Another massively overbooked few weeks, both in the studio and beyond its walls. I’m coming to feel that our workspace is best understood as a cloud chamber through which we humble particles hurtle — occasionally colliding, and hopefully leaving useful traces of our passing.
- The past month has seen me at Stamen’s Citytracking, Cognitive Cities in Berlin, and Transportation Camp East here in New York City, and I’m even now packing to get on a plane to Austin for SxSW.
I cannot remember an event launching with quite the same buzz as Cognitive Cities — I’d have to reach all the way back to the first Design Engaged, maybe, and that was a very, very different kind of event. The energy in the room wasn’t necessarily about content, or anything else that came from the stage (though Ben Hammersley did a grand job of officiating, and Sami Niemelä, Juha Van t’ Zelfde, Urbagram‘s Anil Bawa-Cavia, Matt Biddulph & holyshit Warren Ellis all dropped science). Nor was it, precisely, something that originated from the audience, however bright their questions were, however generous they were with their acclaim. No, I’d have to locate the source of all this good feeling in the organizers themselves, who simply seemed delighted (and justly so) in what they’d managed to pull off.
And the neat thing was that this delight tangibly permeated every aspect of the proceedings, turning what might have been just-another-conference into the kind of thing you want to follow, and come back to, and watch as it grows. I think we all had a sense that the actual presentations were just scratching the surface, really. But there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as nobody’s pretending to have offered something more comprehensive, and I can’t wait to see where they take this event over the next couple of years.
It strikes me that CogCities sat between Citytracking and TranspoCamp conceptually as well as on the calendar. More than anything else, what I take away from this rapidfire burst of events is the desire to cross-pollinate between these various communities; I’ve had quite a few moments of late where I was sitting through a presentation that would have been improved enormously by an encounter with a perspective not available at that particular event. The open-data folks need to be speaking with the data-visualization people, the architects need to be listening to the mobility planners, the regulators need to understand the implications of new technical potentials…and all of them need to ground their work in the everyday urban experience of getting around and getting by.
I know, of course, that in writing here I’m doing nothing if not preaching to the choir. But it’s worth remembering that the silo still exerts a powerful pull on a great many, conceptually every bit as much as organizationally.
Nothing has recently brought this home to me so much as a TranspoCamp panel I attended on how to tempt people who are currently non-users of public transit onto the buses, trains and trams. The panel organizers, while obviously well-intentioned, seemed to regard this as almost entirely an information problem: if only people had access to better maps, or timetables, or directions to the nearest bus stop, they’d naturally become riders on the spot, because public transit is self-evidently and transcendently a better, more rational way of getting around. (Trust me, I’m only barely caricaturing their position.)
To me, this epitomizes silo thinking. Yes. Yes, of course there needs to be excellence in the design of the constellation of informational resources around public transit, at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. But I have trouble seeing that as anything but table stakes. A more correct — certainly a more useful — approach to the problem would mean understanding the concerns, fears, conceptions of self and (yes) prejudices that keep people from seeing themselves as “the kind of people who ride the bus.”
It would mean asking what a region intends to get out of its investment in transit services, what the different communities that make up a place need from their mobility networks. It would even mean asking, as John Geraci recently did, if maybe there are some trips that shouldn’t be taken.
An information designer can’t help resolve these dimensions of the challenge, except perhaps by providing decision-support materials. (I don’t mean to minimize the utility of that kind of input, either.) As Jane Jacobs argues in the final chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, questions like this are richly braided tangles of interinfluential (f)actors all enfolded in a given envelope of space and time — and no one design discipline can resolve the tangle alone. To coin a phrase, it takes a village. (Though surely not this one.)
From our perspective, the frustration and the opportunity both reside in the fact that the village barely exists, or is at least barely conscious of itself as such. But then, maybe that’s what events like these are all about: making introductions, illuminating connections, preparing the way.
OK. I want to extend my gratitude to the Stamens, Igor, Johannes and Peter at Third Wave Berlin, and Nick, Frank, Jeff and Janetti at OpenPlans. Thanks to you all, and the investments you made in my ongoing comfort and convenience, it’s been a superbly invigorating month.
- After Berlin, Nurri and I headed up to Helsinki so I could spend a few days with our partners at Nordkapp. I can rarely, if ever, recall being so excited about a project as I am about Urbanflow, the “operating system for cities” we’re working on together. Sami, Tia and Kate at Nordkapp have put an awful lot of hard effort into imagining what this would look like from the perspective of someone standing in front of a situated screen; now we work backward from that and figure out how the same information is perceived by someone holding a mobile phone or a tablet. And how that information gets into the system to begin with. And all the thousand other questions that sheet off of a mockup, the answers to which form the kernel of a service architecture and a business.
That’s the fun part, the daunting part, the part I suspect we’ll be working on for most of the next year. Never fear, you’ll be hearing and seeing plenty more about it.
- SxSW is, aside from an opportunity to stay at the beloved San Jose, a chance to talk about about science fiction and the urban imaginary.
I’ve got high hopes for the discussion, though if we are being entirely frank I’m also a little concerned that my conception of “science fiction” (Ballard, Brunner, Delaney, Children of Men, District 9) may not wash with an audience that’s been primed to expect, um, Star Wars and the like. I have nothing to say about the latter.
Igor says he’s going to rock Soviet-film-of-the-mid-70s discourse, though, so I’m letting myself be reassured on that point. And if anyone mentions flying cars, well…that’s when I’ll reach for my revolver.
- Far and away the thing we’re proudest of at the moment: we’ve learned that Mayo’s City Tickets is going to be in “Talk To Me,” Paola Antonelli’s latest mega-show at MoMA. Mayo is even now preparing a NYC-specific version of the project, which means learning the particular grain of the Muni Meter, its affordances and constraints. I’m just unbelievably stoked by this, and you should drop Mayo a line and congratulate him.
That’s about it for now. MN’s in (and out of) the studio all week, working with Nurri on the Project PERRY video in addition to his own work on City Tickets NYC. And like I said, if you need me, I’ll be poolside at the San Jose with a plastic cup of Shiner and some good salty edamame.
