As I started writing this, it was hovering around 39˚C here in Sydney. Gusty, burning hot air. Too hot. It could not have been more different to New York, where I'd been a week or so earlier, where the temperature had been hovering around -7˚C and down to -15˚C with the windchill. I was in Manhattan for a Microsoft Research event: their annual 'social computing symposium', and this year was loosely focused on 'the city'. Many thanks to Tom Coates + Matt Jones, Liz Lawley, Clay Shirky et al for the invite.

Here are my notes on the event, with a dash of local colour thrown in for good measure.

(There are some other excellent notes, from Nicolas Nova and Liz Goodman, and a fine set of photos from Julian Bleecker that capture the essence of the event.)

The venue was the now near-legendary ITP at NYU, set in a typically sturdy building on Broadway, around Greenwich Village and the other relatively opaque NYU buildings, so I was often tramping around in the scruffy, rough-hewn nature of American urban fabric - I'm always struck by how different the various surfaces of the street are here, compared to Paris, say; Manhattan's are muscular, tough, fractured, brutish; I like it.

The surrounding streets were festooned with discarded Christmas trees. The relatively low-rent retail around here had a discernible air of desperation about it ("40% off sale price!"). The recession is far more evident than in Australia. 

Walking to and from the hotel on Union Square was a particular pleasure for the three days I was there. The soundscape of Manhattan is immediately and easily familiar, shaped by the buildings such that it bounces around the streets: the rattle of distant subway under your feet, accompanied by  a welcome draught of warm air blown up through the sidewalk; the chatter of hundreds of different dialects; the rolling thunder of supersized trucks careening through the rough and ready streets; the bawls and drawls of homeless and helpless; fragments of cellphone conversation; Dirty Projectors on the iPhone; eventually, the freezing wind howling round the blunt edges of my hotel ... For all that insecure New York is now often gripped in the fear that the party has moved on, that it is no longer the centre of the world, or the locus of American creativity, or that the US itself sometimes now feels like an un-developing nation, that it is beginning to unravel at the seams, or is at least being leapfrogged by others ... For all that, New York is still utterly beguiling, every single time. Beautiful.

(However, I was taken by Smith Magazine's 'Big Apple in Six Words' vs. Jay-Z, spotted on Flavorwire. As they point out, as if we needed reminding, "we do not live in the same New York as Jay-Z.")

This year's Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium had pulled together a fine set of people including Genevieve Bell, Julian Bleecker, Ben Cerveny, Tom Coates, Anil Dash, Russell Davies, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Adam Greenfield, Liz Goodman, Usman Haque, Tom Igoe, Natalie Jeremijenko, Steven Johnson, Matt Jones, Jennifer Magnolfi, Mike Migurski, Nicolas Nova, Ray Ozzie, Clay Shirky, Kevin Slavin, Molly Steenson, Linda Stone, Alice Taylor, Anthony Townsend, Duncan Wilson and many more. (A little US-centric, understandably.) Some old friends, some new ones, many I didn't know. Given the combination of social technology and the city, and the timezone, this was a great group of people.

The event stretched over two days, with series of talks grouped into loose themes followed by breakout sessions to pick apart what we'd heard. It more or less worked. Some of the talks were very good indeed; others just OK, but all were interesting on some level.

The most compelling talk was Kevin Slavin's, which is already being spoken of as one of the great presentations of the 21st century. If there were a Nobel Prize available for Powerpoint, Slavin would be a shoe-in for this round (although I have a sneaking suspicion it was Keynote, and thus disqualified). It was a majestically imaginative construction, a teetering house of cards, each new level beautifully delivered, veering from the physics of stealth bombers to the overwhelming dominance of high-frequency trading in the stock markets, via the early history of trading in lower Mannahatta, to today's NYC where real estate transactions in an entire sector of the city are dominated by optimising the physical proximity of algorithms to the mass of telecommunications infrastructure that is the 'carrier hotel' of 60 Hudson Street, before all of financial services ascends into the singularity and leaves this corporeal realm behind.

Something like that, anyway. Virilio 2.0, live on Broadway.

He was preceded by the dauntingly/hearteningly prolific Steven Johnson, who had just finished the manuscript for his latest book a couple of days previously. All of Johnson's books are worth reading, just as his projects from Feed to Outside.In have been worth watching, and the forthcoming book would appear to be right up my strasse, concerning the relationships between urban form and innovation and creativity. (Actually, it'll be interesting to see if it's 'innovation' or 'creativity'. Two very different schools.) Johnson's talk was tantalising, in that it described the routes taken by some of his trains of thought, but not that much of the content. Yet.

There were some Johnson-esque graphs (as he joked, it's obligatory to draw some when Clay Shirky is in the room) indicating relationships between creativity and size of city i.e. the bigger the city, the more innovative (don't worry; he went a little further than that). The measures of creativity will surely be explored more in the book too, for here they seemed a little over-focused on techno-scientific measures (products, patents etc.). Creativity of course also includes things like ballet, painting, stand-up comedy and gardening, few of which would register in such a measurement; but for that matter, would also include innovative services like the iPod, which have been predicated on very few patents (just ask Nokia), but rather, in the words of Patrick Whitney, protected and defined instead by a more "systemic nature of innovations and by trademark". Equally, I'd be interested in explorations of creativity (or perhaps innovation) applied outside of technology or creative industries sectors, but in manufacturing, agriculture etc.

Perhaps these activities might show up, but this initial definition should be an interesting section of Johnson's book. Equally, size may matter, but cannot quite be such a direct relationship - again, using that US techno-scientific measure, the hundreds of cities in China that are bigger than their US equivalents would simply not show up. Yet many are surely creative - and equally perhaps many are not.

I'm sure Johnson's approach will depend far more on the relationship with form than size, and here I hope he goes beyond 'the swerve' and Jacobs-isms - as useful as they are, I think we have a wider laboratory of urban environments at this point, as I tried to outline in my recent notes on New Songdo City.

The graphs he drew - which you can almost see in the above photo - indicate the direct relationship between metabolism and mass in animals, and so also indicate the biological and open systems theory angles that Johnson often approaches the subject from, which combined with a natural feel for Brooklyn-esque urbanism, tend to offer fresh insights to the field.

With my 'designing creative clusters' hat on, I cannot wait to see what he's come up with as Johnson tends to synthesise previously disparate concepts with considerable skill and imagination, and communicates them wonderfully well.

Sandwiched in between Slavin and Johnson, a good old-fashioned technical demo. And one that worked. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrated the new Bing Maps interface. I wasn't expecting much. I was blown away.

There are videos of Blaise talking about this around the place, so I won't go into too much detail, but what impressed me were the Silverlight-enabled transitions between the various zoom levels, the smooth switching of projection from 2D to isometric to tiles of angled aerial photography to street level, and the incredible integration of PhotoSynth at this street level. I'd been wondering about a genuine application for PhotoSynth for years, but with the latter on-hand, Bing Maps can even 'go inside' certain buildings - usually museums, galleries, admittedly - into 3D user-created photo-worlds.

It gives you pause for thought - although Google Maps has a massive lead in this market (as Flash does over Silverlight for that matter) these things - being non-physical, free, and with little embedded personal capital - can be relatively easily displaced. There is little friction.

Equally interesting is comparing Google and Microsoft's approaches here. An over-simplification perhaps, but with PhotoSynth providing a form of user-generated creation of the building/street, Microsoft are deploying emergent, colloborative processes at that scale, whereas Google are driving a car with a camera on its roof around every street in the world (more or less) to create their StreetView. Which is a top-down strategy if ever I saw one. Instead, Google deploy their bottom-up processes at the 2D map scale, via MapMaker etc. (although Building Maker is blurring the line here, with emergent process at the building scale. If that gets integrated into Maps, as it surely must, that's interesting. With buildings, Google users do structural engineering; Microsoft users paint the facade with photos and do interior decor.) And if this paragraph was a diagram it would look like this:

The afternoon session, concerning government, was less impressive. They didn't really focus on urban governance, which would've been useful, and few participants appeared to have much idea of the processes, politics and issues in that world. Having said that, Anil Dash was excellent: amusing, insightful, cleverly-structured and inspirational. 

An obligatory Post-It note exercise, envisioning urban applications, was sandwiched in between these two sessions.

The morning of day two was 'curated' by Tom Coates and Matt Jones, and concerned 'the city as social technology'. After Tom gave a scene-setting presentation characterised by verve, imagination and an incredibly distracting clip of the monkeys and the monolith from 2001, Molly Steenson gave a great presentation that at first glance concerned the history of computers and architecture, yet really dealt with issues of design, agency and artificial intelligence in architecture. 

I particularly appreciated Molly's evident ambivalence with Christopher Alexander, something I share, and also that she handed round some actual physical artefacts, in the form of the proceedings of 1960s ACM conferences on computer graphics and the like. It was a whistle-stop tour of Ivan Sutherland's famous Sketchpad demo, Marvin Minsky, J.C. Licklider, Negroponte's early work (The Architecture Machine, which is delightfully dedicated "To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture".) As we use AI increasingly on projects, albeit at the basic levels of agent-based modelling for instance, it's fascinating to reflect on the lengthy history of this work.

Duncan and I then gave our talk about our various projects. I should apologise here for running out of time. It turns out that one presentation plus one presentation does not equal one presentation. It does in fact still equal two presentations. Who knew? Either way, I think the presentation went well, and we were fortunate to be able to take over Ben Cerveny's workshop session to continue the conversation, as Ben had business to attend to.

Usman Haque followed us, with a hugely entertaining, almost totally off-the-cuff discussion, which genuinely engaged the punters. He ran through a series of statements he'd "heard around the place" - most of which revolved around applying web metaphors to urban environments - asking whether people agreed with them, before revealing he didn't agree with any of them and outlining what he did believe. It was feisty, scattershot, funny, engaging and insightful. As a rhetorical tactic, it worked, and I happened to agree with just about everything he did believe in, for what it's worth. A couple of references to follow-up: Stanislaw Lem's Peace on Earth and H. Von Hurster's 'On Self-Organizing Systems and their Environments'.

The 'breakout' sessions split four ways afterwards, with Matt Jones, Nicolas Nova and Jennifer Magnolfi all leading sessions I would've liked to have participated in. But Duncan and I were leading the other, and so we continued our talk of instrumenting urban environments.

The group involved Haque, Jeremijenko, Goodman, Bell and Yahoo Research's Elizabeth Churchill amongst others. Duncan showed videos of his work on the "stabilising" of the Millennium Bridge, perhaps one of the first high profile sensor-based projects Arup had done. It never fails to intrigue people. The first video showed the swaying of the bridge on those first days; the second showed the trials once the dampers had gone on, wherein crowds of volunteers, many adorned with sensors, walked back and forth across the bridge. The rather saucy name given to the phenomenon discovered by engineers and researchers during this process - 'synchronous lateral excitation' - also caused a stir in the workshop. 

Following this, Natalie Jeremijenko led a great discussion about the role of the designer/engineer in projects like this, and what levels of agency they/we have within the contemporary development process. We eventually got onto the harsh cut-off in built fabric development processes, wherein little information on the inhabited phase of projects - the ongoing design phase, as adaptive design would have it - is gathered, and certainly rarely acted upon by professional designers or developers. Tough but important questions; exactly what such a session should be. Genevieve Bell, Natalie and I had a good chat afterwards, in a curious but enjoyable little "Australian" cabal, holed-up in frozen NYC.

(This 'breakout' discussion maybe indicated one of the few problems with the symposium - that few present had experience of actually working with city governments or property developers, say, on urban-scale projects that affect either governance or built fabric (some certainly did, outside of Duncan and I, but by far a minority). Of course side-stepping existing structures is a valid tactic in terms of achieving change; not everything must be reinvented from within 'the system'. You still need to know what to side-step though. While I'm being critical, there was also a tendency to grasp for biological metaphors and insights when thinking about the city - and perhaps more understandably, urban systems. While there is considerable insight to be gained from such approaches - and biomimicry in particular, from a design perspective - there is also considerable difference with cities, and citizens, and the way they work. Equally, although many here came from different backgrounds a way of thinking has emerged concomitant with developing web-based structures and systems, and we might have benefited from further external references - a biologist, an architect, a landscape designer, a policy-maker, say. Then again, this was a social computing symposium after all.)

For some reason, the afternoons for both Monday and Tuesday weren't as good as the mornings had been. I'm not sure whether this was due to the sessions themselves, or fatigue (and certainly my jet-lag kicked in big time on Monday, so perhaps it was just me). Yet maybe the afternoons tended to fall apart because the conversations stimulated by the morning needed some time and space to be expressed. This drifting focus wasn't just due to the event being in Manhattan, and therefore surrounded by distractions, as people did stay in and around ITP in the main. It's just that the conversation needed to dissipate, that half-formed reflections needed to be articulated. So it tended to, and attention was lost a little in the afternoons as a result. That's how I read it anyway.

The aforementioned Anil Dash Show was an exception on the afternoon of the first day. But I cared little for the presentation on governance structures of Burning Man. As Matt Jones commented at the time, perhaps there's a gene for appreciating Burning Man which seemed lacking in many of us. Actually, I don't think it's genetic - I just suspect that Burning Man is rubbish. But then I've never been. And I'm English.

