» Midweek we shipped off the final documentation of the January workshop we held for BBVA’s Centro de Innovación, with our good friends Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova of Near Future Laboratory and young Mr. Slavin.

It’s been wonderful working with BBVA. If you’re interested in tracing the flows of matter, energy and information through a given place, not many things will give you a better handle on them than studying the patterns of financial transaction that obtain in that place. And of course, very few parties will have better visibility on these patterns than a bank with both retail and commercial offerings.

This kind of access is a tonic, let me tell you. Over the last half-decade or so, I’ve more than a few times been confronted with a frustrating inability to build some useful model or visualization of a situation, because the data required was simply out of reach — either it was held close by some recalcitrant gatekeeper or, just as likely, it straight up didn’t exist. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said something along the lines of “Imagine what we could show if we could only get” X or Y or Z dataset. The amazing thing about the BBVA engagement is that no such imaginary exercises are required: the answer to such queries is generally either, “Yeah, we’ve got that,” or at worst, “We can get that.”

The generous space of possibility this opens up has implications for one of the longer-term (rhetorical and practical) points we’re trying to make in our work. We believe, bluntly, that as far as the dynamic visualization of information is concerned, the era of “pretty pictures” is over, and that the time has come for institutions to use these methods more instrumentally, in roles as varied as prediction, decision support, argumentation and advocacy.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to make this argument on a foundation of visualizations with meaningful probative value, and the odds of building any such thing are immeasurably improved by access to robust and complete data sets. So saying that I’m looking forward to seeing what we’re able to develop with BBVA and the Near Future folks is something of an understatement.

» On the logistics front: this upcoming week we’ll be in Taipei for a series of events happening around the TELDAP 2012 conference. On the 22nd, with Nurri Kim and under the Do projects banner, I’ll be leading a Taipei Systems/Layers walkshop, and on the very next day, giving a talk at the Academia Sinica. But for a half-hour layover at the airport on my virgin visit to Asia (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, April 1994), this will be my very first time in Taiwan, so — again — I’m super-excited.

» A little further out, upcoming keynotes include the Digital Urban Living Konference in Aarhus, Denmark, on the 22nd of March, followed by Where 2.0 in San Francisco, and one I’ve tentatively agreed to do at Open Data Eindhoven. The latter two are both in April — the San Francisco talk on the 4th and the Eindhoven event on the 20th. (I’m planning to be in Amsterdam a day or two either side of Eindhoven, so get in touch if you’re interested in e.g. Wijnand Fockink.)

» Keep an eye peeled for a post here showcasing some of the outstanding work our friend and colleague Ryan Sullivan did on iconography for Transitflow. We think this work goes a long way toward solving some really vexing problems in representing complex transit options for the mobile touchscreen, and we’re happy to be able to share it with you even independently of the context in which it originated.

» Finally, and on a not-entirely-unrelated note, I’ve been energized lately by the conversations we’ve been having with “social transit” provider Weeels about our doing some NYC-based work with them. Given our love for the city and our pride in representing it globally, New York has always been kind of an upsetting lacuna in our portfolio of projects, so the prospect of working on something we might actually get to experience as part of our own everyday life is just too enticing. I’ll keep you posted as these discussions evolve; until then, we’ll come back at you next week with a report from Taipei and whatever else crops up.

From the outset, I positioned Urbanscale as a hybrid proposition: a chimera forged of equal parts “visionary” consultancy, boutique design practice, and resolutely pragmatic development shop. The logic behind this was that, ideally, each one of these activities would inform the others, generating that all-important synergy, and ensuring that the whole would give rise to more value than the sum of its parts would imply. In practice, though, it’s become obvious that the diverging requirements implied by these different ways of approaching the world (and, particularly, of trying to offer full-scale technical development and integration for municipal clients, without losing focus on our other activities) pulls a studio of five people in too many conflicting directions.

This tension is in itself interesting, and it’s probably productive in a bunch of ways. But one in which it’s clearly not productive is the single way that happens to matter for a business enterprise, and that is financially. I’ve always been conscious of the fact that the studio was undercapitalized for the sort of projects our ambitions dictated we should be taking on. Equally — municipal bureaucracies being known neither for the rapidity of their decision-making or the transparency of their procurement processes — we understood that anyone playing in these particular fields had better be prepared to tolerate drawn-out negotiations and lead times that are often measured in years. We made a bet that our relatively high-margin consultancy activities would generate sufficient short-term revenue to support the other facets of the practice while our more ambitious and capital-intensive projects gestated. This was a hedged bet, but a bet nonetheless.

Unfortunately, it’s now clear that we’ve lost this bet, and there are consequences for the practice and its projects that I need to share with you. The most obvious, immediate and frustrating consequence is that we’re suspending development work on our Urbanflow and Transitflow projects indefinitely. There are also some implications for the way we’ll structure the studio and its ongoing activities. The best way to describe these changes would be to say that we’re reformulating the studio as a rather looser network of associates, who will continue to work on some projects together under the Urbanscale banner, and take on other opportunities as they present themselves.

