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Links

From Open Source Urbanism

A place for relevant external links. Please annotate and categorise!

Contents

General Research

  • Situated Technologies - Homepage of the initiative between The Architectural League of New York, Centre For Virtual Architecture and Institute of Distributed Creativity, led by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz and Mark Shepard.
  • Locatative Media course at Buffalo. Good intro text, but like the one above, very handset focussed. The future can't be about handsets, it just can't.
  • Maps could be the next internet. Dunno how relevant, but definitely interesting.
"maps as navigational tools for the physical traversal of space are supplanted by intelligent maps for navigating a contemporary space in which the physical becomes a layer of data in a global informational space (…) Much of this world is invisible and it is the task of the designer to help us understand it.“
  • Polite Pertinent and Pretty - presentation by Matt Jones (Dopplr), Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse) on location-aware devices and what you can learn about your habits from using systems like Nike+ and Flickr etc.
“I believe that cities are all about difficulty. They’re about waiting: for the bus, for the light to change, for your order of Chinese take-out to be ready. [etc.] ... with our networked, ambient, pervasive informatic technology, we now have (or think we have) the means to address some of these frustrations.... So you don’t head out to the bus stop until the bus stop tells you a bus is a minute away, and you don’t walk down the street where more than some threshold number of muggings happen ... all these decisions are made possible because networked informatics have effectively rendered the obscure and the hidden transparent to inquiry. And there’s no doubt that life is thusly made just that little bit better. But there’s a cost - there’s always a cost. Serendipity, solitude, anonymity, most of what we now recognize as the makings of urban savoir faire: it all goes by the wayside. And yes, we’re richer and safer and maybe even happier with the advent of the services and systems I’m so interested in, but by the same token we’re that much poorer for the loss of these intangibles. It’s a complicated trade-off, and I believe in most places it’s one we’re making without really examining what’s at stake."

I found this quote really interesting in regards to our project because we're proposing use the same (or similar) technology to enhance this savoir faire, not destroy it.

Psychogeography and related practices

  • Conflux, an annual New York based festival for contemporary psychogeography; "...the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice".
  • You Are Not Here. An art project that overlays the map of one city onto the terrain of another, producing a new "walk" where the experience of another city is carried out. eg, you can walk through Baghdad in NYC, or through Gaza in Tel Aviv.

Forming a 'Public'

About Open Source

About Urbanism

  • Cyburbia. Collaborative wiki and forum for discussing Urban Planning.

Open Data

Linked Data

Data Collections

  • pachube. Community tagging and sharing of realtime data.
  • Sense Networks. "Indexing the real world using location data for predictive analytics". Real time data collection and aggregation, a private company with "for common good" principles. Developed the Citysense project.

Open Museum Data

  • Mashed Museum. Collaborative space for discussing open museum practices.
  • Open Objects. Blog focused on user-centred open online museum collections.

Human Interfacing

Existing Projects

  • Momo! the cutest little GPS navigator.
  • ReCode, a community-based group examining how city regulations can support rather than inhibit creative and sustainable living.

Interactive Walls

Temporary Architecture and Public Spaces

  • N55. Mobile event based architecture.

Data Collection

Data Usage

People and practices

  • Dan Hill - Lots of good stuff on Dan's blog.
  • ENESS- Melbourne's own super-gurus.
  • MIT's John Maeda- the digital thinker, writer and maker. Also see his books 'Design by Numbers', 'Maeda@Media', 'Creative Code' & 'The Laws of Simplicity'.
  • Emergent. Ex-Coop Himmelblau guys. Despite the name, the work is fairly heavily authored as opposed to emergent.
  • Scripted by Purpose exhibition. Pulls together a whole lot of practices interested in computational design.
  • Mr Watson Ubiquitous computing blog by a grad student at the Bartlett.
  • placekraft. "interdisciplinary research" from Chicago "studying: tactical urbanism, speculative cartography, ephemeral/vernacular architecture, and itinerant practices". Now dormant.
  • Leapfroglog. Interaction design. Mobility, sociality and play. This post is about emergent play in public space.

Grants, Projects & Conferences etc

Bikes

  • Jon Faine ABC segment comparing cyclists travel times with cars.
  • Wearable Workshop with a coat for cyclists that displays cyclists speed via 'warp speed' style lights.

GPS mapping, tracking and hacking

  • Nokia SportsTracker Beta - This is super awesome and rad. Save GPS and time data straight from your phone (if you have gps), export to google earth, or to gpx, it creates graphs, has social-networky functions, and you can even upload photos taken on your trip and it will locate them on your path based on the timestamp! They are also looking for new applications beyond visualising training data (see last entry in FAQ). RH.
  • Gofinder - seemingly very intrusive GPS mobile phone tracking service.
  • Enkin - a prototype mapping interface that sits somewhere between the map and the territory.

