decision making

graphics

Sustainability

In our field, as in many others, we use this term. It gets regurgitated in our discussions and sanctified through political endorsement. Sustainability is a safe word. It implies we don't need to change, we just need to make sure we don't necessitate change by forcing the acknowledgment of our own wastefulness. This language is terrible, and is so for strategic purposes.
Suppose we choose a new word. Rather than sustainable, perhaps it is the attainable that we should be aiming for in our design choices. This language imposes a trajectory of change. We are not trying to sustain a status quo, we're invoking a newly defined relationship to our environment.

Old News?

Incomplete Manifesto

Map of facebook

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-the-us.html

Visual Thesaurus

I mentioned this a while ago in class and wanted to be sure you can all take a look. You can only do a few searches before they start asking you to subscribe, but it's really beautiful while it lasts.

Visual Thesaurus

WolframAlpha

Here is an example of how WolframAlpha can be used to compare information, in this example, comparing species. The last image on the page is a map of the information that can be shown as a tree or a network.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=puma,+lion,+red+fox

Here it is as a network:

Hamlet as a Facebook news feed

I don't know if you all have seen this before, but I think it is one of the greatest things inspired by Facebook, next to Scramble :)

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/7/30schmelling.html

Carbon footprint of Google search

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece

I'm glad manifesto's can be in list form.

Design sets an example.
Restructuring our own values begins a greater discussion.

Design with the life cycle in mind.
This includes everything from trees, to bricks, to hardware and software.

Understand the carbon footprint of the Google search.

Good infrastructure is flexible.
In this instance, flexibility means being able to anticipate and plan for known changes and tactfully adapt when surprises occur.

Expect the unexpected.
I don’t really how to elaborate on this but it sounded cool.

Nobody benefits from hoarding.
Too much information begets too many resources devoted to that housing that information.

Privatization and exclusivity decreases productivity and progress.
The immaterial economy is upon us. Sharing [ideas, immaterial knowledge, codes, images] helps us all.

Technology alone will not save us.
Real change challenges existing institutions.

Re-instate the Common(s) as a resource and a product.
If the model can flourish online, it can be reinstated on the ground and in our planning policies.

Get political. We are the least involved generation politically speaking since it has been recorded.

Our designs do not stop at their physical manifestations.
Just as carefully as we craft our buildings, streets, plazas, and institutions, we must consider crafting the digital infrastructure, and a corresponding language, which supports and interacts with them.

We are where our attention is.
But – the body is still situated in time and space. Understanding this relationship is crucial.

The dignity of making things is important to our [human] livelihood.
Our ability to make art is a strictly human tradition. Take craft seriously. Beauty and use still have a place in a time of algorithmic design.

PS this is a draft :)

Draft Manifesto

With the incessant pull on the human mind toward the virtual it is the architect’s responsibility to ground their work in the physical. While information may be incorporeal and instantaneous, those who access it are still tied to bodies, environment and place. In acknowledging that which is physical we can advance along with technology. Light, air, temperature, sound, touch are the materials with which we must work. It is these that ground the body and mind within the physical world while supporting their forays into the digital.

Similarly, technology thus far must still inhabit a physical body in order to support its reach. These bodies – computers, servers, digital devices – are also grounded in their physical needs. To design for technology we must answer to these physical needs in order to provide space that will withstand evolution.

Class Manifesto

Historically, we have always had questions, fears, and doubts about infrastructure and technology.

Architecture and technology are mutually inclusive terms. If architecture is a form of technology then it is not immune to technological advances.

Information technology has not outmoded architecture. It is adding another layer to architecture’s role as mediator between people and the environment.

The internet and related IT devices reinforce individualism while at the same time present new means and speed of communication, much like the highway did in the past.

Personal connectivity conveys a heightened degree of power, freedom, participation, familiarity/comfort, and safety to the individual.

As designers, we hold a determined level of control over program in our designs.

A whole environment, such as a city, can be seen as a set of interfaces at different scales. As designers, we can optimize those human-physical/environmental-digital interfaces.

As we move into the future, our designs need to include more hardware capacity than necessary to avoid swiftly becoming obsolescent. We define hardware in very broad terms.

We will resist inherent obsolescence by building- in multiple functions.

We have the ability to design-in responsible usage; part of this is designing from a whole system approach.

The Takeaway: Obama's Budget, The Week's Agenda; Terror Trial Move; Haiti Update; Dave Barry - The Takeaway

The Takeaway: Obama's Budget, The Week's Agenda; Terror Trial Move; Haiti Update; Dave Barry - The Takeaway

Eddie Bernays Teaser

Century of Self

Technology from a theological perspective

An interview with Wired magazine's co-founder, Kevin Kelly.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5227

New Industry Revolution

Here is the article Maren mentioned last week. It's worth reading!