None of this will affect our ongoing consultancy work in any way. We’ll continue to serve our existing clients, and (we certainly hope) take on new ones. I should also make it clear that we’re not abandoning the work we did on Urbanflow/Transitflow — if nothing else, we’ve generated a significant amount of code, cartographic and other assets, and we’re currently exploring ways we might return the value locked up in these to the City of Chicago and the broader open-source development community.

There’s a much longer post to be written about what we’ve learned by trying to bootstrap our way into municipal-scale production immediately, but the time for that consideration is a little later on, after I have enough distance to put things in their proper perspective. For now I’ll confine myself to noting that, in retrospect, a wiser course of action might have been to concentrate on producing the design fictions I tend to dislike so heartily, in the hopes of securing the longer-term institutional buy-in that might have led to more successful outcomes. (This may in fact be what’s in the process of happening with Urbanflow, given the spate of recent and favorably-received coverage, but only time will tell.) But, y’know, sometimes it’s hard to see past one’s ideological blinders, to say nothing of one’s own ego and ambition.

I want to thank the whole extended family — Mayo, Jeff, Leah and J.D., Nurri, Benedetta and Justin at GROUNDlab, ace coil man Todd Bailey and our West Coast co-conspirator Ryan Sullivan — for all of their hard work on our slate of projects over the past year. (Actually, what I really want to say is otsukaresama deshita, which is the customary way of thanking Japanese colleagues for a collective effort; ironically enough, I hated having these compulsory and merely performative-feeling ritual greetings expected of me when I actually lived and worked in Japan, but have come to miss having a handy figure of speech to acknowledge consciousness of the debt one owes to one’s coworkers and their diligence.)

A heartfelt otsukaresama deshita, then, to them and to those of you who did so much to support us during this never-anything-less-than-engaging process. As you might expect of us by now, we’ll be ringing the changes at Temple Bar tonight. I think we may even have one or two Year One t-shirts left, so bring cash if you’re inclined to pick on up. And I’ll check back in next week with some more thoughts on where we go from here.

» We’re reflecting on what we learned last week in Madrid with our old friends Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova of Near Future Laboratory (plus Kevin Slavin) and our new friends from BBVA’s Centro de Innovación. We were thrilled to be able to bring a different perspective to the work they’re doing, help them see how we combine data analysis with on-the-ground observational research in our practice, and suggest some new opportunities for their current explorations.

It was a short trip for us, so one of my personal highlights was the afternoon we spent observing transactions around Madrid – it was crisp and clear, the streets were bustling, and I feel like a I got a real (if tiny) glimpse at the life of the city. I think our presence helped the Madrid natives take advantage of their local knowledge while consciously considering the familiar locations as though they weren’t.

The trip wrapped with an evening of talks from Adam, Nicolas and Kevin (whose answer to a question from the audience prompted this from Leah), a lovely reception, and a rather fantastic Spanish dinner. We certainly hope to make it back again, soon.

» Transitflow is coming off the back-burner, as Mayo and I review the user experience and interface design work we’ve done thus far, taking advantage of the little bit of distance we’ve been able to get from the project to attack it with fresh eyes. J.D.’s rolling some of the codebase he’s built for our Urbanflow on iPad proof-of-concept back into Transitflow, so he’ll be ready to start implementing the UX solutions as we lock them down.

» Speaking of Urbanflow, we’re sorry to say that conversations about a Chicago implementation have drawn to an unsuccessful close. Despite the best intentions of a lot of smart people, the parties involved just couldn’t create the environment necessary to make it happen, and everybody walked away disappointed. But then, nobody ever said that bringing something truly innovative into the world was easy, and we remain optimistic about Urbanflow’s future in Chicago and elsewhere.

» We were thrilled to see a great writeup of Do projects‘s Safety Maps on Fast Co Design this week. Congrats to Nurri, Bloom’s Tom Carden, Stamen’s Michal Migurski, and Adam for that.

» In the background of all of the above, we’ve naturally been engaging in the business of running a business — thinking about ways to formalize some of our service offerings, developing concepts to add to the pipeline, and having interesting conversations with people with interesting problems to solve. Think you’re one of them? Get in touch, or if you happen to be in New York this week, drop by FRIDAYS AT 7.

» For the first time this week, the clocks on our new about page each did something useful – indicating where each of us was. With Adam, Leah, and Jeff in Madrid for the previously alluded-to workshop with BBVA, the studio has been emptier than usual this week. Adam, joined by Kevin Slavin and Nicolas Nova, also gave a free and open-to-the-public talk titled “Beyond Smart Cities” at BBVA’s Innovation Center last night.

» That left J.D. and I holding the fort back in New York – hustling for new business, shipping a proposal, and cranking away on some of the thornier interaction questions remaining for Transitflow.

Although the Farevalue prototype arrived in the studio more than a month ago, it’s taken us a little while to push a short video demonstrating its existence, functionality, and performance out of the door. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to be able to show definitive proof that the technical concept behind Farevalue – pronounced impossible and against the laws of physics less than a year ago – very much works.

