown because it’s being taken further, or it’ll be released at some point in the not-too-distant-future. From a process point of view – and especially in contrast to my experiences of the service design course - we did not work through the details of a specific solution, but focused almost completely on communicating a vision of the future towards which the client should strive, and within that, combining the needs of humanity with the strategic (business, brand) value of trying to meet those needs.

There were some really interesting overlaps between the initial brief and the final outcome with some of my thinking for my thesis, so although there’s nothing direct to report, at least some of the thinking and discussions at the city scale around infrastructures and near-future possibilities we had that will undoubtedly have some positive overflow into that project.

New Thesis Reading

Reading has slowed – both because of a lack of time, and also because it’s getting to that stage of the project where I need to do less soaking up, and more focusing and creating!

Nonetheless, while in Geneva, I picked up Birkhäuser Basics: Urban Analysis (2009), a thin volume by Gerrit Schwalbach, which gives an excellent and brief introduction to the analysis of urban contexts from an architectural and urban planning perspective. Publisher’s blurb, here. Note to self: do not expect to go into a design/architecture bookshop and leave empty handed.

I also picked up a strange but very useful publication from the library: Industrial Design in the Urban Landscape, which was published in 1994 by De Balie together with the Sandberg Institute in the Netherlands. It feels remarkably dated (I mean – will you look at that cover?!), but it’s a fascinating read, even as that viewpoint throws a new light on  my current thinking. The thoughts on urbanism and cities come, logically enough, on the back of the 80s, and seem to have been written in a time when the collective vision of cities was a pessimistic, negative, and uncertain one, quite in contrast to the feeling I’m getting from more contemporary writing and thinking. ‘Information Technology’ and its consequences seem to be a big unknown, as opposed to a simple fact of life. Information and data are only very briefly touched upon as something for designers to consider and shape – and only in the sense that they should work together with “software design and mechatronic technologies” (p 8). But it also, as the title suggests, comes from the perspective of industrial design as a classical form-giving discipline, which, interestingly (and to me surprisingly), seems to have been one that was still figuring out it’s role in the world – much later than I would have imagined. The publication seems to be a manifesto for industrial designers to engage with the urban, civic realm – something that now, to me, seems self-evident. But reading it 15 years after its publication, it’s interesting to note the parallels between industrial design searching for it’s role in an urban context, and me, now, here, as part of my thesis, questioning the role interaction design(ers) should play in the same space.

My advisor also lent me a copy of  Mobilities (John Urry, 2007), which looks at different issues around movement and mobility from a sociological perspective, which I have been looking at, but don’t think I’ll have the time or brainspace to properly engage with as a whole – but I’ll certainly read a couple of the chapters once I’ve got a more narrow focus sorted out.

Next steps

Talking of a more narrow focus…

My next step is clearly to take all the very much stop/start thinking and reading I’ve done to date, and spend a little bit of time consolidating, summarizing, and identifying a couple of very specific areas, ideas, or opportunities that I want to focus on. From there on, I can run with it. But I need to get there first.

Jack Schulze, Timo Arnall, and Matt Cottam will be with us again for a couple of days this coming week, and will hopefully help us narrow our thinking and give us new and exciting directions to ponder – and maybe make some decisions obvious, and help me figure out the ones that are less so.

I’m also hoping to run or co-run a Systems/Layers walkshop, ala Adam Greenfield / Do Projects, here in Copenhagen, in the near future (towards the end of June, hopefully), if we can figure out the logistics, which would be extremely exciting. That should also be a great way force me to think in a very focussed way about some of the things I’ve been thinking about at quite an abstract level for a while.

So – in search of focus I go.

Wish me luck.

I’ve been super busy since getting back from Lift, but here are some delayed thoughts on my time in Geneva.

