I like the idea of an Automated Teller Machine that functions as a message board…

BURGER KING studio is part art gallery, part think tank. It’s a social laboratory that features the work of local artists in an interactive and engaging studio space. BURGER KING® and cutting edge artists take our “HAVE IT YOUR WAY®” spirit out of our restaurants and into the world.

Strolling in Obama land (Chitown), I came across this interesting experiment. So I created my T-shirt :) with original drawings by Blütt:

Blütt is a Chicago artist who tends to create messy backgrounds with his own bold, unique characters lurking on them. For this, he generally uses spray paint, ink, watercolors, wood, canvases and anything else he can dig up. On the street, he usually uses stickers and posters. When he’s not being anti-social and scribbling on something, he’s walking dogs and falling off bicycles.

No comment.

Conversation with my friend Laura Forlano, who recently graduated from Columbia University (Bravo Doctor!). Laura presented her work at the AOIR2008 conference, and attended EPIC2008.

Laura Forlano is a visiting fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and holds a PhD in Communications at Columbia University. As an adjunct faculty member, she teaches Design in Everyday Experience, Design and Management, and Sustainable Design in the Design and Management department at Parsons the New School for Design. Forlano serves as a board member of NYCwireless, a non-profit organization that promotes the deployment of free, public WiFi networks, and the New York City Computer Human Interaction Association (NYCCHI). In her receiver contribution, Forlano shares some of the key findings of her research into the communities that form around WiFi hotspots and the emerging mobile work practices of “Generation Mesh”.

Laura studied the new work culture, people that go work at Starbuck to be with surrounded with people… She published a short article in the Vodafone Receiver, Generation Mesh:

The phrase “anytime, anywhere” – grabbed from the pages of magazine advertisements for software and mobile phones – has come to signify both freedom and mobility and, at the same time, the need to be constantly tethered to a mobile phone or wireless device. But, “anytime, anywhere” is the lingua franca of a homogeneous, globalized “space of flows” rather than a meaningful “space of place” as Spanish urban planner Manuel Castells has theorized.

Dan Fost quoted her February 20, 2008 in the NYTimes :) Read the article: They’re Working on their Own, Just Side by Side:

“Even people who are antisocial feel a need to be around other people for at least part of the day while they’re working,” said Laura Forlano, a visiting fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who has studied people working in communal offices and cafes.

The interaction designer Anab Jain, who came for the EPIC conference, and who I have met in Tokyo at the Ubicomp2005 conference was wearing a wonderful RFID flower…

Cornell University at Ithaca college will get a new transportation system… with podcars.

A podcar is:

A car-sized vehicle without a driver, that runs on rail. The system is built on a network of high beams. The vehicle arrives when you press a button - like an elevator - and then takes you to the adress you have ordered.

Watch a movie about… “the transportation of the future”… (Screenshot below):

Podcars are not new:

There has been podcar ideas already since the 1900th century but the first real podcar concept is considered to be developed in 1953. Donn Fichter, a US town planner started research in alternative transportation methods. In 1964 he published a book called “Individualized Automated Transit in the City”. There he suggested an automised transport system for areas with middle high or low population density.

During the 60s, analyses and trials were made from authorities and instituttions in USA, France and Japan. The first real – and today still functioning! – podcar project was realized in Morgantown, West Virginia, and was ready 1975. In today´s modern eyes it can appear a little bulky and has not got the flexibility that the podcar concept nowadays implicate. It has however been running without any real problems since the start and managed to transport several millions of passengers.

For more information about Morgantown, West Virginia, Personal Rapid Transit – PRT – hyperlink here:

The Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system is one of five automated urban “people mover” systems that have been built in the United States since the late 1970s. (The others are in Detroit, Michigan; Irving, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; and Miami, Florida.) It is operated by West Virginia University, and connects the university’s Evansdale and Downtown Campuses with downtown Morgantown. It is a single line, 3.6 miles long, with five stations. The section from Walnut St. (downtown Morgantown) to the Engineering station opened in 1975; the rest of the line opened in 1979.

And finally a picture:

Argh… I am being scold by my nike+ mini!!