Although clearly there’s space for optimization on the size of the actual electronics and components, the prototype does everything we could want it to do at this stage: the update of the e-paper display on the card is powered purely through induction from the coil on the base station, and the value on the display is decremented by the appropriate amount ($2.25, the cost of a single ride on NYC’s subway) – and if there isn’t sufficient value remaining on the card, the base station responds approriately. Thanks again to Justin and Benedetta at Groundlab, and Todd Bailey’s expert wrangling of the magic of induction coils, for creating this prototype for us.

It’s also highlighted the power of the two-pronged approach we’ve taken with Farevalue. With the combination of the design fiction and the technical development, we’ve been able to do a kind of pincer movement, prototyping the idea, vision, and execution on the one hand, and prototyping the technology, feasibility, and constraints on the other. Whether in presentations, or, more viscerally, when somebody visits the studio and gets to play with the prototype, the two parts together tell a greater story than either element alone could ever communicate.

» Logistics: Next week Adam is speaking at Deloitte GovLab’s Future of Transportation event in DC, while the rest of us will be in the studio all week, working away. If you’re in town, why don’t you swing by for a visit? Failing that, there’s always Temple Bar – do join us for a drink, and perhaps a t-shirt?

» Aside from helping Jeff with the site, Mayo has been putting the finishing touches on a video demonstrating our Farevalue/PERRY prototype; look for that video soon. For my part, I’m spending the week polishing our Urbanflow iPad demo, and then I’m back into Transitflow.

» Leah, Jeff and Adam are headed to Madrid on Sunday to conduct a spatial data analysis workshop for Spanish bank BBVA, and they have been heads-down all this week preparing for that. (Every time I glance over Leah’s shoulder, I see some new work of cartographic beauty, so I trust those preparations are going smoothly.) While in Madrid, Adam will be joining Kevin Slavin and Nicolas Nova for a free, public discussion on the 18th of January, under the rubric “Beyond Smart Cities.” The team also hopes to be given a tour of Madrid RIO, a linear amenity that does the High Line one better by converting a several-kilometer stretch of the M-30 ring road into parkland.

» Coming up the following week, Adam will be catching an Acela down to DC to participate in a summit on the Future of Transportation sponsored by Deloitte’s GovLab. It’s a wonderful opportunity to share our vision of transmobility with some of the sector’s most thoughtful, experienced and influential people.

» A bit further out, Leah’s work will be featured in an upcoming show at MoMA entitled Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. You can read about the design process behind the show here. Foreclosed opens February 15th.

» Logistics: Mayo and I will be holding down the fort on Centre Street next week while Leah, Jeff and Adam are in Madrid. Do drop by the studio and say hi. As ever, you can find us at Temple Bar for FRIDAYS AT 7. We’ll have Urbanscale Year One t-shirts for purchase, so bring cash if you’d like one.

When I say the word city, what’s the first thing you think of?

For most of us, I’d wager, the word conjures up images of things that are for the most part just that: things, physical facts. Judging from the friends, students and total strangers of whom I ask this question, anyway, our initial impressions tend to be oddly static dioramas, mute arrays of buildings and streets and sidewalks; only after a moment, if at all, do we remember the unceasing flows of people that animate a place and make it what it is. And this is likely to be true whether our first thought happens to be of Grand Central Station, Shibuya crossing, the choked streets of Lagos or the markets of Bangkok.

Two lenses, then. Through one, the city is coextensive with its stones and monuments, more or less independent of the acts that take place among them; through the other, it’s nothing other than the sum of those acts. If you’re like me, you may be disposed to think that one of these two ways of describing a place has by far the deeper claim on truth — and it isn’t the former.

So what are we to make of the invisible electromagnetic sleet that attends any human place, this pulsing cloud of signal that threatens to exhaust my store of metaphors and which it’s already half a cliché to discuss? Doesn’t any consideration of this belong to the city of stones?

Well, maybe. Just maybe, if the inquiry is confined to the physics of signal absorption in densely built-up areas, the differentials of attenuation in concrete and brick. But even there, the all-too-human isn’t far beneath the surface. Because literally anything beyond the very simplest question in the domain — whether we’re concerned with the placement of relays to ensure line-of-sight propagation or the politics of spectrum allocation — is bound to invoke the presence of human actors and institutions, our values and our priorities. We’re always already present in the Hertzian city.

And inevitably, no matter how ghostly or immaterial it may be, the veil of electromagnetic traffic that suffuses a city is going to have implications for the visible behavior of the people in it — interestingly enough, in ways that diminish the relative significance of the built environment. Any close observer of human behavior in the contemporary city will have noticed that our decisions are no longer informed entirely, or even predominantly, by our physical surroundings. The quality which now conditions choice and action belongs primarily to the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that lies roughly between 3 MHz and 64 GHz: the domain of microwave transmissions, mobile telephony, and WiFi networks.

If you doubt the claim to determinism here, you need go no further than the nearest busy sidewalk to garner evidence in its favor. Note how many of the people you see are quite literally receiving instructions from the aether. How many of them are turning at this corner because that’s what Google’s walking directions specified? How many are following some gradient of ostensible hipness dictated by a social-location service? And how many are about to step heedlessly into traffic, because they’re more present in the nonplace of their phone conversation than they are in the onrushing here and now?