As previously mentioned, I was super lucky to be awareded a Student pass to the Lift Conference in Geneva. There have been some great talks in previous years, and I’d watched lots of them online, so was intrigued as to what it would be like to be there in person. As expected, the draw were not the talks themselves (which were decidedly mixed, it must be said), but the many opportunities to meet other attendees, both in workshops and the breaks between sessions. It was also great to have Ishac and Jacek there as well (exhibiting and volunteering, respectively) – being in a room of 800 strangers is tiring, so it was a relief to regularly be able to go talk to somebody familiar before taking the plunge again!

Some stand out bits and pieces, in no particular order:

> The Reinventing books, magazines and newspapers in the digital age workshop which kicked off day one promised much, and the initial discussion bit was interesting (slides here), but the main workshop bit felt like a bit of a disappointment to me – but I think that was mainly because I’ve become so spoiled thinking and working in a similar way (collaboratively, openly, rapid-fire) at CIID, whereas for most of the other participants it appeared to be more of an eye opener.

> Chris and Kenichi’s Animal Superpowers project (RCA Design Interactions, 2008) was super fun – some really playful thoughts, beautifully executed.

> The Hacking Venture Capital workshop by Fred Destin was, to my great surprise, great – I was expecting interesting but generally dry numbers and strategies, instead it was engaging and a fascinating look into a world that has always been a bit of a mystery to me.

> Enjoyed hearing Björn Jeffery talk about some of Bonnier’s design principles for mag+ from their perspective, having talked with Jack and Timo about it previously, but it was a pity his speaking slot was so short.

> Russell’s talk was nominally about ‘Printing out the Internet’, and he did talk about Newspaper Club a bit, but also touched on various other experiments with combining the internet and intangible (meta)data with the physical world. The mentions of analogue friction and magnificent bits of infrastructure made me smile and think of my thesis, and then reminded me that I didn’t yet know what I was going to do with those thoughts. But nice thoughts they were. And who could forget that big red button?

But still, many of the presentations were suprisingly poor, both visually and their delivery – even when the thoughts themsleves, once you persevered past those rather large obstacles, were interesting. I’m always puzzled by how people manage to take perfectly acceptable and functional, if bland, defaults, and put so much effort into creating large distractions out of them instead. The talks where the twitter backchannel was more interesting than the talk itself were, suffice to say, not the winners! Fortunately, the good ones were pretty good, and there was enough food for thought to go around.

As a reflection on the conference as a whole, over the three days, I found it interesting to notice how used to multitasking I was, especially while watching conference videos online – suddenly trying to force myself to give my entire attention to the same thing happening directly in front of me, without other tabs to flick to, went surprisingly against some sort of ingrained instinct. The sign of a good talk was, quite literally, the ones where I didn’t feel the urge to open my laptop and only half engage, but where I wanted to take it all in, both visually (and not just slides, also body language) and the presentation itself.

Overall, it was a great experience, and I’m really pleased I went (despite losing a precious week of thesis-thinking-time!). I loved exploring and feeling my way around a new city. It was my first time at a proper, formal conference, so that in itself, aside from any content or people, was interesting. I met a bunch of great people – in workshops, through the exhibition and the volunteer teams, and through randomly talking to (former) strangers during breaks. I hope to stay in touch with a couple of them, and that, surely, has got to be good.

And then, as suddenly as I had arrived – it was Sunday night, I was back home, and on Monday morning it was back to CIID, and back to work!

This week, rather than focusing on my thesis as I should be, I’m in Geneva, for the Lift Conference. I arrived this morning, and am around until Sunday evening.

Let me know if you’d like to meet – I’m a stranger in a new city, not to mention knowing only a tiny proportion of the 800-odd people at the conference itself!

When not at the conference centre (eg, today, Saturday, Sunday), I’ll be wandering, exploring obscure corners of the city, wherever my feet take me, or sitting in the corner of a tiny cafe with my sketchbook.

First impressions: I’m surprised at how completely French the city is (not just in language, but in character), although perhaps it reminds me most of Brussels, at least at first glance. But with more money, banks, and watches.