Tuesday's afternoon session on (urban) games was also a little variable, though Kati London of Area/Code gave great overview of some of the best work in this area, including their own fine work. Dennis Crowley of FourSquare was also very entertaining, but if the technocratic/biological metaphor had been slightly, well, pervasive throughout the two days, so had been the game metaphor. As longer-term readers will know, I've previously focused on football, and video games such as Grand Theft Auto, as metaphor to some extent, but generally in terms of notation of interactive systems, and exploring the (creative) tension between the individual and a system. But the idea of competition and point-scoring - of seeing everything as a game - becoming an overriding metaphor for everything (with its tendency towards individualism and acquisition) is limiting at best.

Before the event kicked off, Duncan and I walked over to the new Cooper Union building by Morphosis (after I'd been so impressed with the Caltrans building in LA), which I rather like the look of. 

After the event, a quick tour of the High Line, which is of course wonderful. With a fair wind, notes on those to follow. (All photos from this New York visit are here.)

After New York, down to California and a couple of days in the Arup San Francisco office. Though I was working for most of it, it was good to briefly catch up with friends there too, and then finally get out for a bit of a walk on the last afternoon. If I'd been strategic, I could've gone to San Francisco Federal Building to complete my hat-trick of Morphosis buildings but didn't make it. Next time. Still, I feel I got under the skin of the city a bit for the first time. Report: San Francisco is largely appealing.

As for me, I couldn’t help but make a few observations - I'll try to take a different angle, at least initially, approaching it from urbanism as much as product/service design, particularly not having seen the thing in the flesh yet. To get the basics out of the way right away, yes, I think it’ll be incredibly successful. And yes, the name’s a bit iffy but will not be a problem in time because it'll be incredibly successful. And yes, it’s the first iteration of something that will be rapidly refined over the coming years.

 There’s been lots of talk of it being a ‘third’ product, in-between iPhone and laptop. To me, this reminds me of ‘third places’. That’s a Ray Oldenburg term, of The Great Good Place, and generally refers to cafés, bars, libraries etc. Thus the iPad to me feels more like a product for third places rather than a third product. Its form factor and service model is defined for in-between spaces. Although it will float around the home and the office perfectly well, it comes into its own in these third spaces in a way that that phone and laptop cannot, being either too small or too large respectively.

With this in mind, it also reminds me of Jan Gehl’s book, Life Between Buildings, in that the iPad is a device for the life between buildings. 

If we approach it spatially - in terms of context of use I mean, rather than the device itself - it becomes clear why I think it’ll be a success.

It’s a device for airplanes, taxis, public transport, park benches, coffeeshops, pubs, bars, bistros, co-working spaces, breakouts, studios, receptions, meeting rooms, plaza and piazza, public libraries, beaches and all manner of transient spaces, civic spaces. 

It’s a device for cities.

 It’s not that it couldn’t be used in rural environments of course; just that it wouldn’t be. The general lack of third spaces in such places means that a phone and a PC are sufficient. By living in cities, in other peoples’ places, a different kind of device becomes appropriate. Something light and small enough to fit in a handbag or satchel, yet powerful and productive nonetheless. In the old view of city living - say, the classic Parisian apartment - the small size of dwelling meant that the bistro downstairs at the street level of the block becomes the dining room, the bar/coffee shop becomes the living room, the shared courtyard becomes the garden, and so on. While this vision is hopelessly romantic, there are numerous urban variants on this kind of living, and these transient (yet personal) spaces are where the iPad will fit right in. (Again, exurban environments clearly have coffee shops too, but they are not part of a integrated system of living in the same way. And so different tools will suffice.) 

As software becomes a service, data resides in the cloud, various forms of wireless connectivity coalesce over the city, and yet face-to-face physical connection becomes more important than ever, a device like the iPad becomes obvious. The cloud is the connective tissue between these spaces, the software provides the platform for interaction with information, the tablet is the tool, and the forum is the city.

The particular device is not the core aspect, necessarily, though brings things together at a certain place and time. The overall service model - noting how iTunes made the difference to the iPod - is key. There’s a symbiotic link between software, hardware and context. The link I’m now interested in is this last link to space, as well as system. As in, how do we design environments for this activity, and how does this activity work in, and affect, particular environments?

In much contemporary work - at least the more knowledge-based end - people are often transient too, even in a corporate office environment. In fact, in the latter, the chance that anyone will be at their desk at any one time is around 50% or less (which has implications for the way we design commercial office space, never mind soft infrastructure like computing.) Given this, it might be very handy to have a machine for easy lifitng between coffee bar, meeting room, what are euphimistically-called ‘quiet rooms’ or studio-like spaces, breakout spaces. Or in a non-corporate environment, just moving effortlessly over the space. 

Of course this is why the broad move to laptops in working environments is key, but if a laptop is connected to a big screen (as may often be the case) and power socket, and you just need to flash some code, some text, some images/photos etc, some webpages, some Powerpoint etc. past someone’s eyes, a tablet will not just be more convenient, but far more appropriate. Indeed, a distributed phalanx of tablets will be far more palatable, more civil, than the walls of laptop screens that are temporarily erected during meetings now.

So I’m afraid this new device may be additive rather than subtractive. It probably is 'yet more stuff in the world'. But at least it’s well-designed, relatively cheap, carefully thought-through, with increasingly considered life-cycle thinking (if not quite good enough). Well, at least most parts of it are well-designed. (See below.)

The various previous netbooks had, or met, many of these same conditions of course, yet Apple’s superior user experience, and integrated services, primes it for many many more citizens than any previous form of computer.

Some, thinking of third products rather than third spaces, have queried the idea of a third computer anyway. The thinking here is stuck in pre-'New World computing' mode, to quote from this excellent review of the iPad.

In particular, that Old World thinking centres on a techno-centric view of computing as the 'universal machine', or Swiss army knife, capable of doing anything and so highly flexible - and so rarely used to its capacity and for most of its existence using a minute proportion of its processing power. You might almost say this is a resource-abundant view; another anachronism.

But the idea of ‘a primary computer’ is increasingly ridiculous, particularly as we move towards an ‘internet of things’, with data, including media, increasingly fluid, stored anywhere and accessd everywhere.

How many computers do you think you have, or use, already? Just the one? How about in the car, in your phone, in the fridge, in your camera, in the set-top box etc. Think on. It’s already almost impossible to calculate the number of computers most people use in their daily life, just as it is with the data traces contemporary life produces.

We’ll ultimately think of data floating across numerous computers and contexts, some of which are personal and some of which are shared.

So this is not about what some have called “the mythical convergence device” at all, but about multiple devices for divergent spaces.

Obviously, there’s a necessary critique here about ‘more stuff in the world’, which is fair enough. I’m not advocating for multiple computers necessarily - as Apple would have it: an iMac in the living room, a Macbook Pro on the desk, an iPhone for walking, an iPad for the transient bits in-between etc. But it is relatively smart of Apple to now have a stratified yet integrated range of products across all those spaces, you must admit.

That ‘Swiss army knife’ model may well be on the way out. It should be fine to say of a particular product, “Oh you can’t do that on that one”. That's OK. We don’t expect, say, cars to do everything - off-roading in a Honda Jazz is not recommended, any more than doing the weekly shop in a Lamborghini is. When functions are attempted to combine we end up with monstrosities like the SUV. Or common or garden PC.

As for the lack of openness that has been critiqued, long-time readers will know that I've often been an advocate for open systems, but many will also know that the form of development involved in open systems tends to mitigate against ease of use. Poor design also mitigates against ease-of-use, of course - the hours I’ve put in explaining the difference between files and directories to Windows users cannot be got back. Paul Dourish, in the Where The Action Is, explored the mental models underpinning computing. It’s clear that many users, and potential users, will never want to, or be able to, live within those mental models. So to me, a relatively closed or controlled system that abstracts files and folders yet still enables a way into computing may be a price well worth paying, at least on this device (which again, is not the only computer in the village.)

Stephen Fry has nailed why many Apple products work for many people - because they’re not open, because they’re controlled. Democracy and openness does not always make good city form, either. Sometimes, often, it leads directly to NIMBYism, or consultative processes so convoluted that nothing actually gets done. Whereas, sometimes accidentally, dictators often have created great urban spaces (though often some years later). This is a core paradox around openness and control, but there is a time for both. Fry again:

“Yes, I do like and have tried to champion OpenSource software. How can I square that with my love of Apple? I’m complicated. I’m a human being. I also believe in a mixed economy and mixed nuts. I love our National Health Service and the National Theatre, but I also love Fortnum and Mason’s and Hollywood movies.”

Or, in John Gruber’s analogy, the iPad is akin to a shift from manual transmission to automatic in most cars (that won’t go over so well in dear old Blighty, where I think most cars are still sold with manual transmission, apparently out of sheer stubbornness.)

A more fundamental critique may occur around ‘seamfulness vs. seamlessness’. The lack of seams - obvious traces of structure that enable users to comprehend and ultimately manipulate the system - in the iPad’s system is what enables that accessible user experience, yet also prevents those users that wish to learn or explore deeper structural or integrative elements from doing so. Again, there are plenty of other devices to explore those aspects with, however. Not every device has to do everything.

Either way, as John Gruber notes, it’s more complex than that in that, when he says, “Apple like their technologies open and their products closed”.

Others have critiqued it as a consumption device rather than a production device. While I think it’s too early to make that critique - as we don’t know what software will be produced for it yet, nor how it will work - this also falls into the trap of thinking about users using one machine for everything, that everything should do everything. This is not a displacement device - replacing a laptop, say - but works alongside other devices. And those devices more oriented towards creative work won’t go away. Quite the opposite.

Incidentally: It’s been funny watching the videos of people trying to figure out the gestural controls - fidgety taps, repeated swipes, awkward pinches, agitated pecking. Like a teenager fumbling with a bra strap.

Incidentally: A camera would be nice of course, but it also would’ve meant that the fluid sense of orientation that Ive talks about in the promo is gone. Would you chat in landscape or portrait? Either. Portrait would be like talking to a Bill Viola ‘icon’ piece, and so quite appealing if unsettling. Landscape is more likely, but then the camera would be on the side of the device, near the thumb, when in portrait orientation. Hm.

 
(Apologies to Bill Viola) 

Incidentally: In designing a computer “for the rest of us”, finally, 25 years after promising to do so, perhaps the best analogy for the iPad, as a product designed for everyday people, is actually the AK47, or in car terms, the Mini, 2CV or perhaps Trabant. Crucially, it does not yet share the adaptability, innate or crafted, of those products as a piece of industrial design, nor quite as software design. Yet. But if the rhetoric around 'New World computing' is right, it's worth considering how it stacks up against these genuine pioneers.

Scaling the interface

All is not perfect, however. Some of those screenshots and videos of the iPad software in action unfortunately make all-too-clear some issues with Apple’s interface design. Although some elements of the iPhone software have always been problematic, the scale of the iPad screen brought it home to roost. The trigger was seeing the risible Notes scaled up to 9.7 inches, where the full horror of that interface design became evident.
 
There appears to be a schizophrenic character (if you’ll permit me to mis-use that term, no offence intended) to Apple’s software design, entirely at odds with its highly consistent hardware design.

Even at this distance, some parts of the UI look fantastic, like the YouTube app, or the core applications of Mail, Safari, iTunes, most of iPhoto etc. They are entirely in-sync with the clean machined lines and brushed textures of the Dieter Rams-influenced industrial design of Ive+team.

On Jonathan Ive’s Wikipedia page, it (at time of writing) states the most recent 'phase' that Apple has been going through is amusingly though accurately dubbed ‘extreme minimalism’ or ‘dark aluminium’. In the NYT, Paul Saffo says “a defining quality of Apple has been design restraint.” In the same article, Steve Jobs is quoted thus:

“Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.””

But what do they think when iBook pops up in these surroundings? Likewise, Contacts, and even Calendar to some extent, appear to be trying to be desk diaries. iTunes doesn’t try to be a shelf full of vinyl records at all.

But Notes, IBook, the Dock itself, parts of iWork, most of Calendar and Contacts are quite different, indulging in faux-textures, references to physical objects like desk diaries, 3D spatial metaphors, ‘spacey’ background images and so on; an entirely different interface language. What’s going on?

 
iBook in particular seems very rushed, and not great. That shelf interface is particularly horrible. While the bookshelf metaphor was trailblazed by Delicious Monster a few years back, it hasn’t improved with time. Why would a Rams-fan such as Ive settle for clumsy faux-wooden shelving? Particularly when you might have referenced the Ram’s designed 606 shelving system, which is about as perfect as shelving-as-modular-interface can get?

I don’t actually think that the interface should literally ape the 606, by the way - just that it might be better moving in that direction rather than some thrift store, sub-Leksvik, chunky wood monstrosity made by outsider artists. It would certainly reinforce the holistic nature of the design across hardware and software. Even better would be to ditch the shelf metaphor altogether in favour of something more appropriate for digital content; something more innate to the medium.

Within iBook, the layout of the books’ pages are fraught with issues. As many have picked up, the idea of automatically justified text is either lazy or ignorant. Either way it’s not great, in almost all contexts. Likewise the fonts they’ve got listed. While changing size is handy, obviously, these ‘features’ such as forced justified paragraphs in only six typefaces utterly negates the idea of book design, a complex and beautiful craft. Apple in particular ought to think more carefully about this.

Equally, the page turning metaphor Is without much merit. As with the designers of Mag+, I wasn’t looking for a ‘realistic’ page-curl from a new interface on reading. So much effort has gone into that page curl, and yet it still will not feel like paper. It will feel like touching a screen. 