Watch what happens at any subway entrance, any time a train comes in, as passengers emerge from the signal-free purgatory of the underground and immediately reestablish their presence on the network. Observe the behavior of workers leaving an office building at the end of the day, as they say their goodbyes to their colleagues and don headsets for the journey home.

Now compare what you see to William H. Whyte’s classic time-and-motion studies of the Midtown Manhattan of the 1980s, collected in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Spend even a few minutes watching Whyte’s video — you can find it on Vimeo, if you’re so inclined, stream it to your phone as you walk down the street — and you cannot help but notice how differently people once lived the city, and not so very long ago.

Before pulling the dense shroud of connectivity over ourselves and our cities, people used to be co-present, at least in potential. They were available to one another, in ways we’ve largely ceased to be, and it shaped their microbehavior in ten thousand unconscious ways, from the things they carried to the way they held their bodies and moved through space. We’re very close here to William Gibson’s observation that “some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.”

If you still doubt the thesis, you can simply pay close attention to the people headed back into the subway. In my talks, I very often tell the story of something I saw in Hong Kong over ten years ago now: a series of young women moving briskly through the turnstiles of the MTR, swinging their handbags in the air with balletic grace as they did so.

What were they doing? They were using the system’s RFID-equipped Octopus farecards — using them brilliantly and intuitively, but in a way that system’s architects had never foreseen.

These architects most likely imagined that people would use their cards in the conventional manner, by tapping the card neatly against a turnstile-mounted reader. At some point soon after the system’s introduction, however, one or another canny passenger obviously figured out that they didn’t have to do this: because the reader was powerful enough to acquire and read an antenna tens of centimeters away, even through layers of fabric, they could leave the card wherever it was most convenient for them, and never have to fish it out at all.

The result wasn’t merely the elegant gesture I’d seen enacted time and again. Because the elaborate interaction between card and turnstile, turnstile and database, database and barrier had been compressed into the third of a second it might take someone to swing their handbag through a reader field, each one of the women I’d seen was able to move through the process of fare collection and into the subway without breaking her normal walking pace. And this, in turn, markedly improved the number of passengers the station could accommodate in a given period of time, what traffic-analysis engineers call “throughput.”

There turns out to be a surprisingly close coupling between parameters of a system’s technical operation and the kinds of behavior that arise in response to it, as I learned when I related this anecdote in the course of a talk I gave in Tokyo a year or so later. During the Q&A session, someone in the audience pointed out that one of that city’s major public transit systems, JR East, also offered its customers an RFID-based smartcard, called Suica…and yet he’d never seen women in Tokyo making the handbag gesture I’d described. And he asked the obvious question: Why not?

I had to confess that I didn’t know. As it turned out, though, someone in the audience that day did. As she explained it, the designers of the Suica system, acting out of concern over the long-term health implications of radio-frequency fields for human users, had deliberately lowered the power of their readers, and therefore abbreviated their system’s range. No range, no handbag ballet, and an entirely different rhythm at the turnstile.

And here we get to the crux of the issue: in both Hong Kong and Tokyo, the consequences of decisions made by engineers about the properties of a technical system operating in the electromagnetic spectrum cascaded upward not merely to the level at which they could afford or constrain individual behavior, but that at which they affected the macro-level performance of the entire subway system.

Similar things are true at the larger scale of social activity, as well. If “city people are constantly making and ‘unmaking’ places by talking about them,” as geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues, and “[a] network of gossip can elevate one shop to prominence and consign another to oblivion,” how could it not matter that such communication now propagates across the urban fabric at the speed of light? The terms on which this “gossip” is conducted, its persistence and its domain of effect, have all been altered beyond recognition. What people are saying online, how they rate the businesses around them, which social networks the customers of those businesses happen to use — these are the things which now tell.

You don’t have to like what this all implies. Most days I myself do not. But if you care about cities and what people can do with them, you do need to understand what’s going on here:

The irritating guy with the popped collar standing next to you at the bar? He paid less for his G&T than you did, because he’s the Mayor of this place on Foursquare, and the management has cannily decreed Mayors get a 5% discount. Ten minutes from now, the place is going to fill up with his equally annoying buddies, absolutely ruining your hope of a quiet drink. And they’re going to show up not because he did so much as call them to tell them where he’d be, but because he’s got things set so his Foursquare account automatically posts to his Facebook page. Buddies of his that don’t even use Foursquare will come, to slouch at the bar, stab at their phones and try and figure out where the party’s going next.

You’ll settle up and leave, miffed, and ease on down the road a spell to a place you know where you can get a decent bowl of penne — nothing special, but good and hearty and cheap, and you’ll chase it with the big bouncy house red, and all will be well and right with the world. Except the Italian place is gone, gone because it racked up too many nasty reviews on Yelp, or somebody Googlebombed its listing, or its hundred healthcode violations made it positively radioactive on Everyblock.

Two years from now, these names will most likely be different. But the point will remain: if the technologies these services are built on are opaque to you, if you don’t know what they are and how they work, you’ll never have the foggiest clue why things shook out the way they did. Your evening will have a completely different shape and texture than what it would have prior to their advent. You’ll have been tossed this way and that by gusts and squalls blowing in a parallel dimension, whose sole physical trace is modulations of a signal imperceptible to the human sensorium.