For the first couple of weeks of working and thinking about my thesis I’ve mostly been reading; surveying the landscape of what is already out there both in terms of projects and thinking.

Doing my best to stand on the shoulders of giants.

These are some of the people who’s thoughts have been influencing my thinking regarding where I want to take my thesis; sometimes I have highlighted a particular paper, blog post, talk, or project, sometimes I haven’t. It’s not a comprehensive bibliography, even of just what I’ve read so far. But there’s lots of interesting stuff in there.

IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

Dan Hill: City as Platform; Towards a Sentient City

Matt Jones: Mujicomp and Mujicompfrastructure (Technoark 2010); The Demon Haunted World (Webstock 2009); The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future (2009)

Adam Greenfield: Everyware (2006); The City is Yours to Use (expected soon); most of his blog, Speedbird.

Einar Sneve Martinussen: Adventures in Urban Computing (AHO, 2008)

Ben Cerveny, Michal Migurski (Stamen)

Anne Galloway: Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and The City

Timo Arnall: Designing for the Web in the World; Designing for an Internet of Things (IxDA Interactions 2010)

Usman Haque

Julian Bleecker: A Manifesto for Networked Objects (2006)

Urban Computing and its Discontents (Greenfield and Bleecker)

Jan Chipchase

Mike Kuniavsky: User Experience Design for Ubiquitous Computing (pre-print draft, 2010)

Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2010 (various write-ups, various speakers. Theme: “City as Platform”)

Molly Steenson

Century of the City, Rockefeller Foundation (2008)

Fabien Girardin

Nicolas Nova

Clay Shirky: Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data (2003)

Fukasawa and Morrison: Super Normal

William J. Mitchell

Bruce Sterling: Shaping Things

Marc Weiser

Martijn de Waal: Design Approaches for the 21st Century City

Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City (ed. Marcus Foth, 2008)

Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell: The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure (2007); Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Notes on Ubiquitous Computing’s Dominant Vision (2007); Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space (2004?)

Williams and Dourish: Reimagining the City: The Cultural Dimensions of Urban Computing

Don Norman: Designing the Infrastructure (Interactions, 2009)

Mainwaring, Chang, Anderson: Infrastructures and Their Discontents: Implications for Ubicomp

—

As for what my thesis might be called? well, that’s covered by Molly Steenson’s Urban Computing Conference Title Generator, of course.

Last call for boarding! The admissions deadline for next year’s Interaction Design Programme at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction design is fast approaching.

I can only enthusiastically encourage you to apply – the curriculum, the faculty (both permanent and visiting), the open lectures, and the overall atmosphere are all wonderful, and  – if this year and last are anything to go by – your fellow students will be great too. You’ve only got a couple of days until the deadline (the 3rd), so polish that portfolio and write that essay!

THE BLURB:
As an education concerned with the broad potential of design and technology, the CIID Interaction Design Programme is looking for a wide diversity of students. We plan to have a class of 25 people and welcome applicants from all over the world with educational backgrounds in varying disciplines. You should be curious and creative, enthusiastic about design and have the desire to study in a cross-disciplinary environment. Whether you’re currently studying or working, you should be interested in the connections between education and interaction design practice.

To find out more about the application process and requirements please refer to the website: http://ciid.dk/education/admissions/ – there is a list of FAQs but if you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

The curriculum teaches students to apply technology to everyday life through the design of software, products and services. We believe in a hands-on and user-centered approach to interaction design. Students learn the programming and electronics skills needed to work with technology as a design medium. They conduct user-research and experience prototyping to provide real-world grounding to their concepts. Frequent work in multi-disciplinary teams encourages peer-to-peer learning and a diverse selection of visiting faculty exposes students to a range of expertise.

You can view documentation of the course and student projects here: http://ciid.dk/education/portfolio/.