In an otherwise useful review by Andy Ihnatko:

“On the iPad, it feels as though you put your finger on the bottom-right corner of the page and dragged that corner towards the spine of the book until it flipped over.”

No, it doesn't. This is ‘ocularcentric’ thinking (that Pallasmaa et al have so brilliantly critiqued, if not eradicated, sadly, in architectural discourse) — the mistaken belief that somehow sight overrides all other senses. Or that in this case, visual feedback is so convincing that it substitutes for touch. Touch is another sense altogether, and the iPad has no sense of that, having no feedback for texture, or weight of object (at least in this version).

So this part of the interface is entirely skeuomorphic, and valuable processor-time, screen real-estate and gestural interactions would be better spent on the new functionality enabled by this new medium. You can call it an e-book - and reading Bleak House on on an iPad is still reading a book, from a content point-of-view. But from an interface point-of-view it is not a book, or a magazine, but something else, a window onto text, with new possibilities, and so new affordances. It would be far better to focus on new functional manoeuvres, like clipping text, saving/quoting elsewhere, contextual services, 'scrobbling' reading patterns and so on.

I look forward to seeing a Kindle app for the iPad, if Amazon can bring themselves to do it. They (Amazon) can then drop out of the hardware market. Amazon has always been about transcending hardware; the first hardware it transcended was the mainstream bookshop. Equally, I'd guess iBook should be much better by launch.

But does the software mentioned above even come from the same team that designs iTunes, Mail etc? And how is design co-ordinated across the hardware and software? I’m aware these are age-old discussions around Apple’s design team and process, but each new product seems to highlight these occasional, but meaningful, inconsistencies even more.

The other effect of the iPad I’m interested in is how its scale might affect the application interfaces, and applications themselves. The iPhone had indicated that for many apps the screen and associated interaction model was effectively the right scale for many basic applications. While interaction designers for mobile would argue they’d been exploring (relatively) small screen interfaces for years, the explosion of innovation that Apple’s App Store model enables has both honed and expanded interaction around applications.

In this respect, I’d argue that Facebook on the iPhone is far superior to Facebook on the PC, partly as all the extraneous chrome and optional functionality is pared back to a core. Ditto Tweetie for Twitter, Google apps and so on. Incidentally, the App Store model also means that users paid for applications direct, rather than through advertising, which I think is far healthier in many respects cf. newspapers. The advantage is that interfaces can be honed around core function rather than advertising.

There’s a focus forced by the constraint of the iPhone that leads to better UI. I think the iPad has the same possibilities - constraints in terms of screen, input mode etc - but across a wider set of more complex applications. Some reviewers have indicated this effect of these constraints on the iPad’s software already:

“I was struck by the amount of restraint the apps’ designers used. A bigger screen increases the temptation to just keep adding interface elements. And yet it’s remarkably uncluttered. All of the features of a “real” spreadsheet are there, but there are appear to be fewer buttons and controls here than what you’d find on a typical Android tip-calculator app.”

I think the really interesting point will come when a truly meaningful piece of productive software - Photoshop, SketchUp, or Omnigraffle, say - is attempted on the iPad. I would hope that it’s possible to compress Photoshop’s interface by half at least. (Of course Adobe are at an interesting point in their relationship with Apple, so we’ll see …)

With iPad I hope we’ll see that there is a middle-ground between the phone and the laptop, and that the way the application interfaces are designed defines that as much as any aspect of the hardware. If we start seeing genuinely productive or creative software appearing on it, those who talk of it ‘merely’ being a machine ‘for consumption’ might need to re-think. (Please read alongside earlier points about the device being part of a system of interactions, rather than a closed all-purpose system.)

If it’s technically possible to develop a Processing environment,  a sawn-off Photoshop or Illustrator, Sketchup, Omnigraffle for the iPad, then I see no reason why Apple wouldn’t move those apps to the front of the shop, and thus the iPad becomes productive, at least in a traditional sense.

The iPad abstracts away complexity such that files, folders, and multi-tasking are effectively invisible or inactive, which will require a new approach to, say, sharing multiple edited versions of images between applications and spaces. It’s not at all impossible to imagine productive workflows that do not require foregounded multi-tasking or obvious, seam-ful access to filesystems. Conceptually, there is nothing in computer science that states that this must be so. It’s just become the de facto standard approach to operating system and application design. So this will requires a 'New World computing' approach to re-thinking how we might do it, and that’s not a bad thing. It’ll be interesting to see how people approach it.

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

Bryan describes his interest in the “intersection of structures of governance”, and outlines his academic project concerning the “redesign of the national Capitol building”. (There are two resources around this project: the site, and a webblog) 

He was interested in “new ways to draw the building - to press the overbearing icon back into the realm of capital.” “it’s a symbol”, he says, “but a piece of workable architecture” also, but is interested more in new ways of seeing the Capitol. He thinks that generating new ways of seeing is one of the architects’ most valuable skills, which he describes as a kind of “x-ray vision”.

Not only this, but it’s important that “we work on important questions - (comprising) a heightened understanding of spatial logics.” In this respect, he says, “we must become fluent in understanding the social graph of realtionships within Congress” for instance (he notes a visualisation detailing how the amount of time politicians spent together on junkets affects their voting behaviour, and another similar analysis predicated on the location of offices and the elevators that they take …) Boyer describes this work as the “dense and continuous weave of matter and its consequences”.

Summarising this, Boyer says “space matters, and architects and designers are the ones who understand that the most …”

However, these are still “conversations outside the discipline of architecture - with politicians, people who studied politics etc., seeing their world in a new manner. But “there’s a lack of understanding of the importance of spatial thinking outside of our discipline - designers are typically asked to be part of important decisions at a stage that’s too late in the process as to be effective …” (Again, echoes here of several discussions at Postopolis! LA. There are of course numerous issues here, not least the fact that designers often don’t do themselves any favours, but Boyer’s talk and work felt like the most considered and advanced reflection on this aspect of design at this event.)

He notes that “by the time the architect or designers are brought in, your hands are tied”, and in a worst case you’re left with the job of applying the proverbial “lipstick on a pig”. So how to “bring the architect forward?”

With hits, he turns to his (and his colleagues’ work with Sitra), acting as “a designer sitting in a governmental context”.

I personally find Sitra a fascinating organisation, being another example of a Nordic country’s forward-thinking use of public funding (see also Norway). It was founded in 1967 and benefits from an endowment from parliament, such that it is technically part of government, but self-funded (a “tentacle of the government”). Their projects have a timeline of 10-20 years, which Boyer notes “frees them to work at the intersection of disciplines and necessities”. 

They’re a ‘think and do’ tank (though Boyer doesn’t like the phrase, noting there’s only so much that white papers can do.) 

Of 100 staff at Sitra, the three in the strategic design team are trained as designers (all architects). They’re interested in “holistic integrated systemic” changes, which Boyer suggests is indeed ‘design thinking’ (though again, he doesn’t like to use that term.) This applies to the “architecture of societal problems - shaping better decisions.”

By way of example, Boyer talks about the Low2No competition that Sitra are devising and running.

(Disclaimer: some months after this talk, I was part of the successful Arup team that won the Low2No competition with Sauerbruch Hutton, Experientia, and Galley Eco Capital.)

This competition to redevelop part of the southern tip of Helsinki, the former port area, as a mixed-use redevelopment, which by 2025 would be home to around 16000 residents and 6000 new jobs. It’s almost ⅓ of ‘downtown’ Helsinki. 

Sitra are interested in making it a “a model for development inside city centres”, as well as a model for a more sustainable built environment within Finland. 

In this respect, it’s not a traditional architectural competition, but a “sustainable development competition”, in which the primary goal is to “design a team and strategic approach before sending in the pretty pictures - to describe an approach to building and developing a new part of the city …”

(This talk of shaping better outcomes for the built environment through better competitions follows neatly from Austin Kelly’s earlier discussion of the culture around competitions in Switzerland.)

Boyer suggests that the “critical step forward is in ‘the mix’ - not in the expertise in the silos, but how that expertise is put together - to design the team that can make it happen - to design the vision for what that thing is going to be.” Although the goal is a “low-carbon, complex urban district, ultimately transitioning to zero-carbon” they’re very invested initially in “finding the right team.”

Having said that ‘the architecture’ can follow, the competition is issued primarily to the  architectural community, as Boyer sees “the architect as the person that can lead this process … that can deal with a policy wonk or economist … that the designer needs to take lead role” in this. 

“Things should be cross-disciplinary”, he says, “noting that the ‘60s gave birth to this”, mentioning Buckminster Fuller explicitly. 

This isn’t just idle name-checking, though - Boyer’s referring directly to a particular event in Finland in 1968, now called Helsinki Design Lab. It stemmed from a reaction to craft-based design, and the need to “develop an industrial design revolution” to cater for the “emerging needs of a new world … a new kind of design”.

The list of participants was fairly extraordinary, including Buckminster Fuller, Christopher Alexander, Juhani Pallasmaa amongst others. It concerned a “fully multidisciplinary design”, including system design, computer use, anthropology and so on, running collaborative design workshops generating built prototypes (including for a “portable reindeer slaughterhouse”.)

 
Photos by Kristin Runeberg

Sitra are now working towards a kind of follow-up design event, Helsinki Design Lab 2010. Boyer notes that the population of Finland is around 5 million people, or half the population of LA area. It has a rich infrastructure, a highly educated population - “all the things you need to execute”. He sees “Finland as prototyping lab”, and that its size is “a great advantage” here, but wonders could it scale?

The US is simply too large to approach in this way, he thinks; healthcare, energy use are “a mass of conflicting interests”. Yet he is still interested in generating “strategic roadmaps”, indicating “specific projects you could choose as pilots - (they) don’t want to export solutions, but strategies”.

The Q&A includes one question wondering whether there needs to be a PR campaign for architects, akin to the re-branding of UPS. Boyer says he doesn’t like to “hate on the AIA, but that it could be “a bit more effective in transmitting the full range of architectural thinking, or the abilities of a designer, at least designers who think strategically”. He notes how this isn’t “something that we’re known for” but that if Helsinki Design Lab 2010 is a success, “then we can prove it”. We need “cases where architects and designers are working outside of their discipline and producing some kind of measurable output or change …”

This is exactly right, and was behind my earlier aside about designers not doing themselves favours - essentially, there are very few genuine examples of why designers should be ‘higher up the food chain’ (the now burgeoning literature around ‘design thinking’ notwithstanding). I’d suggest there are numerous reasons why designers should be, but few reasons, few case studies. Bryan Boyer’s emerging body of work (and that of his colleagues) is interesting because it promises to produce exactly that; several strong case studies of why multidisciplinary design should be an important part of fundamental strategic decision-making processes, across numerous arenas. Low2No and HDL are both a long way from mere lip-stick.

Bryan Boyer 
Sitra

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

Downing is highly aware of this, and deflects it easily by indicating that this is “Not your normal setting … It’s kind of the antithesis of what I’m used to …”. He’s used to far more sterile buildings, apparently.

In fact, he says of the Standard rooftop that he’s “only seen it from the air, hot and low and rotors popping …”. This is something few other speakers can live up to.

To business. Downing commands two operational divisions, covering the bases of anti-terrorism, surveillance, organised crime etc., and working on information sharing.

If you’re wondering why he’s speaking at Postopolis! LA, Downing provides an answer straightaway - he sees counter terrorism in terms of “the way you think about space”. As in, “How do we build crime resistance or hostile environments to terrorism in that same space but have same sense of freedom and community.”

His background is in community policing, and in particular the “big rehabilitation of Hollywood”. The “philosophy of policing that community had to come from within.” He describes how the approach from the police became about partnerships, and “adopt(ing) blocks”. Their approach was to “build crime resistance into the community”

“There’s nothing worse than seeing an abandoned block - like seeing an abandoned car … And now we see people moving freely, sitting on the street, having a glass of wine, protected by plants and lighting …” (It’s already uncanny how close some of what Downing is saying gets to standard practice in urban design.)

He talks about the balance between “rule-based enforcement and care-based enforcement”, and knows that the balance has to be “somewhere in-between”. It wasn’t all touchy-feely - they had to ensure that they “pushed out the gangs as much as possible.”

Downing then talks of the extraordinary expansion in this area in recent years. “Pre-9/11, we maybe had 25 people that did counter-terrorism. (In the) last few years it’s grown to 300. (Yet) you can’t arrest yourself, you can’t win the war on terrorism - it’s an ideology - you can’t win it.”

(Interesting to note that this is not something the incumbent government would’ve said with such easy clarity, presumably.)

Downing then offers the following definition: “Operational capability plus motivation = terrorism”

“What can we do on those 2 sides? (In terms of the first) they do hunt.” He says “There is no such thing as ‘the muslim community’ - there are muslim communities …”

Downing then lists some aspects of their somewhat extraordinary capacity.

He talks about ‘Arcangle’, their “critical infrastructure protection programme”, which is 85% owned by the private sector. Its role is to “assess vulnerabilities … (there are) 500 or so assets in the database (and it) makes recommendations to private sector (in terms of where to place) cameras, gates, guards, ingress/egress (Again, this is the LAPD in urban design mode, to some extent.)

They have  “regional video command centre, which can “link up all the private and public CCTV”.  