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution

Manifesto

Every invention, every innovation… every solution posed by those preceding this time has raised more questions and produced more problems than the ones to which they were designed in response. Of course, every solution we in this coming information age propose will naturally perform likewise. The extent to which we can minimize the shortcomings in design will be measured by our attempt at solving for as many variables as can be recognized. We can no longer only ask ourselves how something could be done, but had better be ready to ask whether something should be done. Every generation is born into the luxury of hindsight; and we know that we could do most anything we suppose is possible, but have already done a great many things that should never have been accomplished. Or, if that accomplishment serves its immediate purpose, some immediate good, it inevitably becomes the burden of some succeeding condition. With the technologies we use we could do great and terrible things, but to say we should do something is to introduce to the process of design a moral imperative. It will be that moral imperative that sensitizes us to all those variables that in recognition of which we will produce solutions of both broadly versatile conception and modestly specific, local actualization.
We will restrain ourselves. While the temptation is to cram the latest novelties into every design, we must re-evaluate the basis of need. We must consider the life-cycles of our products, obsolescence, and the continued use of resources after its intended function is no longer supported.
We will remember that invention is not creation, and that creative design is the displacement of material. The displacement of material is either the forcible disruption of natural equilibrium, or the necessary release of stress. We must ask what the intended environment needs and what it produces, what the proposed product needs and what it produces, and how the two entities can be paired to complement one another.
We will understand expression as inexorable flatulence due to the digestion of experience. It is neither rational nor reducible. It is as needless as music and as natural as gravity. We will honor that dynamic in at least these two ways: 1) For too long our notion of expression has relied upon the purchase and possession of goods; a notion sold to us in the interest of commerce. A new paradigm should be realized in which expression is no more than a communicative and behavioral interpretation of experience. The foremost objective for any designer is the enrichment of experience for the purpose of encouraging expression. 2) We will promote no programs that seek to misappropriate information technology or the means of communication public and private for the purpose of repressing, surveying, exploiting, or corrupting the liberty and sanctity of human expression.
We plink and sputter. Behind every technologically advanced appendage we can invent is the soft flesh and bone that orchestrates its movements. We design for the flesh and bone not for the advanced appendage. We will endeavor to remain grounded in our respect for the human condition and resist romanticizing the fetishes of industry and technology.
We will be responsive, not resolute. When our fellow citizens insist on behaving otherwise, our response will be resistance. It is our fundamental responsibility to question popular convention regardless of political climate, the answers we accumulate inform our actions for or against popular opinion.

Minutes

Infrastructural salon.

January 25th

* Wired magazine article on the 'new industrial revolution'

discusses the flattening of the world due to new technologies.

* Visual thesaurus- a model or type of branching network

Snapdragon

*Ornamentation & beauty as qualities of analog

McSweeney publications as unique products, not mass produced using new techs.

Is ornamentation outdated or not?

'empty formal logic'?

*Victor Hugo

*Biomimicry & algorithmic architecture

*De-modularization (destandardization) of manufacturing processes

*Organic based structures

*Growth of technology is inconsistent (leaps, bounds & plateaus)

*Non centralized systems of growth

& Processing programs ((starlogo?)

Circulation analysis tool

Human motion mapping

*Control of the techs (commons media like wikipedia)

*Privacy concerns of new techs.

Security of augmented environments (hacking)

* 'The cloud' proposed for London Olympics

*The shift back & forth of technology between centralization and decentralization

*'Google Power' vs. infrastructure as historically 'public works'

an author's reaction to the e-book

An All Things Considered story

JB Jackson rewrite: Gregariousness in the Technological Landscape

An individual’s search for identity has developed to be more concrete than ever within the framework of the internet. A century ago we defined ourselves in terms of our environment, and forty years ago JB Jackson identified an inclination to manipulate our environment to help identify ourselves. Identity now has become in large part the appropriation and reinterpretation of the identities of others on the internet. There is a mass of images, words, and music on the internet that is now available to be copied, pasted, edited and rebroadcast into the world as what makes up you.

In Jackson’s description of the highway as the new social landscape in 1966 he points to the loud self-identifying architecture that lines these thoroughfares. This vivid self-image-making of businesses and institutions has now become possible on a personal level on the internet. Imagine being able to build your own billboard or neon-sign-adorned business along RT 95 telling all who pass who you are and what you stand for. With the growth of the information highway, we are capable of this level of self broadcasting within a vast communication network that can support it.

