[iDC] a personal intro and questions on precedent
Mark Shepard
mshepard at andinc.org
Sun Sep 10 14:02:46 EDT 2006
Greetings, Molly. Welcome to the discussion, and thanks for your
inspiring post and questions. It's great to have you here.
> - What should we look to outside of the common discourses of
> western Europe, the US, and Japan ...
I wonder if you'd like to share some of the insights you've gained
from your experience this past summer researching mobile culture in
India?
> - What about the use of physical infrastructural networks? ...
You're probably familiar of First Mile Solutions - http://
www.firstmilesolutions.com/ - Did you have any contact with them
while you were there? Their Boomi project would seem to relate to
this question?
Bhoomi Pilot: World's First DakNet-Enabled Bus
http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/projects.php?p=bhoomi
A Mobile Access Point network was deployed for Bhoomi, a
computerization of land records initiative in Karnataka which has
been acknowledged as the first national eGovernance initiative in
India. A MAP was mounted on an existing public government bus that
provides connectivity to villages up to 70km away.
Regards,
Mark
On Sep 10, 2006, at 11:02 AM, molly wright steenson wrote:
> A bit of a personal introduction first, by way of introducing my
> question. Trevor asked me to introduce myself a while back and I've
> been on the move for the last month. This is the first chance.
>
> I'm Molly Wright Steenson. In a past life, I was a professor at the
> Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, in Ivrea, Italy, where I led
> the connected communities research area. (Karmen Franinovic, one of
> the people participating in the symposium, was one of the students
> I advised). Thanks to people like Karmen, I found I was more
> interested in architecture than virtual interactions on screens.
> Previous to that, I started working with online community in 1992
> and the web in 94, was active in the webzine community in the late
> 90s: I was the co-founder of Maxi, a pop-culture feminist webzine.
> I worked at places like Netscape, Reuters, and a variety of web
> design studios leading design and application projects. I was also
> very active in the AIGA Experience Design group.
>
> I'm now attending the Yale School of Architecture (where I'm
> pursuing a history/theory masters with Keller Easterling and
> Emmanuel Petit as my advisors), and am working on architectural,
> historical frameworks for mobile, social architecture. I am also
> interested in issues of development and technology. This summer, I
> spent six weeks in Bangalore at Microsoft Research India, where I
> researched how people in urban Bangalore share mobile phones. It
> turned out to be more collective than in countries like Japan or
> Korea.
>
> I'm finding myself a little disenchanted with projects within the
> locative media realm, and thus I'm researching modes of mobility in
> architectural work in the 60s and 70s to develop a framework to
> apply to more recent projects or studies of mobility. I'm less
> interested in the dérive and Guy Debord (which have been done,
> done, done, done, and done) than I am in the people who broke off
> from the Situationists. Right now, I'm writing a chapter on Cedric
> Price. Next: cybernetics, Yona Friedman, the Smithsons, and
> Constant are next (I'm open to other suggestions, too.). Later,
> Henri Lefebvre. Previous to these people, Walter Benjamin with
> Einbahnstrasse and the Arcades Project figure in, as do of course
> Baudelaire and the flâneur (though again, locative media's often
> fixated on the flâneur). I've not listed the copious philosophers,
> sociologists, writers, media theorists, and so on, that I've been
> reading. They're too copious to list here. I'm curious about
> tensions like mobility vs. domesticity, which always seems to come
> up, whether then or now.
>
> And so I'd like to ask:
> - What precedents might we look to to undergird our discussion of
> situated technologies, beyond the most obvious ones that we turn to?
> - What fields might these come from? What sources? (For instance,
> I'm turning to cybernetics.)
> - What should we look to outside of the common discourses of
> western Europe, the US, and Japan (that is, outside of the
> Metabolists)? Might there be precedents in other parts of the world?
> - Where can we look for earlier approaches to networks?
> - What about the use of physical infrastructural networks? Cedric
> Price's Potteries Thinkbelt (1965-66) used redundant rail links.
> Projects in rural India (today) use the mail system to send DVDs to
> schools because mail is cheaper and ultimately faster than an
> electronic network. Where did we and do we see these connection
> points and how might we use them in work today? What are other
> precedents of this?