Of course, you could just as easily argue that your evening out would have been inflected in all sorts of delightful ways by these prevailing winds. Either way, though: inflected it will be. The trouble is that these effects, which do so much to shape the experience of the contemporary urban environment, are produced by a series of institutional and individual actors with relatively little feel for the unique complications of that environment.

Put bluntly, engineers aren’t paid to care about high-quality urban experiences. They’re given a series of constraints — physical, technical and economic — and within these constraints they are responsible for devising an optimal solution. Requiring that the solution they arrive at be something that underwrites a congenial, humane environment is not generally among the criteria they are issued.

Worse, designers of informatic systems have tended to treat the ground on which their systems take effect as what Deleuze called “any-space-whatever”: an abstract, generic, unconditioned space at degree zero, containing infinite potentials for connection. But as more sensitive observers — I think of writers like Paul Dourish and Malcolm McCullough — take pains to point out, this can never be so. Space is always some particular space, technical systems are always given meaning by being situated in a specific locale and human community.

Meanwhile, the urbanists that might have supplied technologists with vital corrective insight have tended to be far from the cutting edge of technical development, in their turn unfamiliar with the impact of things like mobile phone use on cities and their users. As urbanist discourse has embraced ideas like transit-oriented development, traffic calming and urban wetlands, it has lacked any account of the ways in which the behavior of people in cities has changed over the past quarter-century, largely due to the influence of the technologies we’ve discussed. All of these things, to be sure, are entirely laudable ends to work toward…but none of them does a damn thing to respond to the novel circumstances we now find ourselves in, as residents and users of cities.

What we need now, acutely, is a generation of technologists who understand the texture and nuance of city life, and, in parallel, a generation of urbanists with some nous for the technologies that now do so much to shape that life. Perhaps together, they can offer us a third and unifying lens, a lens through which the city of stones and the city as lived can be seen to be one and the same place.

» The past few weeks have seen some interesting and welcome developments on Urbanflow Chicago, including a departure of one of the parties that had been proposed to deliver the hardware on which Urbanflow would be running.

If I don’t sound particularly concerned about this, it’s because I’m not. We’ve always conceived of Urbanflow as a service, and while I don’t think it would be correct to describe that service as entirely agnostic to the hardware and software on which it’s instantiated, we’ve certainly done our level best to keep its options open and varied.

Too, we were having a hard time imagining how we were going to achieve ultralow-latency interactions, and the other measures we regard as benchmarks of acceptably good user experience, on the thin client we’d previously been handed. I have enormous faith in J.D.’s development chops, and in the team’s ability to provide him with maximally elegant components, e.g. memory-parsimonious colorways for map tiles, which becomes significant for a city the size of Chicago. But wresting high performance from a single-core, Celeron-based machine with no onboard graphics acceleration, no local storage, and, charitably, an idiosyncratic implementation of WebKit? What I’m saying is that I don’t doubt our capacity for wizardry, but there are certainly less stressful ways of doing things.

The proposed replacement is based on Android, and relatively speaking, it’s a much friendlier platform. We have, at least, a much easier time seeing how we’re going to get to the kinds of interactions that meet our expectations. So this latest turn is actually quite welcome. Nor, for that matter, would I regard the few weeks we’d lived with the Celeron box as wasted effort. We all refined techniques that allowed us to do more with less, tutored ourselves in the sleight of hand necessary to make the clunky processes underlying interaction at least feel elegant.

It turned out, also, to be relatively easy to port that work to iOS, where Mayo, Leah and J.D. continue to add refinements and nice touches to the interface. This provides us with a very, very helpful interactive sketchpad on which to work out Transitflow UI ideas. (This is the work that was responsible for my first genuine frisson of what it’s going to feel like when we can interact with public objects by tapping on representations of them.)

There have been other developments on the project as well, including the prospect of working closely with two of our favorite design organizations, but more detail on that count will sadly have to wait for a moment at which we can speak freely. (That’s actually my least favorite thing about weeknotes, the occasional necessity of being opaque in describing something we’re really excited by.)

» We’re turning up a deeper issue in our work, regarding who maintains municipal geographic data, and especially which parties maintain such data with the quality of representation and specific attributes necessary to support robust automated routing.

If I can judge fairly from what drifts across our field of vision, it would appear that cities are by and large getting out of this game. They’re no longer allocating resources to producing maps of their own terrain, because they believe Google or Navteq can do it better and cheaper.

This is really where all that neoliberal rhetoric about government sticking to its ostensible “core competencies,” and “getting out of the way of enterprise,” comes home to roost, because at the end of the day those critical assets are owned by concerns who get to determine exactly who can do what with them, and how. The city winds up acquiring map data of its own streets, alleys and sidewalks under a license that permits use for any internal purpose whatsoever, but explicitly forbids its incorporation in public-facing services.

This is why Open Street Map is so important to us and to our work. We don’t believe any municipality should ever be beholden to an outside party for something as basic as a representation of its own terrain. There’s a great deal more to say about this issue, but it’s becoming pivotal to our entire practice, and will therefore get an entire post of its own in the relatively near future.