You can also trawl through my writeups of all the courses for my personal view on them.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask Alie, or if you’d prefer a student perspective, you are welcome to get in touch.

So, onto the thesis. We’re on our own now. And, no pressure: this is, we are told, the project where we get to define ourselves.
No pressure? eek!

We had our midterm exams, where we had the opportunity to reflect on the year, project, work, and learnings so far, and to start a conversation about where we were thinking of taking the thesis, and get feedback from the CIID faculty and also from external advisors, Gitte and Niels, both ex-IDEO and now in Copenhagen at ReD and Designit, respectively.

And so, onto my thesis, or final project, at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. Here goes!

As a basic starting point, I’m interested in exploring the overlap between the emergence of ubiquitous computing, and the city and urban environment, and the opportunities for taking a design lens at the opportunities for services that evolve out of that combination. There are huge bodies of work on both areas – ubicomp from a technological and computer science perspective over the last 20/30 years (with some more social-science work more recently, as it has moved out of research labs into the world), while urbanism has been a field of study for most of the 20th century, primarily from architectural and sociology angles. Urban computing as a field of study fits in there somewhere, too.

I’m not completely sure of how it all crystalises into a design project yet, but I’m working on it. I’m hoping to combine the more systemic thinking inherent in service design with some aspect of craft and tangibility, drawing from my background in industrial design. Micro and macro, if you will.

Rather than write long descriptions of my thoughts, or try to make any structured sense of it all at this early stage, I’m just going to make a list of the things I’ve been thinking and reading about in the first week of the project. What I have as a start is broad – almost infinately so – and I know that my first major challenge will be to define some constraints and find that one little seed from which the rest of my project can grow. But for now, I’m trying to soak up as much as I can, to give myself a general understanding of what has been done, and fill some of the gaps my more haphazard reading over the last couple of years has left.

If nothing else, this should give a feel for the mess in my brain at the moment – with overlaps, repetitions, gaps, and tangents all part of the deal.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING & THINKING ABOUT:

ubiquitous computing, ubicomp, internet of things, pervasive computing, everyware

mobile computing

infrastructure – digital, physical, static, dynamic

the points where infrastructure is exposed.

Mujicomp

Mujicompfrastructure

tangible

touchpoints

networking, networked objects

nearlynet, permanet

system failure

touch, RFID

the city

city as platform

urbanism

urban planning

urban sociology

communities

security, privacy

payment

data – open data, APIs

homogeneity, heterogeneity, difference

transport, mobility, systems,

the mundane

designed vs not designed objects

maps and territories

barriers, borders, edges

industrial design in an urban context

combining service design with tangible product/industrial design

focusing on something small and exploring the consequences

and more…

I’m excited by what it could become. Now I just need to figure out what exactly that is. 3 months seems ridiculously long… until you start counting the weeks, discounting the ones already taken (two industry projects, my recently booked trip to San Francisco in July, etc) – and then it seems frighteningly short. So. back to reading, thinking, making. But faster than before.

And always remembering to strike a balance between the two posters above my head in the studio, reminding me to Keep Calm and Carry On … and Get Excited and Make Things.

This writeup will be unusually short, at least compared to the previous ones – not because I have any less to say (!), but because I’m keen to catch up my blog with what going on in my head, and focus on my thesis (in both places). Nonetheless, some quick and possibly disjointed thoughts and reflections on the course and the project I worked on, intrust.

For many, the course was the first time they had encountered service design in a structured, focused way (although many of us had worked on what were basically service design projects for user research). In contrast, I was broadly familiar with the tools, methods, and processes we used on this course from my time at Radarstation. In some ways, of course, this felt like an advantage, a headstart. But it also added an element of ambiguity and skepticism to my experience of the course. Sometimes, things were presented as “the way things are”, and I felt “no no – that’s the LiveWork way”. Nonetheless, it was great to get a different perspective on something that I nominally already knew or had experience of: new descriptions of old processes, different ways of doing similar things, examples of tools in use in different types of projects.