Whereas “‘Trapwire’ measures behaviours, actions, mannerisms”. This can deliver a feed direct to his Blackberry of “all the suspicious activity that occurred in the city that night, and overlaps with open surveillance cases.” He describes a “richer picture, more intelligence”. (This is somewhat unbelievable - the torrent of data that would unleash could not be parsed, particularly on his Blackberry, leaving aside such issues of what constitutes such behaviour.)

“So where is the ‘Ring of Steel’, as per London, and as they sort of do in Lower Manhattan”, asks Downing rhetorically. He says “you can’t actually put one in LA - it’s too vast and dispersed …” (Again, an understanding of this particular urban form drives a strategic response.)

They focus on airport, ports etc, and buildings under the “highest threat”. He gestures across to the adjacent buildings, pointing out that the “US Bank tower right opposite was on hitlist for 9/11”. They often “have a lot of suspicious activity going through whole area (captured in terms of) photographs, surveillance, sketches which could be pre-operational surveillance.” (That’s a choice phrase, that last one.)

They deploy “license-plate recognition systems” but he says that the “real ring of steel for LA is humans”. There are “45000 private security guards, building managers, the community, and so on.” To him, these are “all tripwires that alert us to things that go on, and they can then open up investigations. He has “50 people that follow tripwires, that’s all they do.”

(He’s getting carried away at this point …)

“We have something the size of a grain of rice and we can put it in your pocket and follow you around the world. We can take a fly and fly it into a room and it’s got audio visual …”

He stops and looks up at a helicopter that’s hovering overhead. He says it’s not one of his. “They don’t know I’m here”, he laughs. He thinks it might be the fire department …

He sees some links to the practice of blogging, in terms of building networks to solve problems. For instance, they have two main threats: Al Qaeda and Hizbollah. But then there are black separatists, white supremacists, eco-terrorists … They have to “take a network-based approach” rather than “hub vs. hierarchical” forms. So they’re looking to “build more networks”, and he talks of a “regional public/private infrastructure collaboration system (which can) push information out every day (but also) solicit information too.” This gives an “all channel network” as he puts it.

Downing defines the “real success of policing (as) only giving adequate force to enable the community to police itself - people are police and police are people - and the community takes more responsibility.” (Again, echoes of some debates in contemporary urban planning.)

He again reiterates that “we can’t win war on terrorism (but) what we try to do in LA is to protect our city from terrorism.” The “threat is always evolving, so tactics and strategies have to change.”

“We’ve been pretty lucky”, he concludes.

He says the “failure of 9/11 was intelligence. There were 16 federal intelligence agencies each of whom protected their turf.” On the “second day of the new administration, they did an exercise with all heads - on multi-scenario attack” (Similar to the 7/7 bombings in London.) They concluded that the ”single point of failure was information sharing. If you have the good things about ‘culture, capability and awareness’ but still combine with jurisdictional responsibility and boundaries, you still have a single point of failure.”

“But if you have all channel networks”, he says “you have no single point of failure.”

The Q&A features a few questions about the openness of data. I ask him whether the crime maps might inadvertently heighten anxiety rather than assuage fears. He artfully evades the question, I think. He talks a lot about approaches to garnering “feeds from people all over city, all the time.” They have antennae on numerous buildings enabling upload of video link. They can push this to his Blackberry and he’ll be able to see anything within 450 sq miles …” He describes this  as “a digital nervous system within the city …” (Again, I think the ability to generate vast volumes of such data does not naturally lead to a heightened ability to parse, comprehend information and then deriving meaning from such data, particularly on devices with interfaces as stunted as the Blackberry’s is. See also: drones already generate more data than the US military can handle)

Another questioner wonders about a “military doctrine affecting the urban police force - is there a shared relationship between the LAPD and military?” Again, slightly dodging the question, Downing says they “travel the four corners of the world” to stay on top of thinking. In the first quarter of this year, they’ve been in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia etc. He talks about an ‘Irregular Warfare Support Group’ in Virginia, and says that “cities are in a post-conflict zone” . The “philosophy of the military is control and contain through force or fear (whereas) police is occasionally that, but is better when you’re inspiring community”. What they are trying to do, he says, is “solicit the help and inspiration of people to take responsibility for their neighbourhoods and communities and partner with the police.” In fact, he says, they may end up “teaching military units how to police …”

Another question concerns the wave of foreclosures sweeping across the land. Does this lead to  new communities on vulnerability?

He says they “watch crime closely”, and use sophisticated software to do so. Chief Bratton brought ‘CompStat’ to LA (from NYC), and this means that, for the police, “everything is a number, dot, statistic”. He can now say that “Southern LA has gone down every year for 6 years … things have slowed down …” However, he does note “the slow-down in construction, and if some of the buildings won’t be finished and abandoned, that would be a great fear for us”. He refers back to his experience in Hollywood, and the issues with “slum conditions”. 

However, he says that LA has another major issue: “The gang problem is something that plagues us. LA gave birth to gangs - there are 85000 gang members and 1300 gangs.”

“It’s as much a threat as terrorism”, he says.

Geoff and I both ask him about this emerging notion that the LAPD might end up having some kind of architectural or urban design function - or ‘spatial counter-intelligence’ division, perhaps. On the one hand, does a new, poorly designed high rise send shivers of fear throughout the department? Are they harder to police than a cul-de-sac, say? Would the LAPD end up effectively working in architecture and urban design more formally, pursuing this theme of shaping the city to enable communities to police themselves to its logical conclusion?

Downing finds the idea intriguing, I think. He refers to the social problems that arise when architecture is found wanting, referencing a specific project in which military housing was converted into public housing. “*There was) nothing about that sustains community, crime resistance or socialisation”, he says. “(We need) to build in elements of how community is going to socialise within itself or outside”. He also suggests that a “diverse multidiscipline group” would be highly useful here. He later suggests that meetings with with architects and designers, during the early design phase of project. Before certain projects, he thinks it might be of value to have a counter-terrorism security adviser (leaving open the question of which projects.)

 It was a fascinating talk, and Downing is a compelling, interesting speaker, with what is clearly a relatively open-minded and inquisitive approach to an almost impossibly complex area. His rhetoric was close to that of an architect or urban designer at times - in terms of shaping space to enable community - never mind that of urban informatics, with its various “digital urban nervous systems”. Yet there was a line - a hard line you suspect - that divides him from contemporary thinking in urbanism.

Equally, while he seemed to be fully aware that focusing on ‘security, risk, threat’ can have the impact of heightening collective anxiety rather than diminishing it, those various strategic programmes - ‘Arcangle, Trapwire’ etc. - did feel in tension with the idea of the ‘community policing itself’.

And watching him briefly get carried away about the various technologies of surveillance at his disposal was vaguely unsettling, to say the least. Yet I was impressed with his candour and, in general, his thinking. While he may have been ‘playing the crowd’, it was no more so than the rest of us. And kudos for simply turning up to an event that I suspect many of his ilk wouldn’t even recognise as such. 

The relationship between the control of citizens and the design of cities has been long-discussed and is deeply contested (e.g. the ‘Haussmannisation of Paris’, perhaps most famously), but that the way the LAPD approach their work might have something in common with architecture and urban design is a beguiling idea, and Downing had the wit to explore it in accessible and meaningful fashion - even if his talk left as many questions hanging in the air over downtown LA as there were helicopters circling overhead.

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

A subsequent project, the ‘Frogtown Artwalk’, deals with “water pollution through art lens”. It deployed a “riperian raft”, where the “plants used absorbed organic pollutants, creating areas for bioremediation.” They’re particularly interested in the LA River (as am I) as the site of these works. The water quality is reflected through sculptural lighting.

Another project on vertical gardens, and another called ‘Matryoshka’. This was a park, sculpted with CNC elements (de rigeur in LA, and there seems to be some connection with SCI-Arc) and vacuum forming and earthwork. It was a temporary public art project for the City of West Hollywood, based around a Russian community, comprising a form of “large nesting” area. They say the local “kids enjoyed it too much. In fact, they actually destroyed it!”.

Another project for the Glow Festival, based around the trash vortex in the Pacific Ocean. Their imagined “sea creatures that were evolving in the toxic soup”, which were created via “glowing LED lights beaming through plastic bottle ‘sea creatures’” as part of giant floating structure.

Another project: Climate Clock. This is a “landmark public sculpture with a 100 year lifespan”, and so attempts to be a “persuasive instrument for visualisation of climate change.” The difficulty here, they say, is “with technology getting outdated” so they focused on “bio-indicators” instead; what they called “nature’s clock”. They look at the California Blue Oak in particularly, working with ‘digital ecologist’ Mike Hamilton.

(At one point they say that “we’re really worried about planet”. I’m a little irritated by this - it’s not the planet that’s ‘in danger’ as such; it will simply shift from one mode to another. it’s humanity that’s in danger, and we should be clearer about that. I know what they mean, of course.)

Moving on they note SEED magazine’s statement that “more data will be gathered this year than in the entire history of human knowledge.” They say “we have a lot of data. The problem is visualising it in a persuasive way.” They describe the “Wired Wilderness’ project, where everything “everything that could be monitored is being tracked and logged. They have robots panning the canopy of forest, every rock, every tree …” 

But “we have all the data”, they say. “Nature is telling us everything we need to know. In our timeframe,we’re not able to undersand it.” As a way of understanding this, they talk about he constrained view of “the birdbox that takes a picture every hour”, wherein you can “expand and contract time” to enable focus. “Then some things become clear.”

In the Q&A, Regine suggests that it might prove difficult to have a concern for both planet and humanity, as stated?

They reply that “there has been a lack of compatibility between planet and humanity - or a gap. And what the art projects try to do is reintroduce a relationship between environments and inhabitants of environment - to create an awareness.”

“We have technology, we have bio-indicators”, they say. “Getting the audience and the public to care about it is proving to be the most difficult aspect …”

Another question, noting that Brian comes from Georgia and Freya from England. So what is it about LA?

Freya replies that the “big inspiration for our projects is the city of Los Angeles - it’s vast, and continually reveals itself to us. It’s had very little environmental policy (it had the worst air quality than any other city in US) … But the art enables us to discover new communities within LA.” With reference to the Russian project, she says they “had no idea that the Russian community existed. The parents spoke only Russian, though the kids were bilingual. It’s a city were you can be quite isolated from other communities. There are not too many social forums that create integration. So we’re lucky we have the opportunity to integrate through this work.“

(Aside: they refer to “our neighbour Fritz Haeg”)

(Thanks to Brian Howe for his later tips on how to access the LA River. Watch for a forthcoming post on the resulting expedition.)

Freya Bardell and Brian Howe: Greenmeme

(Much of this originally written at the time, September 2009.)

A day trip to Seoul. Depart Sydney Thursday midday, arrive in Seoul Thursday night, depart Friday late-afternoon back to Sydney. I'm in international airspace for longer than I'm on Korean soil. Don't ask.

What follows is a series of thoughts, vignettes and photos from your tired but intrigued correspondent.

I'd love more time to even begin to explore this city, but not this time. And actually I'm not really in what most would think of as Seoul at all, but New Songdo City. (The taxi driver called it Songdo New City; others call it New Songdo City. Who knows. I was actually visiting the Songdo International Business District. Which is part of Incheon Free Economic Zone. There's a furious series of city branding skirmishes going on over here.)

New Songdo City is a vast new development on reclaimed land — the Song Do tidal flats, in fact, just on the edge of Incheon and Seoul. I arrive at around midnight on the Thursday night. My taxi driver waves his hand towards the lines of lights ascending into the murky sky, describing loose outlines of skyscrapers.

The driver had only recently put on his seat-belt, upon reaching the built-up outskirts of Incheon. We’d skimmed along the smooth infrastructure from the airport at 125kmh without him feeling the need for such protection. Perhaps this makes perfect sense.

Incheon Airport is rather good, though at night it feels essentially the same as most decent-quality contemporary airport projects. A few hours later, upon returning, I admire the fine view of hazy tree-covered hills out of the massive glass facade at the end of the departure hall. This places you somewhat.

On that return leg, as I’m in a different cab driving in the opposite direction, I can see that the sea either side of the bridge leading to the airport is rather beautiful. The vast bridge cuts between several sudden islands, rocky volcanic burps covered in feathery trees. These extrusions from the silvery dead calm of the sea remind me of the similarly sudden volcanic eruptions punctuating the plains glimpsed from the window of the shinkansen between Osaka and Tokyo.

Heading into Incheon in the dead of night though, none of that is visible, and the road is all I can see, a parabola of lights curving away into the darkness. In fact, other senses are more revealing, for as we zip along the bridge approaching the mainland, the driver apologises for the smell emanating from the more industrial parts of Incheon.  It is rather fruity; not a smell you often get to experience in major western cities anymore.

Another immediate difference: I notice the resolution of the GPS on his dashboard is far greater than those seen in the west too, with richer sound. There’s more information here than out of the windows.

My flight from Sydney had been delayed by some hours due to a ground-crew strike, hence me arriving so late on Thursday night. Yet the flying experience had been rescued almost immediately be the restrained glamour of the Korean Air uniforms. The tailfins on the flight attendants’ hats would be one of the finest bits of architecture I encounter all trip. When the staff flutter through Sydney airport at the end of the trip, having quick-changed into their crisp away strip, the contrast with the dumpy, dull uniforms Qantas staff are lumbered with could not be sharper. Likewise Sydney Airport itself, and in particular its re-entry experience, hugely suffers in comparison with Incheon.

