Lots to manage this week, amidst our on-the-fly reconfiguration of the company and its offerings.

» 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.

This is one of the more difficult weeknotes I’ve had to write — but they can’t all be good news, now can they?

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.

Week 56 finds all of Urbanscale back on NY time and in the studio, at least until Adam departs for DC on Thursday. As ever, we’ve got our hands in many pots this week.

» 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.
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» Looming over the internet this week has been the debate about and protest against SOPA/PIPA, and a wider discussion about copyright, censorship, and state control – or, if you prefer, corporate control – over a network that spans nation states and legal jurisdictions. The two bills currently before the US Congress, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the US Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US House of Representatives, threaten free speech, hamper innovation and increase insecurity on the web. We hope you’ll join us in opposing this dangerous legislation. Find out more here.

» 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.
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First off, welcome to our newly-redesigned site! Jeff and Mayo have spent the past several weeks putting everything in place atop a foundation built for us by our friends Kristin Gräfe and Marcus Schaefer, with Jeff pushing through last weekend for a soft launch Sunday evening.

» 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.

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