[iDC] Re: a personal intro and questions on precedent

[mollybh at netspace.net.au]

Hi Molly, Mark, Omar, etc. 

I have been having a few responses to the 'situated technologies' call for 
questions, and have decided to share some of them. First of all, I'm looking 
forward to going through the website more closely, and trying to get a handle 
on what is meant by 'situated technologies' given that, aside from the first 
meaning offered- that of being located in a specific place, associated with 
land and well positioned housing - I cannot yet...get my head around what is 
meant by this puzzling term, but, obviously, especially in the last few years, 
with housing complexes and public spaces, hotels and other complexes of 
buildings becoming more intelligent, the appearance, if you will, of 
technology adhering to architectural space has become more prevalent. 

I also feel similarly about 'architecture' = I want to say, which? 
Which architecture? Where? Which architecture? 

Then I just wanted to respond a bit to the text of Mark's below, because it 
can be construed as closer alignment to a critical history of technological 
development and cities, - I feel it is in these ideas that I have yet to find 
the the best point of entry to the topic.


Mark wrote:

<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.


Yes, Mark, I think this is an interesting, and promising approach for tracing 
and teasing out precedents for technology in artistic practices which, then, 
veers into architecture - and I want to suggest framing it, following 
Castell's especially in terms of the shifting relations of cyberspace, which 
follows much of the art history you mention, but which has transformed in many 
ways the relations of art and architecture, and which originally was that 
placesless set of flows, now much more anchored to place, even specifically to 
public and private ownership. I don't feel it is possible, for example, to 
discuss current day technology and networked, responsive and environemental, 
without looking at the commercialization of both networks and research, and 
without discussing ,open source'. So, I'm wondering how, both OS and the  
commercialization of networks as culture and cultural debate, relates to 
technologies being 'situated' or not? or how they are situated?  

Then to respond to the second part of this interesting synopsis:

> 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.

>>I think it is powerful to suggest that there may be a shift away 
from 'exchange debates' in communication to a focus more on people and things. 
For me this apprehends ways in which cyberspace has diminished in its power as 
a separate place, and has melded with the real, partly as a result of mobile 
and portable communications networks, where time spent 'on' could happen from 
more locations. Secondly, Archigram has been brought up many times in the last 
few weeks and my perspective on them is that they were at their heart, deeply 
modernist, and I find this interest in 'things' which are actually sort of 
disguised machines, doing stuff which has disappeared aka the dreams of M. 
Weiser, maybe = has a kind of modernist ring to it, because in some sense we 
are still talking about our relationship to the machine, even when the machine 
is a coffee pot. And, that these interacting machines flourish now in a kind 
of popular culture of ubiquity, interest in them spatially has a ring to it as 
something Archigram would have been curious about, or is, I don't mean to 
relegate them to the past. 

So, I guess my question here is, to what extent are we still governed in our 
sense of technology and industry by modernist ideas about the machine and its 
presence in our interaction and can we evoke the  Dadaist's as well, who's 
work in some senses reformulated industry into a technoculture from which 
creative commonality was then derived, as opposed to being divided or 
destroyed?

Cordially, 
Molly Hankwitz (Cox)