The Incheon Grand Bridge opens next month, and will cut journey time from the airport to 15 mins. Now however, the journey to New Songdo City takes around 45 minutes, racing through largely clear roads. The bridge is one of the major contributions of the various local and national governments to the development, along with other significant infrastructure such as a new subway, the airport itself, the Free Economic Zone which provides for tax and regulatory breaks for investors, and so on. Immediately, the level and quality of civic investment is impressive.

The cab drives through the outskirts of Incheon, briefly built-up backstreets that feel a little like a lower-density Tokyo, and then out into the mist once more, over long stretches of road whose edges fade into the night. Again, the driver gestures out of the window towards the lights of Songdo New City, emerging from the murk, saying that it was all ocean a decade ago. 

The promotional video for New Songdo City gives some idea of the scale and nature of the development (see also the official site):

Yet as we’re slowing down outside the new Sheraton Incheon at the heart of this new city, it’s clear even on a foggy night that the development is half-finished. While the side of the road I step out on is complete, and home to several very tall buildings, the other side of an admittedly pristine main street is not really visible at all.

Looking out of my bedroom’s windows from the 13th floor of the Sheraton, it's difficult to discern much either. A carpet of lights might be a park. It could be a sequence of low-lying buildings. Whatever it is, there's a 10-lane road in-between me and it. It's still a little foggy. The air had had a salty tang to it outside the hotel.

WIkipedia suggests that New Songdo City is the largest private development project undertaken anywhere in the world (and the by now usual disclaimer: Arup are heavily involved, though the overall masterplanning and much of the architecture is Kohn Pedersen Fox.) Again, though, the public investment is significant too.

The next morning, with the yellow haze that typifies the lower atmosphere of an east Asian city barely making any impression against a perfect blue sky, it all becomes clearer. The space stretching out across the road without light was indeed a park, a large one too, and it’s surrounded by building sites furiously sprouting skyscrapers all around. It’s a quite extraordinary sight and the more I would find out about it, it feels very different to examples of speculative urbanism reclaimed from land elsewhere (cf. Christopher Hawthorne bearing witness on Dubai’s arrested development at Postopolis! LA.). This feels far more advanced and considered. Cranes are still slowly patrolling the skeletal upper reaches of their towers here.

The LEED-certified hotel was brand new, barely open, and the view from the room looked a little like this:

And I would later realise that the way the areas 'rez up' in that promotional video above, incongruously overlaid onto langorous Sigor Ros, is pretty much how it feels when you're standing and looking across to these giant cranes. You half expect a block to be completed, and then copy-and-pasted, right in front of you.

New Songdo City is a fascinating globalised interzone, designed specifically for international capital and its needs. And so ‘nonplace-making’ strategies include populating the development with a Canal Street, a Park Avenue, a Central Park, a Broadway (interesting to see that Manhattan is seen as the space to draw symbols from - rather than, say, Shanghai, Tokyo, or Beijing, never mind London, LA, Paris etc. It was planned by the New York office of Kohn Pedersen Fox, but still.)

I spend a lot of the day in the hotel — home to the a conference organised by Cisco, on “smart, connected communities” which is why I’m here (and thanks to Cisco for the invite and hospitality) — but manage to sneak out occasionally.

Walking across towards the park from the hotel later than afternoon, I take some sideways pictures of construction workers, though they quickly wave my camera away, and glare at me until it’s pocketed. The pavements are fairly deserted, and I’m fairly conspicuous as a result. There are a few people around, but not many. The form here is high-rise of course - the Z dimension.

Moving on, I come to a smart water taxi terminal by the lake. It’s well-detailed, with quality build and street furniture, and a few people actually milling about, as if it were already a real city.

Walking on through the ‘gate’ of rock formations, this end of the park is dominated by an elegant winding pathway through the trees. Central Park is rather good, actually, even at this early immature stage. It’s somehow deftly manicured and formal as well as rugged and organic. Like the other Central Park in fact. 

As if a subtle nod to the arrays of scaffolding that surround the park on all sides, the young trees are supported, tied and pinned together horizontally. For some reason it reminds me of Steven Holl’s ‘linked hybrid’ scheme in Beijing (and watch out for a subsequent post on that amazing piece of work.)

As I return from the lake to the hotel, I have to pause for some minutes at the pedestrian crossing across the 10-lane highway. It really is a very, very wide road, entirely out of kilter with the prevailing winds in western urban planning. In former Soviet republics, planning codes inherited from another age ensure that military aircraft can land on roads if necessary - surely Seoul has no such equivalent stipulation. 

While the existence of the highway will generate large amounts of traffic at some point, there is very little traffic at the moment. When there is, New Songdo City is to file it away every single bit of it in underground parking; an approach that is traditionally very difficult to finance and build, yet will do something to lessen the impact of cars on the immediate environment. But the expanse of the street is so overwhelming, even when empty, that it’s difficult to see how a active non-car street life will emerge in these conditions.

Construction lorries and taxis are the only users of the road at the moment, though the timers on the lights seem to be practicing for the scenario a few years hence, and the presence of a traffic policeman, and then a woman with a flag, fairly precisely controls who’s crossing when.

The lights finally change, and a gaggle of giggling girls on bikes suddenly engulfs me as I'm crossing the road. They dart, swoop and stumble around me, filling the air with the shrill, slightly unhinged noise of teenagers on unstable transportation.

The lack of traffic noise is eery, given how the space is so clearly delineated for many, many cars, like being alone in a vast cathedral or standing in a football stadium on a quiet weekday morning.

As I only had minutes here and there, literally, when I could escape the conference, I didn't get to much further than this. So, I didn't get to the various attractions of the Incheon Fair, or buildings with beguiling names like Tomorrow City, the delights of the Teddy Bear Pavilion or Robot Science Future Pavilion, the Jack Nicklaus Golf Club of Korea, World Carnival on Parade, the Songdo International School devised by an advisory group from Harvard …

NB. I'm in no way sneering - cf. Chinglish - about these manglings of language and concept. This is all truly fabulous, and genuinely fantastic. Why not a Robot Science Future Pavilion? Every other aspect of urban life will emerge over time, or is within reach in Seoul, so why not start with the fantastical and let the mundane emerge later? Who knows, it might be an inspired way of avoiding NIMBYism - when you’ve started a development with a Teddy Bear Pavilion, the bar for subsequent development is set in an interesting place … 

Yet right now, the fine grain is non-existant; or rather the grain is set to ‘monumental’, at least from the perspective of these central boulevards. They’re larger than a Champs-Elysee, which may have been another reference point, and certainly without the lining of elegant six-storey blocks. Immature trees line the boulevard, and the finish is as high-quality as you’d expect from east Asian builders, but the ground planes of the skyscrapers don’t currently offer much back to the street.

The Canal Walk development looks better in terms of a finer grain and active streets, yet I don’t get to see it first hand. This view indicates some difference in scale, at least in the building if not in the road.

South Korea is home to some experimentation in built form, for sure - plucking something at random, the ‘Paju Book City’ development, devoted to the publishing industry - yet the architecture here doesn’t seem to have that spirit, at least not yet. Again, this may come later, as the spaces left between the ‘monuments’ become encrusted with smaller developments. This is the same strategy hoped for in Melbourne Docklands, amongst others, and I can see more validity in the approach here in Seoul, where the cultural appreciation of density is greater, as is the sheer weight of numbers (population, business) in near proximity. Equally, a diverse set of design firms will help - currently, KPF are delivering some of the core buildings, but the Sheraton is by HOK, Libeskind is doing the Riverstone Mall, and so on. But you really hope for a Holl (or a BIG or equivalent) to start punching holes and slicing apertures, throwing across bridges, diagonals and other interventions in and around these large blocks. However, the build quality of what I could get close to was certainly good.

Reflecting on what I could see - and indeed looking back on my photos - it's difficult to suspend a little of the disbelief about the development. The first instinct, trained through an almost Pavlovian repeated exposure to Jacobs, Whyte et al, and the cities they stalked, is to wonder how genuine street life can possibly evolve from such an apparently arid framework for the streets. But quickly moving beyond that, you realise Jacobs in particular is increasingly of value to only a certain type of city, and that for all her pioneering, peerless insight, her findings seem essentially conservative, almost irrelevant in the face of these new urban projects. To be clear, I can think of few more valuable urbanists than Jacobs, and the kind of rich city life she helped preserve is a personal favourite. But obviously we have to move beyond personal preferences, and the canonisation of Jacobs has perhaps stretched her work too far beyond the particular cities it concerned. (For more, this is a well-balanced review of some of her work, with regard to the opposition of Moses, which has the guts to point out the connection with NIMBYism, no matter how inadvertent.)

What we can continue to take from Jacobs, however - no matter that we're not in Greenwich Village anymore - is an idea of scale, access and freedom of movement for the pedestrians, of enabling the street ballet. A contemporary genius like Steven Holl will reinterpret Jacobs (and Walter Benjamin) and reconfigure this as 'urban porosity', designing a series of large buildings, high-rises of various forms, in an urban Asian context and still find ways to emphasise physical connectivity to an almost exaggerated degree. "Porosity becomes essential for the vitality of street life", as he puts it (in his superb new book Urbanisms).

There is little obvious porosity here. And so I can't find a way of justifying the monumental scale and homogeneity of some of the streets, and the invitation to the private car to be the primary mode of transit, combined with an approach to retail that seems entirely articulated in terms of large shopping malls at this point. 

Towers are not a problem; it’s the lack of complexity and diversity that might be. Optimistically, one might hope that these approaches will be dissolved in difference over time, to be contrasted with something smaller, more adaptable and responsive, exemplifying provenance even (we can talk of provenance, even in new cities on reclaimed land). It should be possible for the initial built fabric to become porous, encrusted, overgrown, transient and entwined with smaller constructions as it develops. We're looking at the foundations.

But again, I don't think we can assess these cities through the prism of Jacobs and Gehl. Whyte, I think, is a little more transferable perhaps, but essentially we need a synthesis of their old ideas with these new locations, to form a new understanding of urbanism for Asian cities in the 21st century.

[..]

An item in the Joong Ang Daily: "The University of Seoul, a public university that will mark its 100th anniversary in 2018, has set a special goal of spearheading globalization by nurturing talent in urban sciences." (The Joong Ang Daily is an odd read: feels state-led, full of optimistic news about rising won, dipping energy use and the Korean economy's "stunning rebound", alongside 'editorial' pieces by the chairman and CEO of the Pohang Iron and Steel Co. on the promise of materials science. That kind of thing. And actually, there's not much wrong with that (unless in isolation). We could all use a little more of The Daily Optimism, perhaps.)

[..]

While Songdo is positioned to draw ‘western’ capital to a strategic intersection between South Korea, China and Japan, Philip Bowring recently noted that Korea’s links with Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand are just as crucial. This economy is extremely well-placed.

[..]

Another aspect of New Songdo City that is particularly interesting is that it is one of the first genuine examples of what they call the "ubiquitous city" i.e. ubiquitous connectivity between (in theory) all objects and actors in the city, from lamp posts to park benches to cars to buildings. ICT is spoken of as the "fourth utility" in this city, and developers Gale are particularly close to Cisco, with a framework for "Intelligent Urbanisation" signed with NSIC and Cisco. (Note also Autodesk's digital model of the city.) 

What I find interesting is that it doesn't yet seem to have changed the form of the city. And I think it should, as urban informatics can attempt to engage with the architecture and urban form directly. Personally, I do believe there ubiquitous real-time networked connectivity will have some direct physical impact on urban space and form, and we're working hard to figure that out. Elsewhere in Seoul, the Yongsan IBD development may have some more advanced elements of this. Equally architectural firm The Living - a City of Sound favourite (see also one and two) - are directly exploring how the built environment of Seoul responds to networked connectivity with their installation …

As to the conference, I give a talk about Arup’s work in urban informatics, as part of a session with several other speakers around property development (It’s mildly interesting how post-talk Q&As often don’t appear to work in an East Asian business context - the unthinking imposition of western business culture is being successfully resisted, which is a good thing I think.)

Two Indian gentlemen from the ‘GIFT’ project - ‘GIFT’ standing for Gujarat International Finance Tec-City - come up to me afterwards and give me a promotional pack about their gleaming new city. I used to go to conferences and get a promotional Google pen or somesuch. These days, you get an entire city in a brochure.

In other sessions, I was impressed by Euro Beinat’s presentation on data mining and visualisation of mobile phone activity to explore the way the city is used - attempting to “take the pulse of the city”. 

The Mayor of Incheon, Sang-Soo Ahn, talked of their work with Cisco, IBM and others, and their desire to see Incheon in the top 10 cities in the world by 2010, with a ‘compact smart city’ vision. 

Interesting also to hear Cisco’s Wim Elfrink put a price on the return on investment of taking a ‘ubiquitous city’ approach, claiming a jump in revenue for developers from the standard $3 per square metre ROI to $8 per sqm if you retrofit technologies, up to $15 per sqm if you design with it in mind. He also claims energy efficiencies of around 30%. 

Jane Prentice of Brisbane City Council presents some of their ideas - interesting also that Brisbane were the only Australian city visibly in attendance. The leader of the Metropolis consortium of cities, Josep Roig, also gives a great talk - involving an memorable analogy about urban governance that re-conceived the “city as lasagna (with) layers of pasta taking care of layers of meat”. 

Jonathan Thorpe, of Gale International, the developers of New Songdo City, gives an interesting summary of the project’s genesis and current and future states of development. 