The context for our project was ‘Financial Lives’, exploring the possibilities for innovations in services for the financial sector (albeit not the type of “innovations” that cause the world economy to crash!). To introduce us to the topic and the backend context, we were lucky to have two bankers from Middlefart Sparkasse introduce us to the bank’s perspective. Middlefart are a small Danish bank apparently known for having great service and being interested in some of stuff we work on at CIID – research, service design, innovation, etc – thus their interest in being involved in our project. Despite this, I remember thinking as their presentation drew to a close… if this is innovative, what are the more conservative banks like?

Still, it was made clear very early on that this was not a client/consultant relationship – we could explore areas that would be uncomfortable for a bank, we didn’t necessarily have to convince them of the potential for profit, and we could go further than a commercial client would want to – while keeping their perspectives in mind.

We were often encouraged to “go crazy”, especially by Chris – I got the feeling that maybe he’d gotten bored by the very functional projects he’d worked on as a consultant, and wanted us to do interesting things while we were in an environment where that was encouraged and possible. We tried, with varying degrees of success. As a group, we had a hard time, veering from the practical and, ultimately, boring, to the opposite extreme of discomfort and crazy. In the end, we swung back somewhere in the middle, although perhaps more towards practical than some of the other teams.

Perhaps where we did things differently was that rather than necessarily build or communicate a shining vision, we worked out a lot of the smaller kinks, creating a service that worked smoothly across different channels, media, and touchpoints. We debated (and went around in circles, and hit brick walls) the minutae of our proposed service, thinking through the different angles and the different experiences as different users went through the system, experiencing the service over time and in different ways. This was reflected in our final presentation – I got the feeling we were presenting something different. It wasn’t as exciting as some of the other projects, but I honestly don’t think it’s because it was an inherently weaker idea. But having worked out all the different elements, created prototypes of every stage, we felt that we had to show it all – and let’s face it, no matter how interesting a concept might be, when you take it down to the level of ‘you get this in the post’ and ‘then you pay with this card’, things get pretty mundane. Having done all that work, we didn’t want it to disappear – it’s hard to polish something, and then leave it in the shadows, even if showing each and every stage is detrimental to the story of the service as a whole.

Is there a fundamental tradeoff between presenting a vision, with theatre and excitement, and presenting the nitty gritty of how a service works? for an experience to be smooth, many small pieces have to come together and feel invisible. But in a presentation, you can’t show the invisible – you have to highlight it. There’s a strange tension between showing something shiny and wonderful – while glossing over more or less obvious difficulties in implementing it – or showing off how thoroughly thought through a service might be. Which is not to say they can’t be combined, or that one is better than the other, just that they serve different purposes.

—

The service design course was taught by Chris Downs – cofounder of livework – and John Holager, from the Oslo office, in March 2010. At the end of the course, they were also joined by Lavrans Løvlie for the presentations, crits, and discussions.

Our penultimate course, prior to shifting focus to the thesis, was a 4 week investigation into tangible user interfaces. I was particularly looking forward to this course, as it promised to put a new perspective on my background in industrial design.

More than any course to date, these four weeks were defined almost exclusively by the project – there was some (semi-optional) reading, there were crits, sure, but looking back, there isn’t much else I remember other than working on the project itself, which is a bit different than most of the previous courses, where project work was combined with lectures and smaller exercises. Maybe working in pairs, rather than larger groups, allowed us to be more focused on the project itself, rather than the process (challenge) of getting something done. Or perhaps because we had previously covered both the technical skills we needed for TUI in physical computing, and all the elements of the design process across other courses, that this was one of the first opportunities to apply and explore from beginning to end, rather than push beyond what we knew. So these notes from the course are basically the story of the project I worked on together with Shruti, Knock Knock.

THE STORY OF KNOCK KNOCK:
FROM CLICHE TO JOYFUL OBJECT.