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> Today's Topics:
> 
>    1. a personal intro and questions on precedent
>       (molly wright steenson)
>    2. RE: a personal intro and questions on precedent (Khan, Omar)
>    3. Re: a personal intro and questions on precedent (Mark Shepard)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 11:02:47 -0400
> From: molly wright steenson <molly at girlwonder.com>
> Subject: [iDC] a personal intro and questions on precedent
> To: IDC list <idc at bbs.thing.net>
> Message-ID: <C825ADD7-E2DA-44B2-8D4D-5D84C5647401 at girlwonder.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; delsp=yes;
> 	format=flowed
> 
> 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
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
> > (distributedcreativity.org)
> > iDC at bbs.thing.net
> > http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
> >
> > List Archive:
> > http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> >
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 13:43:29 -0400
> From: "Khan, Omar" <omarkhan at ap.buffalo.edu>
> Subject: RE: [iDC] a personal intro and questions on precedent
> To: "molly wright steenson" <molly at girlwonder.com>,	"IDC list"
> 	<idc at bbs.thing.net>
> Message-ID:
> 	<B3C5222B126BE046A88632A11AB294BF025D4353 at mail.ap.buffalo.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> Hi Molly,
> 
> > - What precedents might we look to undergird our discussion of
> > situated technologies, beyond the most obvious ones that we turn to?
> 
> 1) I have also been looking intently at cedric price's work for the past
> year. My interest in him really comes out of my brief study at the AA where I
> had the opportunity to work with Gordon Pask. Pask is a necessary link in a
> very interesting puzzle that brings a variety of important characters
> together.
> Pask is a cybernetician of the second order type. His major contribution was
> to learning environments through such theories as Conversation Theory and
> Actor Network Theory both developed in the late 60s and mid 70s. I wonder
> whether Bruno Latour hasn't been hiding Pask in his bureau. Cedric Price of
> course consulted with Pask on the Generator Project. I am not sure but I
> think that wonderful diagram for Generator was in fact worked on by Pask. On
> the US side second order cybernetics didn't quite fit into the "fundable"
> sciences and marvin minsky went so far as to dismiss its contributions
> entirely in his 1969 book "Perceptrons". While AI was not interested, Pask
> found common ground with Nicholas Negroponte for whom he wrote an
> introductory statement for one of the chapters in "soft architecture
> machine". Negroponte is a significant player whose work in the machine
> learning group really needs to be revisited and of course how that was
> transformed into the MIT Media Lab.
> Other characters in cybernetics: W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Walter Grey,
> Heinz von Foerster.
> 
> 2) Another line that I am not so well prepared to elaborate on is Gregory
> Bateson. Interest in artificial ecologies as metaphors or simulations of
> social systems really begin here. At the most recent Performance Studies
> International(June 2006) Baz Kershaw gave a very good paper on Bateson...The
> entire panel was very good:
> 
> Performance Ecologies and Biotic Rights
> Arts Lecture Theatre
> Chair: Martin Welton
> 
> Baz Kershaw (University of Bristol)
> Stephen Bottoms (University of Leeds)
> Matthew Goulish (Goat Island, School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
> The panel will consider several sightings/site-ings of humanism's ghost
> through an exploration of the 'performance ecologies' recently begun to be
> theorised and practised, in which performances are understood as literally
> sharing the characteristics of ecological systems.
> 
> 
> Best,
> Omar
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: idc-bounces at bbs.thing.net [mailto:idc-bounces at bbs.thing.net] On
> > Behalf Of molly wright steenson
> > Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2006 11:03 AM
> > To: IDC list
> > Subject: [iDC] a personal intro and questions on precedent
> >
> > 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
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
> > > (distributedcreativity.org)
> > > iDC at bbs.thing.net
> > > http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
> > >
> > > List Archive:
> > > http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> > >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
> > (distributedcreativity.org)
> > iDC at bbs.thing.net
> > http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
> >
> > List Archive:
> > http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 14:02:46 -0400
> From: Mark Shepard <mshepard at andinc.org>
> Subject: Re: [iDC] a personal intro and questions on precedent
> To: molly wright steenson <molly at girlwonder.com>
> Cc: IDC list <idc at bbs.thing.net>
> Message-ID: <6591AD12-084D-423C-96B9-6BE0C3741614 at andinc.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; delsp=yes;
> 	format=flowed
> 
> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
> >> (distributedcreativity.org)
> >> iDC at bbs.thing.net
> >> http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
> >>
> >> List Archive:
> >> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> >>
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
> > (distributedcreativity.org)
> > iDC at bbs.thing.net
> > http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
> >
> > List Archive:
> > http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> 
> +
> mark shepard
> +
> http://www.andinc.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> End of iDC Digest, Vol 23, Issue 13
> ***********************************
> 





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