He outlines the scale of Gale’s investment here: 100m sq ft of development across 1500 acres of reclaimed waterfront, home to 250,000 daytime workers, and an aspiration to be the key hub of North-East Asia, connecting Japan and China. 40% of the development is to be open space. He notes it’s 30 miles southwest of downtown Seoul, but that “all those roads are blocked” - hence the importance of those infrastructure investments.

Recently, New Songdo City has generally garnered the headlines for its sustainability credentials (see also Inhabitat). In terms of treated greywater and seawater, and energy conservation across the buildings, New Songdo City is a current ‘best in class’. They’re introducing 25km of bicycle lanes, and have expanded the Incheon City Bus and introduced a water taxi. He directly states that they’re trying to reduce the reliance on private car that Korea has. The development is a pilot for the LEED-ND certification (and would be one of the largest examples of that, by far).

(The bicycle infrastructure does seem impressive, at first glance, although not quite as considered in every place it should be. These (below) may be temporary.)

Despite these advances, Thorpe is refreshingly honest about their approach to sustainabilty, which he describes as “75% of the way there, not 100% of the way.”

"Part of the challenge,” he says, “was that it started before they had a sensitivity to sustainable design, back in 2002 - it took a while for us to get to grips with that." But, not least due to the financial value proposition in sustainable design, they certainly have got to grips with it, in terms of ESD criteria at least.

Beyond that, though, it’s not particularly sustainable for the model for the city - as that NE Asian hub - to be predicated on air travel. Songdo IBD is even marketed as an aerotropolis - "3.5 hours to a 1/3 of the world's population". 

That is a fairly extraordinary advantage, to be sure, but it means that although the carbon footprint of New Songdo’s built fabric will be close to ‘best in class’, the footprint of its operations and physical connectivity will be significant.

So it occurs to me that the logical thing to do would be the greatest engineering project of the next centuries; quite possibly the greatest diplomatic and economic project of the next centuries too, linking Japan with China via Korea via a high-speed rail link across gigantic bridges. (Of course.)

The easier half of the route is across Korea, perhaps via the massive port city of Busan, and over the Tsushima Strait via Tsushima Island, where I reckon it continues through to Fukuyoka, at which point you can connect to the Shinkansen and Bob’s your uncle. In the other direction, although the shorter span would be across to Weihei, one of those Chinese cities of several million I've never heard of, I suspect the better option would be Qingdao, further to the south but already connected by high-speed rail to Jinan, and then Beijing, Shanghai etc. While the travel times would be longer than the one-to-five hours claimed in the radius of flight times indicated above, it'd be a productive, efficient, comfortable and spectacular way to spend the time. And yes, potentially sustainable too, given the electric trains could be powered by renewable energy.

In either direction, any bridge would need to be substantially elevated to lift out of some of the busiest shipping channels in the world, but re-casting the bridges as a series of hops across a supergrid of tidal and wind power generators, with terraformed resorts, floating data centres and scientific research stations along the way, might be interesting. But this might be a project for the 22nd rather than 21st century, even, assuming we’re still around. A pipe dream perhaps, but no more than the idea of ‘sustainable commercial aviation’, and an answer of sorts to the question of sustainable transit to Songdo.

Of course the irony of me labouring some hare-brained scheme involving the world's longest bridges in the name of sustainability, after I'd flown to Korea for the day, is not lost on me. I'll move on.

All told, a few hours in any city can only give a glimpse. To be honest, a few years in any decent city can only give a glimpse too. I’m pleased to have seen New Songdo City at this stage of development though. It’s somewhat thrilling to see a city emerging from the ground like this, unsteadily picking itself up as if a new-born foal, trying to develop a rich urban patina from what is effectively a blank canvas (leaving aside whatever the local flora and fauna are wondering about what happened to their tidal flats - “I’m sure it was round here somewhere …” etc. etc.)

To say it’s early days is an understatement. London’s Docklands is only just beginning to develop an identity over a function, after almost two decades - albeit a peculiar identity at that. Melbourne’s Docklands is nowhere near yet. Yet there are people living and working here in New Songdo City already, despite much of it being building site, and you suspect that urban processes - of all kinds - move with greater velocity in this bit of the world. It’ll be fascinating to observe how city-ness emerges in New Songdo.

All photos of New Songdo City [Flickr]

Regarding the previous post on The CLOUD, the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed the visualisation I layered over the third of my AAA exhibition boards. This was no more than a quick sketch, rattled together very late one night - by hand, direct into InDesign (not a good idea, by the way) - illustrating the emails to and from my in-box relating to the CLOUD’s design process. Although it was produced quickly, there’s a little more thinking behind it than meets the eye, and like most sketches, it’s development rather than destination.

It covers one month’s worth of emails to and from my in-box concerning the CLOUD project, leading up to the submission of the initial concept designs. I was a little intrigued that the team had never physically met in its entirety - although this is not uncommon in many design sectors, it’s relatively unusual in architecture and engineering for the obvious reasons that the work generally concerns particular physical spaces. Yet this virtual team was dispersed across numerous organisations, cities, disciplines and other projects, and so meeting up was out of the question.

My interest in plotting out the pattern of emails picks up on the ‘new smokestacks’ theme I’ve been developing here, here and here - how to capture the essence, identity or character of knowledge-based work. The emerging thesis goes like this: heavy industry and physical trade once helped define the character of a city ad its people through its sheer presence; it helped create a local identity. As that work has shifted to globalised service- and knowledge-based work in many cities, so it has become invisible or homogenous, and so part of the identity of a place has also become ephemeral, intangible, imperceptible.

Saskia Sassen has written on the resulting “homogenised landscapes” of most global cities, due to “standardised built environments” of most global business centres (“Re-assembling the Urban”, 2008). Yet she notes that there are major differences in, say, what Chicago and Los Angeles (in Sassen’s research) actually do, and the way they do it.

These differences are perhaps largely expressed through data rather than built form, and leaving aside the glowing possibility of a return to manufacturing in the city (a theme I’ll keep returning to here) we can nonetheless discern a character, rhythm and pattern to this new work. We simply have to look for it through the lens of data. While we could probably discern the new built forms relating to this work - the equivalent of the factory, terrace, docks, slag heaps, mills, warehouses, etc. - but we can certainly glean the essence of the work by assessing the digital traces it leaves.

With the CLOUD, I found myself exploring just one aspect of the metadata of project in non-place - the contrails of email. Even this most basic side-effect was revealing to make.

First of all, perhaps confusingly, time is read from top to bottom. So the first emails to/from my in-box are to be found close to Sydney on the right of the diagram towards the top of the arc. Lines representing each email then fan across the globe from right to left, and top to bottom, with the name of the sender and date indicated, and with the line ending in the location of the recipient, or sender, if it wasn’t me. (I had to cheat a little and bend the lines back towards the US and UK quite a lot by the end of the diagram. This is what happens when you improvise a diagram rather than plan it - and don’t have time for any iterations.)

But the legibility, in this case, is neither here nor there - it was designed to blend with the large, complex image of the CLOUD on the  exhibition board as a kind of spot-effect with a bit of meaning, but with the meaning conveyed mainly through density and scale rather than detail and repeated interpretation. It was not designed to be Tufte-ian in any sense.

What I glean from it nonetheless is perhaps privileged by my position inside the project. Studying the names indicates the key role of particular designers, acting almost as project managers, nudging the thing along all the time (people who wouldn’t usually be highlighted when reviewing a project). They’re absolutely key to the project, and you can see them punctuating the email traffic as a rhythm. Equally, some people who were there at the start of the project quickly fade as it develops in different directions.

You can see focal points of Turin (home of Carlo Ratti’s architecture practice), Cambridge (MIT), London (Atmos, Arup) and Sydney (Arup). You can see the names of all the teams superimposed on the project (and so partly obscuring the detail of some emails, unfortunately). You can also see how the project, from my perspective at least, ends up in a flurry of emails to/from Cambridge, Mass. (Carlo Ratti) and London (Alex Haw) and I, as the final presentations are tweaked and commented upon.

Had I then visualised the second phase of the project - which, having been shortlisted, was the more detailed design phase - you’d see that I shifted far more into the background, as other colleagues at Arup, and at Jörg Schleich + Partners, got deeper into the engineering, or the likes of GMJ started developing the renders and so on. So this shift from concept design to detailed design would’ve been clearly articulated through such a visualisation.

The whole thing would work better as an animation, of course, perhaps with a ‘scrubbing’ control, indicating this sweep of people, skills and inputs. And of course this is a very simple visualisation - one type of data rather than multiple, laid out for effect rather than insight, and covering a series of digital signals rather than anything more ephemeral, experiential, emotional. It also owes something to those standard visualisations of internet traffic over the world, or this very lovely recent variation on the classic global aviation ‘visualisations’ - ‘Air Lines’ by Mario Freese:

But email does have a few extra facets. I thought about making certain lines weightier if they related to an email carrying an attachment - on the basis that these emails probably had more ‘weight’ within the project, perhaps containing key sketches. This clearly wouldn’t be ‘scientific’ yet might have had a loose value. However, in retrospect it occurred to me that many of the key concepts, insights and breakthroughs were delivered via text in the body of an email and so this would not just be loose, but an entirely false relationship between email weight and significance in terms of the design process. (Nonetheless, it could easily be scripted and might be worth exploring.)

Of course, this is only the view from my in-box, and so very skewed. It could’ve been, for instance, that Team Member Eco was sending all kinds of emails about clouds, visualisations, or the durability of ETFE to Carlo et al, and I just didn’t see it. Again, that position inside a project means the visualisation is insightful to me, as a reflexive tool, but perhaps not others (a nod back to self-centred design perhaps?) 

At Arup we happen to have a way of scooping up all (or most) of the emails around a project very easily and so, within a project team, we could run a script over such a directory of emails and produce these visualisations automatically. And we plan to do just that, to see what entails. One of the trickiest things to get design teams to do is reflect on the previous project - something in the designers’ sensibility means the next project is always more interesting - and techniques such as this might provide some handy automated insights, produced as a side-effect of the design process (always a desired mode in content management).

Of course, these scripts wouldn’t capture the chance meeting in the corridor, the breakthrough idea developed over a coffee, the phone-calls and whiteboard sessions and so on, and that shortcoming means the insights can only be useful to a certain extent.

Moving on, informatics as I see it entails two primary relationships with the street - sensors and actuators. As well as drawing data from activities (sensors), we can also project representations of this data back into the street, or in this case, the office, the studio, the project (actuators). Making multi-sensory representations of the otherwise imperceptible traces of knowledge work manifest in physical space is a focus of several projects - from our major urban development projects to our creative clusters research. 

More on those later, but for me this small visualisation begins to reveal a simplistic yet intriguing glimpse of the potential within these ideas. Imagine such techniques casting a wider net over many of the real-time digital traces emitted from a place (opt-in, of course) and then casting that data around the urban environment through visualisations, installations, media facades and the like. Would this help create something of the sense of place previous forms of industry did?

Anyway, there you go: a picture in a thousand words.

NB. The typeface is Archer by Hoefler and Frere-Jones, which I’ve been using incessantly for the last year.

Finally, an urban informatics project I worked on that I can talk about here, even if it’s currently still ‘paper architecture’ (pixel architecture?). The nature of urban development is such that I can’t yet say much about recent design work on projects (including Masdar (with LAVA), Helsinki (with Sauerbruch Hutton/Experientia), and just yesterday Seoul (with Studio Libeskind) etc., as well as various others I can’t yet mention, and building/infrastructure-level projects in Brisbane and Sydney.)

This one though - the CLOUD - is being announced today, on the BBC, by the MIT press office, via its website, on Facebook, here at City of Sound, and elsewhere. We thought we’d try to share most of the details of the project. I think it speaks to a few new ideas of what a monument could be, what a contemporary design process can be, what a structure can be, what we can do with data, and so on.

(It’s also been on show in Sydney over the last month, as part of an AAA exhibition called ‘Remodelling Architecture’ at Customs House, curated by Gerard Reinmuth (Terroir) and Marcus Trimble (Super Colossal). This exhibition is, in theory, a presentation of recent work by ‘young emerging architects’ on the Sydney scene, so being included there is faintly amusing as I’m neither  ‘young’ nor an ‘architect’, though I suppose all of us (except Barack Obama?) are eternally in the process of ‘emerging’. Those of you in Sydney can see it, and great work by other locals such as Anthony Burke, Adrian Lahoud, Joanne Jakovich, David Burns et al, including a couple of projects we also contributed to to varying degrees: Masdar, again, with Chris Bosse’s LAVA, and some ideas for a UTS Broadway competition entry with Super Colossal.)

The CLOUD project is, in a nutshell:

“The CLOUD proposes an entirely new form of observation deck,connecting visitors to both the whole of London and the whole of the world, immersing them in the euphoric gusts of weather and digital data. Each individual footstep on the ascent to the CLOUD participates in a vast collective energy-harvesting effort. Everyone from around the world can contribute to the Cloud - whether by visiting or by sponsoring an LED, helping to keep the Olympic lamp aflame.” [From the CLOUD website]

Before I go further, I should say this was a massively multidisciplinary team effort, running across 15 different teams/contributors in almost as many cities (a note on the design process to follow, based on the visualisation you can see on p.3 of the exhibition boards linked to below). The architecture is largely by Carlo Ratti, Walter Nicolino, Atmos, SENSEable City Lab et al, with the amazing visualisations by London-based GMJ and graphic design by Studio FM Milano. The artist Tomas Saraceno was heavily involved in the conceptual work. Structural engineering was Schaich Bergermann und Partner (of Munich Olympic stadium fame, amongst others) with numerous other engineering services by my colleagues here at Arup in Sydney and in London. Google were on board, as were landscape architects Agence Ter. The advisors included Umberto Eco, William J. Mitchell, Chris Bangle and others. The full team is detailed here, and I thought Carlo Ratti put it nicely when he said in an email, “Our team is a bit like a cloud - nothing to do with the traditional idea of promethean architects and artists. As such, it’s important to me that the project comes out as a collaborative effort.”