Our starting point was to consider the context of the home office, people working completely or in part from the same space they called home – thinking about permeability, blurred boundaries, split lives, etc. The brief served as a great point of departure, but we were happy, from the start, to bend the constraints if we felt the need to.

We started off with some research, talking to and observing a couple of people who worked primarily from home. I’m not sure if it helped or not that one of the people we were interviewing turned out to know more about the history, theory, and discussions of TUIs than we did, but it certainly made it interesting!

Some of the interesting things that came out of the research our were: needing the solitude to work, but it often being lonely; working from cafes for the ambient sociability; working across timezones creates challenges; not having to fit into normal office hours both a challenge and a blessing; collaborating without being in the same physical space; being nocturnal, finding own rhythm and most productive hours; creating rewards for self – coffee, lunch, etc; broadcasting productivity and presence; …

What was interesting in terms of process was that we weren’t looking to target a product at anybody, per se – this wasn’t a commercial (or psuedo-commercial in an academic context) project. We were looking for a spark, something to give us direction, inspiration. Later on, the research also served as a constant reminder of where we had started from, and as a useful guide when we needed to get back on track.

Quite quickly, we zeroed in on the basic concept: a device that allows two people to communicate across distance; initially like an ambient IM-status-indicator, although later more ‘message’ than ’status’. Ambient, not on screen, physical; unobtrusive, ignorable. Connecting to those close to you, without being in the same location. etc.

Which, as Adam Greenfield quite rightly pointed out back in 2008, has become a cliché (at least, we were pretty close: “Interaction Design Cliché No. 1: The pillow you hug, causing its remote twin owned by your lover 3000 miles away, to light up or vibrate.”) – as Michal Migurski points out in his comment, maybe it’s simply an obvious first reaction to the possibilities of networked objects, of the possibilities of the Arduino platform and physical computing. We weren’t even the only pair in our class to be having exactly the same thoughts and discussions. Michal describes it as Est. ~2004, Ivrea, so at least we were continuing a proud tradition.

Initially, we were so focused on what it did, that the form itself was to be no more than a vessel for behavior; something to disappear completely. Not a pillow, but perhaps even simpler – we were imagining cubes, cuboids, simple white geometric objects, possibly in multiples, maybe stackable. Probably glowing, in some form or another. We played with how they would behave, both individually and as groups – how to turn them on and off, how to send a message or change status. What could they do alone, or next to each other, or stacked, or when interacted with in different ways? When tapped, stroked, rotated?

As we played around with what else it could become, we moved away from glowing cubes to objects that worked with sound – knocking, tapping, grating. Perhaps it could mimic whatever sound you made at the other end? a soft tap, a hard thwack. maybe different faces could be made of different materials, which could indicate different meanings – tap the wood and get a hollow thud, the ceramic or glass side and get more of a ping. There was something nice about it, a strong core, but slowly, I felt, feature creep was setting in, and it was getting a bit messy.

And then, suddenly, in a tutorial discussing all these options, an idea jumped on us, starting with an idle thought – can’t “it”, whatever it is, hit other materials? Perhaps, metaphorically, like a woodpecker, sending signals in the woods?

After the meeting, we looked at each other… why not actually make it a woodpecker? Not as a metaphor… but literally? Suddenly, although the function hadn’t really changed, the project took on a different complexion. Glowing, or even vibrating or knocking, cubes felt like archetypal interaction design student projects… but a woodpecker was fun. It was a clean, simple idea. There were glints in our eyes when we discussed it. It suddenly had the potential, as Shruti said, to become “a joyful object”.

So, that was settled. A joyful object it would become. Now just to execute, to fulfill that potential.

[the first woodpecker in my sketchbook, and one of the first functional prototypes]

We had agreed on what it was, and, broadly, on what it should do. Now we had the dual challenges of creating a form that communicated that playfulness, and creating the internals that would enable it to behave as we intended, both in terms of the physical mechanics – receive signal from other woodpecker, so autonomously and mechanically move – and in software.