» I’m delighted to say we’re closing in on finishing the first of the collaborations with Dentsu London we’d mutually announced last March, this one a primer on the effective use of urban screens for information, entertainment, and advertising. This is something I’ve been cowriting with Dentsu’s Chris Heathcote for the better part of a year, and it’s nice to finally be getting to a place with it where near-term release feels like a real prospect.

» The most wonderful thing about the break was that it afforded me (just a little) time to read and think. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking, particularly, about how we conceive of the things we encounter in the world. Are they best described as “objects”? “Events”? “Actors”? “Becomings”?

As academic as it may seem, the question of how to conceptualize the things that exist and how they relate to each other is directly relevant to our work. As designers, I believe we’re obligated to take things seriously, to respect them in their particularity, haecceity, “thisness.” For example, it’s unsatisfying to me when I hear someone discussing the implications for some given environment of installing “an interactive touchscreen.” You wonder if they mean an IR, resistive, capacitive, or projective-capacitive screen, because each of these technologies has discrete consequences for what people can do with and on the surface of a screen, how those people stand in relation to one another, what happens when they move their finger this way and not that. This line of thinking is nothing if not concrete, and it probably doesn’t seem that strange to you that someone in our position would approach the world this way.

But here we stumble. Inasmuch as I believe we ought to be “taking things seriously,” I also believe that nothing achieves its effects in isolation — and this is particularly true of the things we do at Urbanscale. Whether we’re trying to deliver a new kind of stored-value card, an urban-screen interface, an iOS application, or something else, it invariably does work in the world by virtue of being bound up in a technosocial assemblage, an actor-network that yokes these objects with others in a mesh of relation. And these meshes aren’t necessarily homogeneous — in fact, they’re almost certainly woven of the most heterogenous things, operating in a variety or registers, at a multiplicity of scales: technical standards, material qualities, bodies of law and regulation, the physical affordances of the human body.

And wait! We’ve got still another problem, because this focus on things doesn’t seem to account for process, for the flux or continuous unfolding that sure seems to characterize our universe. It also has a hard time with things that transcend ordinary scales of human perception in time, space, or both. Some things belonging to this latter category turn out to be pretty important to our practice — cities, for example.

Maybe this is accounted for by Tim Morton’s notion of “hyperobjects.” These are things that “far outlast most human time scales, or [are] massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience.” That certainly sounds like a reasonable description of a city to me, of that way a city has of absconding from whatever description you try to capture it with. It seems to capture the sense of pulsating, inchoate, protean Londonness, Newyorkness, or Seoulness I experience when I’m in, or think about, these places.

But that, in turn, seems like nothing but process to me, and — as I understand them, anyway — Morton and his peers among the object-oriented thinkers would deny there is any such thing. Someone with a strong object-oriented perspective would argue that the senses of elapse and duration we experience are illusions, that time is nothing but an interpretation of the differential state of the objects we perceive. Accept this perspective, and it folds back onto the design of user experiences in an entirely different way than the process-oriented Deleuzian or De Landan way of constructing the phenomenal world I’m more used to.

This is the furthest thing from abstraction for me. Anybody who sets out to design things and (“therefore”) achieve a set of given effects in the world, it strikes me, certainly ought to have at least some account of these things and the way one imagines they do their work.

Thanks to Anil Bawa-Cavia for pointing me at The Prince and the Wolf, a transcript of Graham Harman’s 2008 conversation with Bruno Latour at the LSE. This and Harman’s book on Latour, Prince of Networks, are the first things I’m reading in my attempt to reconcile the objects of object-oriented ontology with Latour’s actors, which endeavor is what sparked all of the above in the first place. (If anyone’s interested in forming a reading and discussion group around these and related issues, by the way, please do let me know.)

» Logistics: We’re all here and all cranking, ahead of next week’s jaunte to Madrid for a client workshop. Come see us at Temple Bar for our first FRIDAYS AT 7 of 2012 — and bring some cash, ’cause this is the one and only place you’ll be able to pick up your Urbanscale Year One t-shirt, in the fashionable Johnny Cash colorway. Friday, then?

• Inspired by the final delivery of the two prototype card units and base station in their cozy Pelican case, we’re forging ahead with the PERRY video. We shot the last bits of guerrilla footage earlier in the week; now Mayo gets into some After Effects work, and Nurri disappears into the editing suite to bind it all together.
• We printed a stack of Year One t-shirts roughly resembling this. (The actual shirts feature the legend much more prominently, and in black; we’ll get shots up for your perusal as soon as we have them in our hot little hands.) This first run we’ll be selling for cash at FRIDAYS AT 7, touring-band-style, every week until they’re gone. If you want one, better come see us at Temple Bar.

• Congratulations to our friends at Superflux, whose Song of the Machine won Postscape’s award for Best Design Fiction 2011! In this, they handily routed the video that Nordkapp produced to showcase Urbanflow Helsinki; I must say, if we’re going to be beaten that badly, I’d just as soon it be by Anab and company.

It’s also true that I was a little uneasy with framing our video as “design fiction” in the first place, given the effort we’ve all made to bring Urbanflow to life. But as our friend Deb Chachra points out, that’s the risk we all run when the same phrase is used to denote everything from “the front porch of ‘we just haven’t built it yet’ to the distant reaches of ‘not possible with known science’.”