GPS & Bikes

"Gordon Price, in his recent PriceTags PDF on Velib’, noted the possibilities for informing urban planning that Velib’ affords: “”Imagine the patterns and lessons to be found as the system learns more and more about how it is being used - a transportation and urban planner’s dream.”
  • Michal Migurski describing the GPS mapping for his project cabspotting: "With Cabspotting, we made an early decision to ditch the base map and show just the trails of each taxi. This bought us a lot of wiggle room, since the GPS trails don't match up to the roads very well and would have looked terrible." Good to think about for when we map our tracks.

Software

Grasshopper (Explicit History) for Rhino

Can be used to process data sets from text files or excel to create parametric-ish models.

Processing

  • Processing is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) designed for visual outputs. Processing is based on the Java programming language and does not have a visual programming environment. It is however specifically designed to get non-programmers started with programming and has a large user base. Processing is released under a GNU General Public License and is free to download and use. Processing is available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
  • OpenProcessing a community site for visual artist to share code and show their work.

Max MSP etc.

  • Max/MSP and Jitter by Cycling 74 are visual programming environments designed for audio and video manipulation and particularly suited to live performance. They will run under Mac OSX and Windows, they are not free but a 30 day demo version is available.
  • vvvv is similar to Max/MSP - Jitter. It is also tailored to realtime video and audio manipulation. vvvv is free for non-commercial use. It is only available for the Windows environment.
  • Pure Data (or Pd) is a graphical programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works. It is particularly suited to realtime audio manipulation. Pd is released under an open source licence and is free to download and use. Pd will run under Mac OSX and Windows.

Web Apps

  • Pachube - Online environmental data sensing sharing platform by Haque.
  • Google Maps API Reference - We could use this to visualise the data from the existing bike counters & maybe even for GPS tracking.

Social Networks

  • Ning social network creator.

Screen Scraping

QR Codes

  • velcro backed QR Code patches available for purchase. Each code contains a unique URL for a swiss website p8t.ch. The URL can be set up to redirect visitors to other web locations, google map locations, youtube videos, etc. The patch creator is John Young.
  • Semapedia is a project for connecting physical objects and places to relevant Wikipedia articles. An example can be found here.
  • Telstra's QR site qrious.com.au where Telstra attempts to rename QR Codes as "Telstra Mobile Codes" and does it's best to make QR Codes seem like a Telstra only item. It is possible that Telstra is making it's QR Codes so that they only function on the Telstra network but I haven't looked into this (it's not like Telstra to lock out the competition, is it?).

Point&Find

Hardware References

Electronics

  • Jaycar Local electronics supplier.

Arduino

Resources

  • Processing is the language used to program Arduinos.
  • Tom Igoe = another nerdy guru and author friend of Dan. Check out his book 'Making Things Talk'.

Suppliers

  • Freeduino products compatible with the Arduino.

Projects

  • Ladyada's Arduino Tutorial. Really detailed, goes from initial setup to simple projects with screen grabs or photos of every step.
  • Todbot blog by Tod E. Kurt. This guy has made some sweet components for the Arduino platform, like this Wiimote adaptor for the Nintendo Wii remote (which is basically an input device with X, Y & Z accellerometers built in).
  • ThingM. Cool components for Arduino. The BlinkM looks especially useful.

Emergence References

  • John Frazer, 'An Evolutionary Architecture', AA Publications, 1995. Out of print, but downloadable as .pdfs from here. The seminal book on architectural design as a computer-driven biological evolutionary process.
  • Aaron Betsky (author) & Erik Adigard (graphic design), 'Architecture Must Burn: A manifesto for architecture beyond building', Thames and Hudson, 1999?
  • Steven Johnson, "Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains and software", 2001. Great introduction to this field, a must read. Steven Johnson's blog
  • Steven Wolfram, "A New Kind of Science", (online version here). A massive tome of examples of cellular automata and everything else to do with the emergent behaviour of simple programs.
  • Mike Silver (ed.), 'AD: Programming Cultures', Vol 76, no 4, Wiley Academy. Includes an article by pioneering programming philosopher Malcolm McCullough, reflecting on the developments in programming for design over the last 20 years.
  • Helen Castle, 'Emergence in Architecture', AA Files 50, Spring 2004. A good overview of the applications of this thinking in architecture.
  • EMTEC at the Architecture Association. Led by Michael Hensel, Achim Menges & Michael Weinstock.
  • The Science of Surprise - complexity and the insurance industry. An interesting article on the use of emergence theory.
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