We moved back and forth between sketches, Rhino 3d, foam and even clay models, laser cut acrylic; often, whatever the latest development in terms of form met the latest in terms of electronics – first breadboards and arduinos, later a custom PCB, combined with the various components that actually moved things, primarily a solenoid.

At it’s simplest, it was a networked solenoid in a case. But of course, it wasn’t really that simple: we filled the wall with drawings of woodpeckers – true to life, completely abstracted, and variations in between, trying to identify the essence of a woodpecker. I filled pages of my sketchbook and folders with versions of CAD files trying to figure out how we might make the thing. We ordered components, that then turned out not to be strong enough – solenoids salvaged from 70s audio equipment eventually did the trick, when we pumped enough power through them. We laser-cut sheets and sheets of acrylic. I wasted lots of material. Shruti burnt an arduino, with a puff of smoke. We slept less and less.

Form and function and material choice were all interwoven – the components did certain things and moved in certain ways, which defined certain elements of the internal shape, which obviously impacted the external form. Internal space – both in terms of total space, but also in terms of how big a moment around the central pivot point we could create – was vital. As was the overall weight: too heavy and nothing would move, and the concept was dead. Weight and size both defined the components we needed, and vice versa.

A question we kept coming back to, and pushing away, was what to make it from, how to manufacture it?

• Beautifully polished wood? (too heavy)
• Modelling foam, painted white/grey (Muji-esque) or bright colours (toys)?
• Fiberglass or carbon fiber? (expensive, and… where?)
• Vacuum formed plastic? (big split line, not the right materiality)
• Porcelain? (heavy, and even if strong, communicates fragility)
• folded/bent polyprop sheet? (mjeh)
• Bent/folded ply? (heavy, difficult to achieve accurately)

Having made plenty of models during my time at Brunel, I foresaw much pain with some of those options, particularly those that required the final form to be hand-crafted from a solid lump. Any wall thickness had to be exceptionally thin – the whole thing had to be lightweight. There was also the question of the beak, which was to hit the surface on which the entire bird was mounted. Obviously, it had to be solid, and not fragile, or chip on impact. And to top it off, the entire object had to feel (as opposed to be) strong, and be inviting to the touch. A non-trivial spec list of oft-conflicting requirements!

In the end, I hit upon using cardboard – not as a cheap and messy prototyping material, but as the final, finished material. Together with acrylic sheet for a central frame, including the beak, it ticked all the right boxes: it’s cheap, it’s light. It’s strong, at least in one direction, and that’s all we needed. It is warm and inviting to the touch – we quickly agreed that we didn’t want to end up with ‘cyber-bird’. The acrylic (sanded, painted) allowed us to inject an element of colour, of very different materiality, while the card, cut with the laser-cutter and stacked, gave the object something natural.

To start with, I created a basic three dimensional form in Rhino, with the right dimensions and proportions, which was then sliced into the levels of the right thickness (we used 4mm cardboard. It was initially calculated for 3mm slices, which when I put it together with 4mm card, made for a very chubby bird!). From there on, the form was refined in 2d. It was quite an interesting challenge to imagine a 3d form, but implementing it in 2d; getting a feel for where each layer was, where each curve started and ended. While it wouldn’t have been too hard to make a script or grasshopper pattern to take care of the conversion from form to shapes, I liked doing it in the slower way. It was manual and perhaps roundabout, but it was nice to have that level of control over the curves and ultimately, the form itself. It meant we worked in layers, as it would end up, not in a mythical smooth shape, which it would never become. It mean we could feel the limitations, constraints, and, in a way, the affordances of the material and process, even in CAD. I could feel the resistance of the materials and chosen manufacturing process, and design with then, not against.