Of course the computer (or internet-ready device) is the object that allows us into this new social landscape. But the object must also be supported by an internet connection. While we don’t need to get in a vehicle and drive to see and socialize within the new identities constructed, we do need the infrastructure that allows the information to travel to us. By bringing broadband to spaces both public and private, this socialization can be supported more continuously. And perhaps the most socially opportune space is one which provides for both internet and physical interaction. The social possibilities of bringing together like minds in physical space with even more like minds in digital space are more expansive than ever. To have a space of permanence able to communicate with the infinite space of transience may be the new goal.

Jackson proposed that the idea of boundaries may have been coming back into favor in The Public Landscape. The internet has certainly made this so. Places of safety and commonality are often times made possible by the boundaries they hold within the internet. Memberships, subscriptions, and passwords signal to us that we are entering a place shared by people with common interests to ours. Within the boundaries of these definitions we are more likely to find what we are looking for, whether it be a new recipe, a recommended film, or a bank account balance.

If the structure of the internet can more easily allow us to define and locate ourselves, we may begin to be able to tie it back to the physical structure in which we operate. Moving forward we should work toward using the social structures of the internet to support the social spaces we inhabit physically.

NY Times article

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/31unboxed.html?ref=technology

Dynamics of Experience

diagram : from Forlizzi and Battarbee 2004 , <Understanding experience in interactive systems>Cambridge, ACM PRress

----------------

Fluent Interaction - This is the kind of interaction that is automatic or based on skills. Examples are riding a bicycle and making the mroning coffee.

Cognitive Interaction - This is the kind of interaction that has to be learned from the product at hand. An example of cognitive interaction is trying to identify the flushing mechanism of a toilet in a foreign country.

Expressibe Interaction - This is the interaction that help the user form a relationship to a product or some aspect of it. In expressive interaction users may change, modify, or personalize, invesitng effort in creating a better fit between person and product. Examples are restoring an old chair and painting it to accent the color fo the wall.



Most interactive system address the first two interactions well; mostly because these interactions are predictable. However, the third kind of interaction is often unaccounted for. This limits interactivity.

People adapt such systems to work in the manner that they believe is appropriate to that environment and context. But can the landscape be designed to predict or even encourage expressive interaction? To understand the problem we must first understand the differnce between the computational model and an experiantial model.

first approach to manifesto

The spread of digital technology into urban areas, and with new kinds of spatial and material circumstances, challenges the way designers address interaction between not only the form but also the synthesized experience that results with the site specific context.

for example, a media facade Concept 1 : represents the idea of letting the citizens of Copenhagen interact with the façade of Industriens Hus. By engaging passers-by in an active and playful interaction with a large valve near the main road, that opens and closes for an artistic flow of particles that will pass through vertical displays that intersect and interfere with crossing horizontal displays showing logos.

Diagram : Space exploration for media facades(by Boyoung)

"Despite its intention as a catalyst for generating a distinct message in the global marketplace, the globalization in the information age has contributed to the growing homogenization of people and places."

(* from JB Jackson response/ Boyoung)

When designing for new settings, like urban areas, it is particularly crucial to get an overview of the key aspects of the space, and how design moves in one area affect the potentials of other parts of the identity of the space.

Association for Computing Machinery(ACM)

ACM is widely recognized as the premier membership organization for computing professionals.
It has a lot of reources of advance computing as a science and a profession; with journals and magazines, conferences, workshops, electronic forums, and Online Books.
You have to be a member(payed) to see most of the resources but you can access to the archives, job/career, events, etc.

http://www.acm.org/

Building Information Model(BIM)

BIM is a softweare of inter-operability which they introduce as the next generation of CAD.
also known as "Autodesk Revit Architecture"

This software is important in sharing informations and data integration.
It is a integrated digital representation of a project that can be used for many purposes while enabling design professionals to share data, allowing collaboratin between architects, engineers, consultants, contractors, developers and owners.

link to Autodesk.com > BIM

We can download the program just as we downloaded CAD 2010. I haven't used them yet..  but seems very efficient for practices.

Civic Technology Link

http://singularityu.org/videos/2009/12/jonathan-zittrain-civic-technologies-and-the-future-of-the-internet/

JB Jackson Response

As we have moved from a one-size-fits-all economy to a customization-for-all economy, the focus of architecture has evolved from an emphasis on "what it has" and "what it does" to "what you feel" and "who you are" - the key concepts in what is increasingly referred to as the "experience economy."