• Elsewise, the week’s been dominated by J.D.’s efforts to get the Urbanflow Chicago demo running on an iPad, primarily for ease of portability, and conversations about graphic conventions for small screens we’ve been having with Ryan Sullivan. We’ve been putting out some fires in the background, as well, mostly of the sort that predictably crop up any time you set your hand to something that’s never been attempted before.

That’s about it for now. The crew scatters to the four winds next week, but I’ll be back with a yearend retrospective. We’ll see you then, yes?

This was my experience of the first annual Smart City Expo and World Congress, held at Barcelona’s yawning Fira conference center week before last. I don’t know if you can quite tell from the thumbnail image that accompanies this weeknote, but what was given to me at check-in was an access-control credential, not a conference badge.

What’s the difference? Well, let’s see. A conference badge generally displays one’s name and affiliation prominently and legibly — which admittedly leads to that ugly, awkward scan people do when they’re trying to figure out if you’re someone worth talking to, but does at least afford recognition and identification. It may feature a friendly picture of the wearer. And if the wearer happens to possess some other special status relevant to one’s attendance at the event — sponsor, say, or vendor, or speaker — that status may be reflected in the color of the badge or the badge holder, for the utility and convenience of everyone involved.

An access-control credential, by contrast, is not primarily intended to be a human-readable document. Its most prominent line of copy is the name of the issuing institution. It may list the wearer’s name military-style (“LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME”), or bear some incomprehensible alphanumeric string that presumably relates to the permissions held by that person. Ultimately, of course, anything imprinted on its surface is secondary to the functioning of the RFID tag laminated within.

Why do I go into all this detail, about what is surely the most trivial aspect of any large event? Because I think it’s telling. I think it’s a give-away that goes directly to this conference’s unspoken conception of the relationship between people and technology.

In claiming to establish “the new international benchmark in the field of intelligent cities,” the event somehow forgot to devote any particular attention to the needs or claims of the people living in those cities. Time and time again, the audience was treated to (empirically ungrounded) assertions that deploying advanced information technologies would render urban areas more manageable, that new heights of efficiency could be realized, that even the most intractable issues would yield to sufficient application of sensors, or data visualization, or predictive analytics.

This tendency was particularly acute at the session I participated in — a panel ostensibly dedicated to discussion of “Living and People,” and including representatives of IBM, Siemens, and Endesa, and a former mayor of Barcelona. Typical of the rhetoric on offer was that of IBM’s Anne Altman, whose recitation of The Benefits of Smart was so juiceless and dutiful that even she seemed not entirely convinced by it. She talked up a case study featuring the century-old water mains of Washington D.C., where severe issues with leaks and low pressure were apparently brought under control by IBM’s spackling them with flow-rate sensors and other instrumentation.

Put aside, for a second, the thought that this little anecdote would have been more appropriate to a panel about infrastructure. What made me angry was the unchallenged mendacity of it. Here we have the capital city of the entity that claims to be the planet’s sole remaining superpower, beset with public works so critically degraded that the entire region’s quality of life is endangered, and the heroic “win” you’re claiming involves a few dozen flow meters?

Fine, you’re proud of your sensor technology. See if you can’t come up with an instrument capable of sensing why Americans won’t invest in the basic lineaments of functioning cities anymore. You want to place your technology at the service of Living and People? See if you can’t use it to foreground and enable the conversations that obviously and urgently need to happen, rather than slapping a Hello Kitty Band-Aid on a festering staph infection.

You can call IBM’s decision pragmatism, or good sound business sense, or impressive engineering, or you can call it cowardice. My beef with the panel, ultimately, was that nobody on stage called it anything at all. No contestation. No expansion. No discussion. Here in a place which aimed “to put together the most comprehensive possible program,” and to “inspire debate on the different issues raised” in that program, nobody said boo.

Do I sound angry? I am angry. I’m not sure what the value is in events like this, to be honest. When the stage is so packed with “speakers of recognized prestige and representatives of the…most innovative Smart City initiatives around the world” that there’s no time in the session to engage any of the issues that were raised, when the whole thing amounts to little more than high-profile Buzzword Bingo, it’s hard for me to see how it’s possible for the audience to learn anything beyond what they might have gleaned from a brochure.

The whole thing would more forthrightly have been pitched as purely a trade show, without any pretense at intellectual engagement. In fact, it’s very rapidly becoming evident to me that “the smart city” does not refer to any general conception of the circumstances arising where information technology intersects the urban environment, but is rather a very specific discourse within that larger field of inquiry. To be precise, it’s a discourse about the instrumentation and quantification of municipal processes, specifically for ease and efficiency of management.

That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s so very partial and limited a conception of things. As we’ve pointed out many times before, it’s a point of view that virtually excludes any conception of the citizen as anything other than an object to be acted upon. It turns its back on by far the greater part of the potential bound up in these technologies.

None of this is to say that there wasn’t a critical perspective being offered at the event. Though never anything less than cognizant of the irony inherent in this position being represented by Americans on a European stage, I was terribly, terribly proud to have presented alongside a contingent of engaged New Yorkers that included Jake Barton, Laura Forlano, Anthony Townsend and Sarah Williams. When I did hear some refreshingly grounded or politically conscious or simply humane words from the stage, the chances were very good indeed that it was one of these folks speaking.

