Reading Thoughts – 2/10

Urban probes: encountering our emerging urban atmospheres
by Eric Paulos and Tom Jenkins (2005)

After collaborating on two Instruction Sets for Strangers projects in my Studio last semester, this reading was another interesting take on Urban Intervention. Urban Probes is the technique the authors introduce – “a lightweight, provocative, intervention methodology designed to rapidly deconstruct urban situations, reveal new opportunities for technology in urban spaces, and guide future long term research in urban computing” (341). Thinking about our next Module, concerning Environment: Place and Space, I think this technique will be the most useful for quickly implementing a project in the public domain. Already I am buzzing with ideas about where I want to do research and what type of intervention I want to impose. For example, one question this reading inspired was How do people navigate their way out of a subway station? Using the Urban Probes technique, I could pick a subway station and observe people leaving for an hour or so, implement a quick intervention, observe user reactions to that intervention, and then come up with a more developed project to create.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier

I had read excerpts of this book for a project in my Design for this Century recitation section last semester and still find it extremely fascinating to look into the profound effects that technology can have on people’s overall human experience. He makes some interesting points about how human’s self-identification changes with “hive” mindset technologies such as Twitter and Facebook, but I do not necessarily think this change is negative. Societal changes have always been a factor in how we self-identify, from the Great Depression to war to the color television set. Why should we be scared that the interwebs are affecting us more than anything else has in the past? Lanier also warns that designers must be careful, for “the consequences of tiny, initially inconsequential decisions often are amplified to become defining, unchangeable rules of our lives,” (9). While Lanier argues that we should be more skeptical of digital technologies than not, I think his overall goal is to empower designers and users to not be trapped by these technologies. We should be smart in our design and uses of digital technologies, but most importantly, we are humans and our total human experience is what defines our lives.

Augmented Space
by Lev Manovich

from Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level

This reading focused on Manovich’s idea of Augmented Space, a sort of combination between Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). The idea is that with the current and ever developing mobile technologies, as well as surveillance tools, designers and artists can create an augmented space that is dynamically updated with real time information of the space and the user. This all reminded me a lot of current AR tools out there. Wayfinder is a mobile application that shows users where the nearest NYC subway station is, depending on their current location. Instead of simply showing users a map of their current location, the app overlays the map data onto their current view. This type of software has a lot of potential to create more dynamic experiences for users.

“The Computer for the 21st Century”
by Mark Weiser

from Scientific American Special Issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks, September, 1991.

The idea of Ubiquitous Computing is already so, umm, ubiquitous. I do not think the average person even realizes how ubiquitous computing is. From automatic sinks in a bathroom, to smart escalators that only function when a person steps on it, to cable boxes that can be set from a mobile smart phone, technology is being implemented everywhere. As a student of design and technology, I am constantly adding tools to my tool belt that would allow me to implement “technology” sort of anywhere. With tools like Arduino or even HTML5/JavaScript, there is so much potential to interweave all aspects of our human experience with technologically smart tools. My only concern for this idea is that we often think, especially as students in this field, that technology should be embedded into everything, without really thinking about the consequences that might have or if the technology enhances the overall experience. We need to be smart about where we implement new technologies and not just implement them for the sake of doing something “cool”.

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