This shift demonstrates that personal identity and personal growth have become even more crucial in a place's value. In this changing environment. The public landscape can play a significant part in determining how people participate in the ongoing restructuring of economic and cultural practices, by acting as a catalyst for new experiences and perceptions.

The machine age during the period from World War I to World War II have served as a metaphor for simplification, standardization. For the information age, differentiation, customization, communication, and perception has become a symbol that is valued. Cities such as Bilbao, Shanghai, and Dubai have in recent years all successfully used architecture to enhance their image and elevate their position in the global village. They can be a powerful strategy to be a unique identity. However the irony is that it has, in many cases it achieved just the opposite effect. Despite its intention as a catalyst for generating a distinct message in the global marketplace, the globalization in the information age has contributed to the growing homogenization of people and places.

Public spaces can play a critical role as a catalyst to generate an authentic identity for people and places. It is a fact that people and places must differentiate themselves in a global economy. I believe that architecture and landscape can benefit from the well-established sustainable identity.

Photosynth

http://photosynth.net/

Google's data lib movement

http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/

Rethinking the monument

The designer, Roberto Rovira, is a risd Landscape Architecture alum.

http://www.sunspars.com/Home.html

Bionic...trees?

http://www.solarbotanic.com/

http://www.sensingplaces.com/

http://www.foresee.biz/foresee_HUMANACTIVE_SPACES/foresee_HUMANACTIVE_SPACES.html

http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~bodybrush/

McSweeney's Answer to Internet Newspapers

Defining the difference between internet and print news:
SF Panorama

Hillary's internet freedom speech today

http://www.state.gov/statecraft/

JB Jackson Response

In response to JB Jackson’s essays concerning the landscape in its modern state, one cannot fail to recognize the massive changes taking place in communications and information technology since its publication in the mid twentieth century. It is not that the overall conventions have changed themselves, but rather that they have been enhanced through the capacity to link systems that were heretofore logistically separated. Where transportation was a series of individual mechanical systems presented as an array of options for travelling from point to point, these systems are increasingly integrated and form an organically responsive network. Where communication was tied to the notion of “a time and place”, we now are engaged continuously in a suspended dialogue with innumerable contacts to whom we make ourselves constantly available. Taken together, these two developments push us further than ever from the paradigm of cultural boundaries as they are described by Frost’s image of a well-built wall. We travel over and through these walls everyday.

If communication is the most necessary element for strengthening identities, then ours have never been more soundly buttressed. The ability to produce, project and sustain one’s outward identity (or identities) has never been so available to so many individuals in so many ways. The conversations we have range from the exclusive to the universally public, each moment on the spectrum subject to a revised persona, and we don’t have to be present for any of them. While this has not yet replaced the practice of consumerist acquisition of product items that propose our intended persona when we must be present in our relationships or activities, it offers the venue for something suspended that is not reliant on accessories for its support. Rather than Jackson’s highway culture in which one’s identity is illustrated through curb appeal, the information super-high-way projects us into society behind the protection of digital avatars and edited commentary.

Therefore, the public space, apart from the political and ceremonial, is in danger of growing obsolete. What can be considered public or social about a place is defined by the behaviors conducted therein. We no longer require a public meeting to participate publicly. We no longer require a social gathering in order to socialize. It is not to say that these spaces should not or need not be designed into the social and public mechanism, but that the trend toward informality in these conventions is compounded accordingly.

Where the major development in transportation in the last century was the proliferation of the culture of the automobile, the newest compliment to our transportation infrastructure is the means by which the various systems are now being integrated. As well as those nodes of intersection, as described by Charlie Cannon, that conjoin systems of movement at physical points of overlap, the ability for each system to respond to logistical conditions of the others through information sharing is increasing. This not only increases the radius of access to resources, employment, and travel, but also is increasingly and profoundly affecting the means of commerce. Rather than a landscape marked by outlets for consumer options in which the interface is defined by where one enters and exits the parking lot, the new user interface is virtual, hardware non-specific, and no longer relies on an architecture-as-glyph brick and block format for recognition and interaction. Merchants become digital Bedouins able to set up shop anywhere at the beckon call of a search engine. Highly automated shipping systems deliver goods from massive, largely unmanned distribution centers that house the inventories of scores of merchants. Plugging into this system is not dependant on storefront access; we have gone from passing a three quarter ton vehicle from residence to store house to passing electromagnetic impulses wirelessly from one processor to another spanning continents in seconds.