My advice to the event organizers? Seriously, if there’s going to be a “next time,” please do leave some space for conversation. Organize smaller panels, and fewer of them. Insist on a more tightly curated selection of speakers. Aim for the cogent, rather than the “comprehensive.” (Since I know the whole point of the event is to fill the Fira Gran Via venue, I’m not even going to bother arguing what I truly believe, which is that the event would have been infinitely more congenial in a central-city location. Hospitalet is not Barcelona.)

And for god’s sake, try and scare up some conference badges that let me know who it is that I’m speaking to.

- Logistics: We’re getting into that space of time where decisions are deferred, and though we’ll be in and out of the studio, nothing meaningful is likely to happen on the client side until after the New Year. Unlike the past few weeks, if you happen to be in NYC, it’s not such a bad time to swing by and say hi.

» The big news of the week was a trifle harder to take: we learned that our Farevalue cards — better known to most of you as Project PERRY — will not be patentable after all. Apparently, a patent that had not yet been awarded at the time of our initial patentability search surfaced when we undertook a second round of due diligence, and the method it claims protection for is entirely coextensive with the PERRY/Farevalue innovations.

While we invested a nontrivial amount of time, effort and money in trying to develop this idea and bring it to market, and are now in a position where we have no choice but to write all of that off, I remain terribly, terribly proud of what we were able to accomplish. I want to extend heartfelt thanks to Benedetta Piantella and Justin Downs of GROUNDlab, coil man Todd Bailey and our own Mayo Nissen and Jeff Kirsch for everything I learned in the course of this adventure. As well, they and you have my commitment that if there exists a way in the possibility space we’re confronted with for us to recoup our investment and bring Farevalue to market, we’ll find it.

» A quick meta comment on the above. The moment we heard from our lawyer that our patent application for PERRY was likely to be rejected — and that the wisest thing for us to do would be to withdraw it — my first instinct was to share this information with you.

In part, this instinct arises from a deep belief in the value of transparency as a way to demystify some of the otherwise obscure processes that attend tech startups and early-stage creative practices of all types. It’s a direct analogue to the open-source software development we also believe in: we want you to be able to reverse-engineer our work, glean whatever insight you can from it, and apply those gleanings to your own efforts. Our desire is to furnish observers with the most accurate record of our activities that’s consistent with client confidentiality, and that record would have little value if it was nothing more than a recitation of triumphs.

But there’s another reason to be forthright about our stumbles and setbacks, which is to push back a little against the relentless pressure that exists in our culture to always present oneself (and by extension, one’s organization) as on-message, serenely omnicompetent, and moving only and ever in a forward direction.

In the case of design firms, this pathological fear of appearing fallible is most likely a transfer from the culture of large-scale, publicly-held concerns, their obsession with “enhancing shareholder value” and their not entirely irrational dread of litigation at the slightest managerial misstep. But it’s clearly also a dynamic that exists in society at large, where Facebook tutors us in the ongoing presentation of self, and brutal economic conditions force each of us to position ourselves at all times as a plausible candidate for any opportunity that might arise. The invariably smooth and placid surfaces that get presented to the world contrast mightily with an interiority we know to be roiling with complication, in the case of individuals and institutions both.

It’s this disconnect that I diagnose as one root cause behind the awful concept videos (and, indeed, awful concepts!) foisted on the world by so many design organizations. These are always narratives of just-so success, in a blandly efficient world purged of all difficulty, contestation and human frailty.

My argument is that we properly ought to consider these videos a subgenre of dystopia, and the body of thought they grow out of a vision of hell. They’re like glamour shots of supermodels Photoshopped to meet some invidious and unachievable notion of perfection, and don’t think for a moment they don’t set up similar expectations. Our world, by contrast, is one where everything does not happen to be perfect all the time, and that includes this disappointment with Farevalue. I simply don’t think we can legitimately claim to design for the real world if we’re not prepared to live in it, alongside everyone else.

» Despite all that, great things did happen to transpire in the studio this week and last, specifically on Urbanflow Chicago. I can’t say very much about it at the moment, unfortunately, but I am blown away by what Mayo, Jeff, Leah and J.D. achieved, almost all of it while I was out of town. (There’s probably a lesson there.)

The long and short of it is that we have a functional prototype up and running on the very limited thin client we were handed just before Thanksgiving, including the base cartography, local service search and discovery, wayfinding and multimodal journey planning. More detail, including screen shots, is forthcoming as soon as we’re able to share it with you, but take it from me: the achievement of getting an acceptably and meaningfully robust subset of the Urbanflow functionality up on this hardware is significant.

» Behold the provisional design of our Year One t-shirts! There are a few tweaks left before we ship these, but do let us know if you think you’ll be inclined to order one, so we know roughly how many to make. You can have it in any colorway you want, as long as it’s black-on-black.

» Logistics: We’re all in the studio all week, polishing the Chicago work for a Friday decision gate. It’s probably not the very best time to swing by unannounced. See you next week.