>
> Cheers,
> Molly
>
> On Sep 10, 2006, at 12:08 AM, Mark Shepard wrote:
>
>> Hello iDC list,
>>
>> With the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium now less
>> than 6 weeks away, we'd like to ask for your help in shaping the
>> questions we'll address next month in NYC. What questions would
>> you pose vis-a-vis the confluence of Architecture and Situated
>> Technologies?
>>
>> We're bringing together a fairly diverse and interdisciplinary
>> group of people – including architects, artists, historians,
>> sociologists, technologists and theorists (some wearing more than
>> one of these hats) – to examine, explore and enact ideas for a
>> near-future world of networked "things" and other "situated"
>> technologies. And we've planned an intensive three days of
>> presentations, discussions, workshops and performances in an
>> attempt to approach the subject from a variety of formats and
>> methods.
>>
>> [ More information about the symposium is available here: http://
>> www.situatedtechnologies.net ]
>>
>> The thoughts, references, provocations, rants and raves
>> contributed here over the past two months have already helped to
>> shape the discourse. Now we ask for your questions to help shape
>> the debate.
>>
>> Some have asked, what exactly are "situated" technologies, and
>> what might they have to do with architecture?
>>
>> When we began thinking about the subject, we identified two usages
>> of the word "situated" to work with:
>>
>>> 1. Situated: located: situated in a particular spot or position;
>>> "valuable centrally located urban land"; "strategically placed
>>> artillery"; "a house set on a hilltop"; "nicely situated on a
>>> quiet riverbank" - http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?
>>> s=situated
>>
>>> 2. Situated Action: every course of action is highly dependent
>>> upon its material and social circumstances focusing on moment-by-
>>> moment interactions between actors, and between actors and the
>>> environments of their action - Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated
>>> Actions: The Problem of Human-machine Communication (Cambridge
>>> University Press, 1987)
>>
>> The first is clearly related to architecture in that architecture
>> often begins with the site (a specific place or location) as a
>> primary force shaping the act of building. The second stems from a
>> critique by Lucy Suchman of assumptions about purposeful "human"
>> activity common to artificial intelligence research at the time,
>> which tended to think of this activity as a something that
>> proceeded by an a-priori plan that was perfunctorily executed.
>> Both invoke context (a site, an environment, other people) as
>> determining factor in trying to understand the object or event in
>> question.
>>
>>> Locative Media, Responsive Architecture and Participatory Networks
>>
>> We also looked at recent architecture, art and technology
>> practices that in different ways attempt to address issues of
>> "context" through a wider lens. In contrast to Manuell Castell's
>> placeless space of flows that characterized much of late 20th
>> century discourse on global networks, we found a renewed interest
>> in questions of location, place, embodied interaction, behavior,
>> responsiveness and participation. We saw seeds of recent work in
>> Locative Media, Responsive Architecture, and Participatory
>> Networks in experiments in architecture, art and technology from
>> the 60s by Archigram and the Metabolists, Alan Kaprow and Vito
>> Acconci, and the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, to name just a
>> few.
>>
>>> The Coming Age of the Internet of Things
>>
>> But where do we go from here? At the dawn of an era of networked
>> "things" – where the built environment itself becomes imbued with
>> the capacity to sense, record, share, contextualize, and respond
>> to what happens in physical space – questions of context reach a
>> new level of complexity. "Things" themselves become actors,
>> affecting change through their observations and assertions. Here,
>> communication becomes less about the exchange of information
>> between people, and more about people and "things" co-habiting
>> within communicative environments.
>>
>> In thinking about how to approach these issues, some of our
>> initial questions were:
>>
>>> What can we harvest from recent work in Locative Media,
>>> Responsive Architecture, and Participatory Networks that might
>>> help "situate" our thinking about the Internet of Things?
>>
>>> How might this evolving relation between people and "things"
>>> alter the way we occupy, navigate, and inhabit the built
>>> environment?
>>
>>> What post-optimal design strategies and tactics might we propose?
>>
>>> How do distinctions between space and place change within these
>>> networked media ecologies?
>>
>> What would you add to this list?
>>
>> Best,
>> Mark
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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