The new paradigm of globalization, in which access is described in measures of time rather than distance, suggests an incoming shift in how we perceive boundaries. The cultural divides that the last two centuries brought boiling to the surface are not altogether disappeared. However, the newer generations will not grow under the ideological contexts these agendas promoted in the past. Distance is no longer a barrier of its own virtue. The concept we now carry of time is metered out in fractions of a second. The new global economy/ecology demands that we take the long view and abandon efforts to isolate ourselves politically, culturally, or ideologically. The philosophical boundaries illustrated in Frost’s poem become logistical obstacles in the context of this new vision of a geopolis, particularly because of the notions brought to rise during his time: that access to the means of promoting one’s self in the social and political environment is the defining quality of liberated and civilized culture, and that this promotion is exercised through the indulgence of expression. In JB Jackson’s time, the newest form of indulgent expression came about in the projection of identity through consumer products. The information age, when communication of data and ideas is at its most accessible and fluid state in human history, brings the projection of identity and the promotion of the idealized self to a level of enterprise no longer dependant on proximity to others, appropriate space, or private holdings beyond the breadth of one’s elbows.

More towers in the landscape

http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2009-08/solar-sunflowers-look-reincarnated-cell-tower-trees

Living Buildings from IBM

Most of these systems are cumbersome and based almost entirely upon sensor networks, networked information, and more information than we can currently process. I think that many of these ideas (as marketable as they are) could be solved by more efficient system planning, architecture etc... so as to avoid the incoming Orwellian future.

IBM's Smart Planet

Comprehensive description of IBM's vision for pervasive computing with great info on existing initiatives:

http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/index.html?sa_campaign=message/leaf1/corp/smarterplanet/sp2adv

What does the internet look like?

http://www.cheswick.com/ches/map/gallery/index.html

http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/

http://www.opte.org/maps/

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/02/01/SeaCableHi.jpg

http://www.labnol.org/internet/favorites/world-atlas-internet-map-social-media/1489/

Lebbeus Woods on Daniel Meridor on ...tomorrow?

http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/utopia-redux/

Notes from class discussion, week two:

January 11, 2010:

What is at stake for public space when information becomes dematerialized? What is critical that might be lost?

Urbanism: reversal of sedentary/agricultural society. potential for nomadic existence—are nomads placeless? Will everyone become disconnect from a natural circadian schedule. Lost in translation.

Does public space have to have program; is it a physical space, eg. chat rooms (public space or public forum)?

Parks are more meaningful in context. Context determines meaning of public space. Only reason to go anywhere is for work or recreation.

Decentralized urban space/ dissipated urban scene.

No need for kiosks anymore, so public space remove from place to gather information.

Nomadic producers—why build a workplace if you can work everywhere? No reason for mass gatherings anymore, not necessary.

Will we ever abandon the basic human desire for proximity/physical presence? Technology always loses its shine.

Which industries will become automated first? Service, production, or military? What about jobs?

Maybe the shift towards decentralization is more sustainable. Why not decrease the importance of the city? Could this balance the pressure for cities to become denser from backlash from sprawl? At least less desire to build such tall buildings?

Innate desire for human interaction—become ‘life-cubicle’ desire for proximity but no direct communication.

Difference between proximity and presence.

How many people do you need for proximity/presence? 1 person in the flesh = 5 people online?

Physical presence becomes everything when the power goes out.

Will we smell things over the internet? [do you then need an ester plug in to do it]

Sensory technologies are thrilling when new, but fade quickly—continued addition of features to mobile phones, for example.

We are overlooking human desire. What if you just want to dig?

Can you program space where work is not desirable? Wireless dead zones. As designers, can we control the way multiple programs overlap in public space?

With advanced tech you have to learn sets of processes to be able to work in the first place. How to use new programs, interfaces.

Market forces and economy change how we work in this way, too.

What do you pay for when everything is free? Taxes?

Social norms are changing rapidly.

Children now are the case study—what all this tech communication is doing to us. Kids never have to say goodbye anymore, never lose contact. Complications of facebook friendship, new rules and etiquette for parent-child, teacher-student, employer-employee, etc.

We keep building more stuff to hold dematerialized info.

Architecture and technology are not necessarily separate, are in fact mutually inclusive.

Do servers become obsolete as fast as our PC’s? Can we keep reprogramming them to better keep up with change?

Data centers do not hold same attraction for human development—don’t employ many people.

If we are plugged in (such as on the phone) in public space are we really in our own private space instead?

How do we differentiate between a window and a screen? Size of aperture?

Chance meetings are lost, small moments—chance to see hot girl’s undies in public laundry room has its appeal, or do the undies get posted online with infinite zoom. Is it becoming more and more pre-meditated?

Over-indulgence: nude sunbathers on Google Earth. Versus digital memorial: hobo on park bench.

Payment for roof-top advertising.