Carlo, who readers may recall from an earlier interview here, pulled everything together and deserves huge credit as benevolent ringleader, creative inspiration and driving force, nonetheless.

Within that team effort, the project lent me an opportunity to explore many of the concepts I’ve been developing on the aforementioned (and not-mentioned) projects, ranging from the ideas of the ‘civic scale smart meter’ creating feedback loops for human activity, with data drawn from wide arrays of sensors (in the widest sense of the word), to realising this on at a ‘land-art’ scale and so exploring civic relationships with urban systems rather than individual relationships, via data visualisation amongst other things. Many, though not all, of the concepts core to my urban informatics work at Arup got an outing here, as I was primarily involved in the conceptual design of the overall thing, working closely with Carlo Ratti and Alex Haw in particular. Some of the discrete system ideas included augmented reality overlaid onto the city, but from a viewing platform that enables entire urban systems to be articulated. This structure could also be as digital as it was physical, and later discussions centred around an ongoing iterative design process for urban fabric.

Strategically I was also interested in foregrounding the idea of ‘re-industrial cities’, in which contemporary manufacturing returns to cities, partly through visualising patterns of production in cities - and in curating data we are choosing what stories to tells - but also ensuring that the manufacturing of the structure itself is done as locally as possible. (I’m proud we sourced, albeit at high level for the pitch, British manufacturers for the project.) Oh, and all that stuff about drizzle, Turner, Constable etc. was largely my doing I think. Apologies, Mother Country.

Overall, it was, of course, a chance to explore an interactive, responsive architecture at a scale beyond a building, somewhat in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller’s Geoscope, Archigram’s Living City, Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale, and many other projects I’ve found inspirational over the years. Credit where it is due.

To communicate the project, Studio FM Milano have built a website for the project, which contains a large amount of the presentation material produced for the pitch. You’ll find images of course, but the texts also contain some useful background information.

I thought I’d share the (A1) boards I designed for the exhibition (6.4mb), as they do a decent job of conveying the project from my angle. (You can download that, but I’ve also extracted the text I wrote for the boards and included it at the end of this entry. Again the amazing background images here are the renders produced by GMJ based on the designs produced by the architectural side of the team.)

Unbeknownst to me, Carlo + team, Alex Haw (Atmos) and others had been thinking similar thoughts as those contained above - and had in fact moved it forwards by a huge degree, importantly, developing something buildable - and the concept came together remarkably quickly and coherently.

I usually produce work in a different way - by sketching and designing spaces, basic structures or products, detailed interface and interaction designs; or writing 'design fiction' to convey how urban experiences might change - but here I was working in a far more conceptual mode. Doing concept design, strategic design - I'm not quite sure what to call it. When working at the urban scale, or doing urban strategy, I sometimes produce these kind of outputs, those kind of diagrammatic scribbles and pulled references, but it was interesting to play this role on a building project - albeit for a particular kind of building. I guess it's a structure working at an urban scale.

A lot of the text at the the CLOUD website is an amalgamation of all our thoughts, but I must say Alex Haw in particular proved extremely adept at weaving meaning and poetry from the numerous concepts at play here. It was a great pleasure to work with him on both this and the digital design/interaction models, as it was with Carlo and the rest of the team.

The CLOUD website

Text on the CLOUD from Remodelling Architecture exhibition boards follows. Written for a public architecture exhibit in Sydney, so please bear that in mind:

This is the story of a design process more than a built outcome. Iit might articulate a new idea of what a monument can be, as well as exploring several emerging aspects of urban informatics and outlining how design can be increasingly distributed across time and space. 

Carlo Ratti assembled a team, including myself, to create a form of monument for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The project team never assembled in its entirety at any point in the 2-month process. Indeed, I never met anyone regarding the project, working on all aspects via email and Skype (though I knew Carlo previously, and several of my colleagues at Arup of course). The project team grew rapidly, ultimately scattered across 15 different cities.

Design should be a humble trade. Hence the focus on the team, the ideas, and the story. They are, in this case, all the design consists of.

Given the site was East London, my thoughts quickly turned to rain, of course. In particular, the landscape and history as explored in JMW Turner’s paintings. Dealing with the sublime (and monumental) yet through the ethereal, ephemeral and environmental, these paintings suggest light, pale and wan with sudden shards of gold, swollen clouds, billowing steam and fierce winds, engineering and technology, harnessing energy, event, spectacle. They are deeply rooted in the English landscape. (Also, the English obsession with weather.) 

The landscape here is also unique: flat, wet, crushed under vast clouded skies. The Thames Estuary in particular is astonishingly beautiful, in a Northern European sense. The environmental characteristics are rich too: cloud, storms, spray, mist, smoke, fog. Again, Turner’s paintings spring to mind. Working with clouds seemed like a promising lead.

The site’s history is rich and evocative. It emerged as a key component of London in its pomp, as the ‘workshop of the world’, when the city was the last European iteration of Jacques Attali’s nine ‘core’ post-Enlightenment mercantile cities. He describes London from 1788-1890 as powered by steam, the British Empire massively expanded by energy, speed, industry and innovation, connecting the city to the world.

My own practice is largely concerned with urban informatics — drawing patterns from the urban experience and projecting them back into that experience, in order to reveal how the city is performing. This is often related to urban sustainability, in the widest sense, attempting to make the invisible visible in meaningful ways.

I saw an opportunity to develop my ongoing interest in the idea of the ‘civic-scale smart meter’ — a structure that acts as a real-time feedback loop on the performance of urban activity within a civic framework. I’ve explored this idea in several recent projects, yet this gave an opportunity to work with a richness of data, given Google as partners, which is generally unavailable in the urban landscape. Likewise, the Olympics Games would cast a long ‘digital shadow’.

I thought of a three-level structure initially. A responsive middle layer moves and is lit in response to patterns of data, a glowing net-like structure held aloft on diaphanous threads, as if data-streams, gently floating and swaying in the wind. LED ‘twine’ forms guy-lines and connects the data to earth and to energy-gathering kites above. Possibly inflatable, from earth it looks like cloud-like (and so nods to the idea of cloud computing, as well as the landscape.)

Unbeknownst to me, Carlo, Alex and team had been working on similar thoughts, imagining a supported balloon structure also with kites. The team quickly aligned these thoughts to suggest an elevated cloud-like structure, extrapolated from Tomas Saraceno’s artworks, its form embedded with data as well as people.

Data is to be drawn from the Olympic Games in real-time, telling particular stories — of industry, energy, innovation and connectivity — as well as of the basic facets of the Games themselves. This data could be visualised as ambiguous spectacle, using the effects most redolent with the landscape and locale (cloud, smoke, steam, fog, mist, water, wind, mechanical engineering, data). The Cloud physically twists and ripples in response to data patterns captured from environmental sensors placed around the grounds, data scraped from web activity, drawn from mobile carriers in real-time, interpreting audio to discern the different languages being spoken, acting as a giant scoreboard floating above the events, detects the viewing and listening figures around the games in real-time, explores the behaviour of localised weather systems, projects the global internet traffic to and from the Lea Valley, forms a gigantic smart meter for Stratford and surrounds at civic scale, and so on and so on.

In this way, it takes aggregate individual patterns and reveals them at civic scale, thus binding the city’s activity together via a gentle ambient drizzle of data.

There are two sides to the interaction, both predicated on the physical experience of the Cloud augmented with data. 

The first mode foregrounds the structure. The Cloud’s experience is physical, visceral — about altitude, atmosphere, exposure to the climate. People are in and on the translucent bubbles of the Cloud. Yet its skin is threaded with an addressable 3D matrix of LED lighting, forming a glowing membrane capable of displaying broadcast video or abstract visualisation. It ripples in response to data and presence of people, such that the Cloud feels alive to the touch. This integration of the display layer with structure means the physical cloud itself can be free of everything except structure. Secondly, while people climb the Cloud and stand amidst the glowing data, augmented reality interfaces create a further interaction layer, overlaying visualisations and media onto the Cloud’s view of London. This layer can project real-time energy data over the city, reveal the medal table hovering over the stadium, depict the Lea Valley as it was a century ago, and so on.

I was also interested in the rich industrial history of this site, and the need to build a productive post-Olympics legacy. So we explored how The Cloud could be a showpiece of contemporary manufacturing, a process that produces reams of data rather than plumes of smoke. Yet we could visualise these new smokestacks, exposing the seams of production in order to subtly bend the trajectory of London’s economy towards a more diverse base. The narrative thus outlines a possible future of production in a Britain that has been systematically denuded of manufacturing industries. In curating data to display, we are describing possible trajectories, affecting the stories that a place tells about itself.

Finally, a structure so entwined with software, its architecture dissolving in behaviour, means that its design is an ongoing process, and so distributed further over time, closer to industrial design or service design than traditional architecture. And as with almost all such projects, there is no sole author here, and I was certainly only one small part of this complex design (the conceptual side was driven by CarloRattiAssociati, Atmos, Tomas Saraceno and myself.) The full team is listed above, overlaid with a visualisation of project emails to/from my in-box, plotted over time and space, leading up to submission of the first stage design proposal.

My flight from Brisbane to Sydney had been delayed en route, due to 60kph winds at Sydney leaving only one runway operational, and so the plane was directed into a holding pattern. Presumably we were stacked alongside other aircraft, though none were visible.

The Australian landscape had also disappeared surprisingly quickly into the gloom of evening outside the window, a gigantic land mass suddenly and easily secreted away. On take-off from Brisbane an hour earlier, ascending above the mangroves and oil refineries at the mouth of the Brisbane River, the lower stratosphere of South East Queensland had been suffuse with a yellowy haze from the dust storms apparently now firmly ensconced along the east coast. But now the view out of the thick starboard window was complex in composition and banal in content, a multi-layered montage of grime and moisture in the foreground, vast inhuman darkness pocked by the odd spot of light in the background, and my trousers reflected in the cabin reading light somewhere in-between.

The delay, which again reminds me of the brittle nature of the oft-inappropriately-named civil aviation (and the essentially unsustainable nature of domestic commercial aviation in the long run), does however give me enough time to both start and finish Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport, his account of spending, well, a week at the airport, as writer-in-residence at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, courtesy of BAA. 

To my mild surprise, I enjoyed it hugely.

I’d picked it up at Brisbane airport’s sorry-excuse-for-a-bookshop, like I had previously picked up Jacques Attali’s A Brief History of the Future and Stephen Carrol’s The Art of the Engine Driver, both of which had also been enjoyable - a decent hit-rate from a poor shop, so far. De Botton’s is a small book, like those I referenced here, and that too was in its favour. (The book is also punctuated by rather nice documentary photographs by Richard Baker.)

I’ve had issues with De Botton’s work in the past, most of which are too nebulous to articulate, or indeed dwell on. But constraining the man in this format - literally constraining him to one location, and then to the format of a short book - seems to have worked. There’s a focus and passion to the writing, at least in his reserved English-Swiss style, that is also insightful and, at a few points, genuinely affecting. It’s also funny.

De Botton can be critiqued for lack of critique. He’s about as far from the ‘intellectual as attack dog’ that you recall Denis Healey’s description of Geoffrey Howe - “like being savaged by a dead sheep” (which would actually be rather unpleasant, when you think about it). Yet behind the pale visage and courteously benign manner there does lurk a subtle critique of sorts. In this context - Heathrow - he repeatedly points out the associated externalities (destruction of green belt, carbon emissions, noise, negative first impressions of Britain, and so on). But they’re expressed as mere descriptors rather than sustained critique. Put simply, he doesn’t stick the boot in and he clearly could’ve done.

Perhaps with this in mind, he addresses the issue of his patron, BAA, right away, and does so carefully, thoughtfully, and with humour. He’s intensely aware of his delicate position here, and the power structures around him. He partly suggests that the new economic reality of the publishing industry has made him consider this alternative, and ancient, business model for the writer - the wealthy patron. I’m not sure that’s relevant - it’s a well-understood model, and we can judge the book on its merits, reading between lines as we see fit. Having been given the green light to say what he likes - and as mentioned above, BAA have chosen a writer that is hardly going to stick the boot in; at worst, a thin smile disguising a delicate stiletto nick - de Botton would clearly jump at the chance of this commission.

And who wouldn’t? Airports are fascinating places, and emblematic tokens of our civilisation. This last year has been a year of flying for me. I’ve probably done over 2000 km per week for the last year, on average (with an appropriately hideous carbon footprint as a result) and so I’ve overly familiar with certain of these spaces. But curiously, I still enjoy them, as places. They perform a compression of so many things the experience is both everyday (almost) and surreal simultaneously.

And de Botton picks apart that paradox from almost every angles one can imagine. In fact, his starting point is that the airport is essentially the emblematic human structure:

“In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic. It was the imaginative centre of contemporary culture Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilisation - then it would have to be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head.”

