An interesting article in The New York Times: Log In Your measurements, and your clothes may fit, by BOB Tedeschi | Published: March 12, 2007. I read:

So why not have a Web site where users can provide their basic body dimensions and style preferences, then see all the available clothing that would fit well and suit their taste? It is an idea so obvious that one wonders why it isn’t an established part of online shopping already: merchandise returns would drop, customers might well be happier and the Web site would earn a commission for every sale.

The article elaborates on the initiative of myShape (the image above is a screen shot taken from their website), and the need for body scanners “saving them [people] the trouble of measuring themselves.” This is what Intellifit does.

Mr. Charpentier, [the founder of Intellifit], who led the design team for the original Commodore 64 computer in the early 1980s, said Intellifit would install a scanner at Newark Liberty Airport and at Baltimore/Washington airport in the next three months.

Even after getting the measurements of consumers, apparel-matching services like Intellifit and myShape face challenges. Clothing manufacturers can be reluctant to take the precise measurements of their clothes and send them along.

I observe how these technologies affect spaces. I asked many times : “How would you design a library taking into account that every book will be digitized in few years time?” This above is another example of technology that has an impact onto space, as the need for road infrastructure, and storage spaces multiplies with online shopping (Steve Woolgar, ed., Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); pp. 1-22). Is architecture disappearing or just transforming our cities in an coagulation of storage spaces?

The article raises other questions: today’s mobilities are paradoxical: we are immobile shopping online while increasing the mobility of “PIGs”, People, Information and Goods as François Ascher, author of La Société Hypermoderne, says. Intellifit locate machines at airports, obviously linking technology to mobility… or maybe to surveillance…

It is about time… now it is Spring Break, to present the work in progress of the Digital + Mobilities seminar that I am teaching at Wentworth Institute of Technology.

I have assigned students to ‘reload’ the Freedom Trail, Boston’s chief touristic attraction. The site of the Freedom Trail Foundation says that:

The Freedom Trail is a 2.5 mile red-brick walking trail that leads you to 16 nationally significant historic sites, every one an authentic American treasure.

The aim was to give students the opportunity to think the relationship between technology and the urban environment, and tangibly engage it. Students will produce an ethNOMOgraphy (an ethnography on the move, adapted to the world of mobility) of the Freedom Trail by taking pictures, interviewing users, and research the history of the Freedom Trail so to find important moments in time and space. They will examine the Freedom Trail, map it, find a real estate for the 2D code, examine reactions, propose a design involving POP(s), People, Objects and Places altogether…

A good start to tackle the assignment was to dwell into the idea of mapping. What does mapping mean in the age of the gaming industry (D.S. mentioned the adventure book)? Conversations about paths, and trails, sparkled some thinking about walking in a field of hypertexts… So what are the ways, past and contemporary, to circulate in the city? Already A.W. discovered that:

The Freedom Trail isn’t Paul Revere’s ride. It’s just a collection of places that placed a role in the American Revolution.

To open students to different methodologies, I have invited Jie-Eun Hwang, currently finishing her Doctor of Design thesis (Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2007) to speak about her research, the Heuristic Nolli Map, and the e-Lens project she collaborated to, a project that has fully been implemented in Barcelona.

Introducing the Heuristic Nolli Map project, Jie-Eun writes:

This research explored the computational way representing perception of an urban setting to address communicative rationality in the urban design process. The complex nature of an urban project provokes huge demands on common understandings between diverse actors and disciplines. One of the key problems is the lack of common representation caused by the different process and skill interpreting an urban space.

The Digital + Mobilities class has opted for DiMo as the general title of the Freedom Trail inquiries :) Here is project DiMo’s blog!

I have organized the links in my blog roll column under the title of the seminar: Digital + Mobilities. Below is an example of a map, produced by Terry, showing the overlap between the bike trail and the Freedom Trail:

A meeting with Matt Gross from ulocate, and Amir Rosenberg from connexto played a role in framing the deliverable: students will create a website and post their design concept and proposal, some of it will be consultable though mobile phones with an Internet connection. Amir gave a demo of his 2D codes to the students.

I am rather familiar with 2D codes. The post My Body is a Hypertext fostered a rather interesting comments-based dialogue between Jerôme Chevillat from smoothplanet and Dennis Hettema, from shotcode. It is always useful to understand the difference between codes. As Jerôme then said:

There are some differences between a shotcode and a semacode, one of them is the business model. While shotcode people charged on a per click basis, semacode will be (or is) licensed for commercial use. This makes the second one a favorite on the market .

In a recent conversation I had with Jerôme, he added that:

Solutions like connexto are too proprietor; the algorithms of coding and decoding are known of them only; they close the market when distributing their solutions. QR (Quick Response) codes are on the contrary public domain.

In terms of what to choose however, some images can be very convincing. For ample information, read Rudy’s posts: Denim-code: Tag My Jeans and Proximity Marketing.

From an academic and applied research point of view, all 2D codes have an impact on space and foster inspiring investigations of territoriality, virtual or physical.

A student had added a layer of information to the panel that identifies the space beyond the entrance door of the Wentworth Institute of Technology Architecture Department. Clever. Something else struck me: the fact that the 2D code was added below the Braille code (“another way to write”) intended for the blind. It made me think about how visual our culture is. Could we make a code for the blind?

Timely enough, I receive a copy of the MIT Technology Review magazine, courtesy of MIT when you graduate from the institution (I should go digital!) to read about the work of David Murphy and Markus Kähäri, one of the 10 emerging technologies of 2007. Read the article online: Hyperlinking Reality via Phones…

A Nokia research project could one day make it easier to navigate the real world by superimposing virtual information on an image of your surroundings. The new software, called Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA), is designed to identify objects viewed on the screen of a camera phone.

blurred
replicant
but Wii?

Students (architecture department) at Wentworth Institute of Technology taking an online test…

There was a test run previous to the day of the actual test: students had to log in, answer a question that read more or less like this: “Do you think you are the best student at Wenworth?” They score 100 points when answering “Yes”. No comment.

The trial tested if students could log in… but it did not go further than that: on the day of the test, many had problems seeing the images that were complementing the questions, a problem which could have been prevented.

The cool thing though is that students would get a random questionnaire… questions were shuffled or different, so none had the exact same test. Maybe this did prevent cheating. Someone had to check that they closed IM and iTunes (though the computer is theirs… even when standing behind them, which I remember it being rather uncomfortable, professors cannot see every click) and had to stay in the room while students were taking the test.

The test was 1 hour and 20 minutes long. Students could take it as many time as they wanted to, though only the first finished test counted. They received their grade right after completing the test. Automation greatly cuts down on the time professors spend grading, though preparing the test takes a little bit longer… and failing technologies, or panicking students not seing an image can greatly augment their involvement.