Our desk was permanently littered with mostly two dimensional acrylic outlines, and towards the end, more and more cardboard forms. People often asked what we were going to make the final thing out of – the cardboard was just for testing, right? No no, we assured them – this is what it’s gonna be.

There was something beautiful and perhaps unexpected about the card. For a material so abundant, usually considered disposable, it’s remarkably versatile. It cuts cleanly, giving remarkably well defined form. From both sides and back it displays very different characteristics: in profile, the layers accentuate the shape, especially the wings, through the natural contour lines. From behind, the ‘endgrain’ has a sudden surprise in store – when walking past, the layers line up, and become momentarily transparent. It’s fleeting, almost like a woodpecker flying past amongst leaves. It also has the nice side effect of making the internals – components, electronics, etc – visible, in a strangely abstracted way, in silhouette.

Using card, as card, also felt somehow honest. it’s not painted, printed on, artificially coloured – and although a heavily processed material, it feels natural. The stripe of acrylic, beyond its functional properties (rigid, hard, etc), created a strip of bright red, which became the beak and the crest; enough to identify the bird as a woodpecker. A flash of colour didn’t go amiss, either, ensuring that the dullness of the brown card was balanced.

The combination stuck.

And so, to the end result. It all came together for a crit and exhibition at the very end of the 4 weeks. To sum up what we created:

“Knock Knock are pairs of networked woodpeckers. When you physically make one woodpecker knock on the wall, its connected pair, wherever it is located, automagically knocks as well.”

That’s it. it’s all it does. And I’m so happy that it doesn’t do anything else. (and can I here just say I love the word automagically?) Sometimes, it can be so much harder to keep something simple, to reject any additional features or suggestions, to keep the idea clean. And I think that’s what we did. It’s probably one of the easiest projects to describe that I’ve ever done,and I think that’s what makes it one of my favorites.

What does a knock mean? It could be anything, it’s open to interpretation… and probably means different things to different people at different times. Maybe it’s a simple I’m thinking of you. Perhaps it’s a reminder to get back to me with those comments. Maybe check your email, dammit. Or fancy lunch? Or Good luck for tomorrow. Or ok, I’m awake now – want to call? Or, sometimes, maybe it means nothing - or nothing explicit, at least. Maybe it’s used just to play, for the simple pleasure of the object, as a distraction. To be playful.

Something we explored was how could we create something so minimal, so open, that the use wasn’t prescribed? As Vinay put it, “create the vocabulary, but leave the grammar open”. Creating a framework, not prescribing the use.

It’s interesting to reflect on the outcome, and what it is to me, in comparison to some of the other projects we’ve done here at CIID, and before. In contrast, for example, the projects from the GUI course were very much learning outcomes. I’m happy with the work we did, but within the context of the course, within the constraints of the challenges we were set and set ourselves, as responses to a brief. But Knock Knock, for me, works both within the context of the course, but also outside of it. It can stand alone, away from CIID, away from the brief. Not just as a way to showcase particular skills, but as an idea and execution, in and of itself. What we were supposed to do doesn’t need explaining, just what we did. It’s not necessarily better, but it is different.

I really enjoyed working on this project, in no small part due to working with Shruti (thanks!) – which was lucky, as we’d never worked together before, and it was a long time spent on one project, by CIID standards. But just as importantly, I am really happy with the outcome. I love the idea and the concept, but also the execution, the form. As both a connected concept, and even as a standalone object, I am unusually proud of our woodpeckers. And it’s rare that I say that about something I’ve worked on – I’m a critical person, especially about myself and my own work.

And yet, I’m so proud.

I think it truly did become A joyful object.

FURTHER READING

My project page is here.

The course was taught at CIID in February 2010. The syllabus is here.

Other projects from the course – responses to the same brief – are here.

The course faculty were Richard Shed, David Gauthier, and Vinay Venkatraman.

There were also visiting crits and input from Joseph Forakis and Durrell Bishop.