A Week at the Airport is not as learned or as deep as David Pascoe’s rich cultural audit Airspaces (part of the brilliant Topographics series). Then again, it’s not one quarter as long. But Pascoe’s book does dwell on a figure that is absent at the feast here. The one figure who would really explore a space such as this, suggesting its essence through an entirely different mode, and thus via all the angles one would not imagine. A figure whose relatively recent absence is felt all the more keenly when reading this book.

Ballard.

“In Ballard’s utopian vision, even the curtain-walling of the terminal buildings and the multi-storey car-parks behind them belonged to an enchanted domain; such houses ‘of glass, of flight and possibility’ are, according to the narrator (whose surname happens to be Ballard), ‘the departure point for our own lives and deaths’. Almost a quarter of a century later, this stark view of airspace seems unchanged: ‘Airports and airfields have always held a special magic, gateways to the infinite possibilities that only the sky can offer.’” [From Airspaces, by David Pascoe]

Anyway. Back down to earth, and de Botton’s book will have to suffice.

A few notes and quotes.

A central theme is the (accurate, I think) impression that few industries are as “vulnerable to disaster” as commercial aviation, but that this leads essentially to a kind of pervasive frustration running through much of the experience. Here, the business simply cannot win. It is perpetually teetering on the the edge of delivering failure. All that changes is the scale of ‘disaster’. The fact that you’ve been delivered safely to and from 25000 feet is conveniently ignored by passengers in favour of being miffed by the size of the taxi queue, or by being infuriated by a mildly officious attendant at the check-in desk, or sitting for hours on the runway due to pre-departure engine failure at Bangkok, or by one’s luggage flying to Belgrade while you fly to Buenos Aires. Focusing on these smaller ‘disasters’ is perhaps a way of dealing with the extreme nature of the experience of flying, and the everyday aversion of real disaster by these incredible systems of technology and people. The whole act is too surreal to think too deeply about - so people don’t, generally rejecting thoughts about how precariously they’re travelling by distracting themselves with the more mundane and everyday breakdowns in a system that’s far too complex to run smoothly. (This perhaps necessary obfuscation is also why Brian Eno’s Music for Airports will rarely actually be played at airports.)

He is particularly good on the peculiar sense of pervasive yet largely internalised tension created by the emotional and psychological pressures of airports. He makes a series of acute observations predicated on this interplay between banal environment and heightened emotional intensity. Perhaps it’s that the situations are indeed essentially emotionally intense, often being a series of greetings and goodbyes, set to the backdrop of persistent minor failures of complex systems amidst the possibility of major disasters. It’s quite a brew. De Botton wryly skewers this extraordinary emotional confection, describing the long goodbyes of couples or the simmering cauldrons that are families on holiday.

“We may spend the better part of our professional lives projecting strength and toughness, but we are all in the end creatures of appalling fragility and vulnerability. Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few who hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognise by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without. There were men pacing impatiently and blankly who had looked forward to this moment for half a year and could not restrain themselves any further at the sight of a small boy endowed with their own grey-green eyes and their mother’s cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless-steel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.”

Oddly, given de Botton’s various stated predilections there is comparatively little direct focus on the architecture. (Just as a visit to British Airways’ Customer Experience Division reveals less than I’d hoped.) He doesn’t ignore it, several times pausing to praise the immense interior and its engineering (by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and — disclosure alert — Arup et al), but he doesn’t really take it apart spatially for us.

Nevertheless, he does offer a lovely, hopeful point about the function of the architecture to stamp a version of Britain onto visitors’ minds.

“The structure was proposing a new idea of Britain, a country that would be reconciled to technology, that would no longer be in thrall to its past, that would be democratic, tolerant, intelligent, playful and lacking in spite or irony. All this was a simplification, of course: twenty kilometres to the west and north were tidy hamlets and run-down estates that would once have contravened any of the suggestions encoded in the terminal’s walls and ceilings.

Nevertheless, like Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament in Colombo or Jørn Utzon’s Opera House in Sydney, Richard Rogers’s Terminal 5 was applying the prerogative of all ambitious architecture to create rather than merely reflect an identity. It hope to use the hour or so when passengers were within its space — objectively, to have their passports stamped and to recover their luggage — to define what the United Kingdom might one day become, rather than what it too often is.”

This is a fine assessment of an ambitious architecture: ambition explored in terms of attempted strategic aspiration rather than simple programme or form.

There’s a fascinating note on the entire point of civil aviation - and how simple economic measurement is not a ‘fair’ judge of the business, as if it were almost an art-form instead. This comes during a chat with Wille Walsh, CEO of British Airways. Perhaps his artwork had begun to leak and engulf his entire surroundings by this point; in a peculiarly infrastructural case of Stockholm syndrome.

"Considered collectively, as a cohesive industry, civil aviation has never in its history shown a profit. Just as significantly, neither had book publishing. In this sense, then, the CEO and I, despite our apparent differences, were in much the same sort of business, each one needing to justify itself in the eyes of humanity not so much by its bottom line as by its ability to stir the soul. It seemed as unfair to evaluate an airline according to the profit-and-loss statement as to judge a poet by her royalty statements. The stock market could never put an accurate price on the thousands of moments of beauty and interest that occurred around the world every day under an airline’s banner: it could not describe the sight of Nova Scotia from the air, it had no room in its optics for the camaraderie enjoyed by employees in the Hong King ticket office, it had no means of quantifying the adrenalin thrill of take-off.”

As someone fascinated by measurement - or value - of non-quantatitative experiential criteria - such as the urban experience - I whole-heartedly agree, particularly as I spend so much time flying over Oceania, with the aforementioned dust clouds over South-East Queensland coast, the peculiar terra-forming of the Gold Coast, the drab brown wrinkles of Victorian terrain, the startling skeins of Sydney harbour and the wriggle of the Parramatta river.

Yet this is also overly-romantic tosh, for if this were the case, and airlines were more akin to literature or equivalent, then surely airlines would offer a far more interesting experience. The problem with civil aviation - one of them - is that it is run as a business to a very tight profit-and-loss statement, and so tends to cut as many corners as possible. It’d be fascinating to idly speculate how, over and above a baseline of completely safe operation, civil aviation would be a different experience if it were seen as a subsidised art form. Something more akin to the Pan Am in 2001: A Space Odyssey perhaps …

Some general asides occur, including this one on how productively he was able to work at a nondescript desk installed in the middle of the the busy departure hall. As a fan of working in public spaces like libraries and cafes, I wholeheartedly agree with the following: 

“Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.”

On the influence of literature on essence of place, while browsing in WH Smith:

“Milan Kundera was being suggested as a guide to Prague, and Raymond Carver depended upon to reveal the hidden character of the small towns between Los Angeles and Santa Fe. Oscar Wilde once remarked that there had been less fog in London before James Whistler started to paint, and one wondered if the silence and sadness of isolated towns in the American West had not been similarly less apparent before Carver began to write.”

My own impressions of T5 tally with de Botton’s to a large extent, for what it’s worth. It’s an impressive space, and generally beautifully equipped. Some rough edges - as it’s not actually Munich or Tokyo - but essentially it does single-handedly lift Heathrow from one of the worst cultural assimilation experiences in the world, to one of the better ones. However, to me, the retail mix seemed entirely out of kilter with the times, as I briefly noted before. I remember gawping at unit after unit of Prada, Harrods; Dior; Mappin & Webb; Gucci, Mont Blanc; Smythson; Tiffany & Co and the like. All predictably empty; nothing in the middle range. 

De Botton does talk about retail, and the considerable amount of retail that T5 entails:

“…(M)ore than one hundred separate retail outlets vied for the attention of travellers - a considerably greater number than were to be found in the average shopping centre. This statistic regularly caused critics to complain that Terminal 5 was more like a mall than an airport, though it was hard to determine what might be so wrong with this balance, what precise aspect of the building’s essential aeronautic identity had been violated or even what specific pleasures had been robbed of, given that we are inclined to visit malls even when they don’t provide us with the additional pleasure of a gate to Johannesburg.”

(I don’t like lazy use of ‘we’ in that last sentence.) But fair enough. Yet those complaints are actually quite straightforward, and perhaps the converse of what de Botton says I.e. there is no particular connection between flying and retail either. Hence the odd fit. De Botton does actually get to the bottom of this, in his own way, after an observation on religion, a chat with the airport priest, and by once again invoking the ever-present potential of imminent death. He suspects that duty free shopping bags are the last things one wants to surround oneself with when “setting thy house in order” before dying; that it might reveal an uncomfortable truth about the role of consumption in contemporary society - that we should place retail at the heart of what might be a final resting place; that the act of flying is a near divine, eternal experience. It’s a morbid, elegiac thought, and hardly one that will consciously run through the retail planners at BAA, but perhaps at the heart of this almost subconscious discomfort.

Lest you imagine him tramping around in a post-consumerist rage, on the very next page de Botton succumbs to the pleasures of the terminal’s first class lounge - the Concorde Room, presumably named without irony - which he describes as “humblingly and thought-provokingly nicer than anywhere else I had ever seen at an airport, and perhaps in my life.”

Finally, de Botton reflects again on his project:

“I worried that I might never have another reason to leave the house. I felt how hard it is for writers to look beyond their domestic experience. I dreamt of other possible residencies in institutions central to modern life - banks, nuclear power stations, governments, old people’s homes - and of a kind of writing that could report on the world while still remaining irresponsible, subjective and a bit peculiar.”

I like this last phrase, reminding me as it does of the work of some of my favourite writers. De Botton’s not in that list, yet, but this small book is peppered with interesting thoughts, observations and references nonetheless, not all of which I agree with or find resonant but which spurred numerous thoughts of my own, and continue to do so.

I said farewell to my family at Sydney airport today, as they went up to Brisbane for a few days, and felt the acute and immediate longing and loss that is occurring right now to people at airports all over the world. I’m getting on a plane tomorrow morning to fly to Hong Kong and then Beijing, where I expect to discover a quite different airport experience altogether.

A Week at the Airport, by Alain de Botton [Amazon UK | US]

I've been meaning to post more on this theme for a while - it's partly one of those entries that is really a 'note to self'. But when Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze posted their fascinating research into visualising the (otherwise invisible) characteristics of RFID last night, it prompted me to hit 'publish'.

Their research piece Immaterials is quite lovely, exploring the spatial qualities of RFID in terms of its readable volume, captured with a simple LED/sensor and camera. Here's their video, in which they explain more:

(As well as the conceptual backdrop, outlined in more detail by both Timo and Jack, I particularly like the care and attention they've given to the visualisation, and the presentation of the research. This is quality design.)

In their work I even see something of the early experiments of, say, Benjamin Franklin and Nikola Tesla in terms of understanding the behaviour of electricity, such that it can then be tamed, conducted, and put to work. It's perhaps drawing a long bow to make that comparison, but it feels like a similar sentiment. Whilst electricity is hardly invisible, there is a sense of trying to understand such immaterial phenomena through prototyping and experimentation. (And again, while some would see that as the province of science, it's also the contemporary purpose of design.)

(In this particularly fine image, we see Tesla's friend Mark Twain conducting high-frequency high voltage current, bringing a lamp to incandesce. Tesla is lurking in the background.)

Part of the purpose behind Immaterials is to understand more about RFID in terms of an emerging 'material knowledge', as Timo put it, from the designer's perspective. But perhaps also in order to raise awareness of a technology which is essentially invisible - and often feared - such that we can better understand it, and so make informed choices. It's similar to my own far sketchier work exploring the shape of the wi-fi at the State Library of Queensland (written up here) - if you could perceive the phenomenon of wireless internet as a physical space, what might it look like? (It'd be more interesting to ask what it feels like, actually.)

Despite the fact that it suggests the already massively overused term "making the invisible visible", I'm particularly interested in tapping into the content in such transactions, as well as their materiality/immateriality, as a way of understanding patterns of behaviour in what I'm calling the new soft city. 

Closing the loop then means finding a way of exhibiting these invisible phenomena back in physical space. In an email exchange with Jack last night, I suggested that we might see such blooms or halos sparking as transit card-carrying passengers walk through ticket barriers in subway stations (I'm currently working on informatics for a subway project; it was front-of-mind). Jack had already put it thus:

"Having produced these visualisations, I now find myself mapping imaginary shapes to the radio enabled objects around me. I see the yellow Oyster readers with plumes of LED fluoro-green fungal blossoms hanging over them – and my Oyster card jumping between them, like a digital bee cross-pollinating with data as I travel the city."

As well as the wi-fi research, I've also been fascinated by capturing existing everyday examples of how the city assesses invisible or hidden characteristics of its infrastructure.

I've been taking photos of people who appear to be sensing the city - in the broadest, er, sense of the phrase. The following shots are from Sydney and Los Angeles, and indicate the more quotidian, prosaic activities involved in instrumenting and monitoring the city - from surveyors to telecoms operators, from vans counting passing traffic to guys probing underground pipes, from markings on streets indicating what's underneath to this peculiar footage of what looks like someone using a sonovac but is probably just a device checking for cables.

I've created a public group at Flickr called Sensing the City, so if you have similar photos, do add them there. I'd be interested to see what turns up. 

While it's a very different sensibility and approach to the aforementioned explorations of radio frequencies - it's often a very material city, rather than immaterial; just hidden - in the context of discussions around instrumenting the fabric of our cities via urban informatics it's interesting to consider how much of this already occurs on our streets. And despite being marked by traffic cones and fluorescent work jackets it's become an invisible activity, somewhat ironically, for passers-by. These people are sensors.