I have just created my mini motivator…

Your Mini is a version of you that lives on Nike+. But they’re not just a cute face. They’re your best training partner – because they’ll show you how well you’re doing by mirroring your training activity. So if you keep busy pounding the pavement your Mini will be happy and full of bounce. If you drag your feet and miss your training, they’ll look all sad and sorry – and you don’t want that, do you?

Your Nike+ Mini will keep you on track for all your training goals. You can even create a widget for your Facebook page that lets your network know how your training is going.

Strolling in Copenhagen this weekend, I came across the Collectivity Project by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. The Collectivity Project is Eliasson’s contribution to U-Turn, Copenhagen’s festival for contemporary art. It was great to observe the way in which kids of all ages were interacting with the piece:

“Thousands of white LEGO bricks - potential buildings - will be piled on a tables shaped after an aerial view of Copenhagen. The visitors can move freely between the tables, which each represent one of Copenhagen’s various neighborhoods, and are free to contribute with visionary, humorous or completely unrealistic proposals - come re-build the city of Copenhagen at the city’s most central location!”

Why am I blogging this? Saying that you wanted to do architecture because you played with LEGO bricks was certainly not an entrance ticket to any school. But looking at some of the creation (Above) makes you think about architecture and standardization, curtain walls, prefabrication… Neo-nomads do navigate in standardized and regulated places…

“The company’s system reads an anonymous identifier that mobile phones transmit and can then track their movements [Demo here].

The approach will be useful for research, security and improving services in environments ranging from train stations to refugee camps.

[…] Mobiles are assigned a temporary anonymous number by the network called a temporary mobile subscriber identity, or TMSI, which the phone periodically transmits to advise of its location. As the phone moves through the different regions served by different base stations, that number changes. Path Intelligence’s approach, called FootPath, directly detects that TMSI transmission from phones. No access to the mobile networks themselves is necessary, so the information that they glean is specific to a user, but completely anonymous.

[…] It has been approached by humanitarian workers in refugee camps, where a lack of central planning means it is often difficult to site services such as clinics where they can be best used.
The system will also be useful for researching the layout of, for example, train stations”

BBC article: mobile tracking reveals spending. Wednesday, 8 October 2008, UK

Airoots is developing 12 principles for an architecture of participation, “based on an analysis of the success of the legendary open-source operating system Linux”:

1. NEED IT: Necessity is the mother of invention. What do you need, as an individual and as a community? It is not for master planners to guess what people need. Stakeholders should speak up.

2. GET IT: No need to reinvent the wheel again. Lets find what works elsewhere and adapt to the local/present needs and then expand it.

3. DO IT: You don’t really understand the problem until after you start implementing the solutions. It doesn’t have to be an all out “redevelopment”, we can start small and gradually build knowledge and best practices. This will develop the social and cultural capital of the community.

4. BE OPEN: With the right attitude, interesting (and unexpected) issues will come up and make the plan & development better.

5. SHARE: Do not feel proprietary about the plan. Or rather, let other people feel proprietary about it as well. The common goal is to have the best/optimal solution for all.

6. CONTRIBUTE: Residents should be co-planners and co-developers. The concerned population is the biggest asset for and of planners.

7. COMMUNICATE: The plan should be publicly accessible to all concerned parties at all times. Updates should be frequent so everyone has access to the latest information and can react immediately. Say what you have to say and listen to what other people have to say and immediately incorporate it. It can always be modified/adjusted along the way.

8. CONVENE: If we have enough people looking at different aspects of the plan, any issue can be recognized and addressed quickly. Finding the issues is the biggest challenge. Once identified, someone will have an idea about how to solve the problem.

9. INCLUDE: Finding an efficient way to get everyone’s input is more important than the inputs themselves. A lot of time and attention should be spent to cultivate the community’s active participation.

10. ACKNOWLEDGE: If participants are treated as the most valuable resource of the plan, they will become the most valuable resource of the plan. Contributions should be acknowledged and valued.

11. PROCESS: We should strive to activate the collective intelligence of a community, which also means processing, selecting and incorporating good inputs into the plan. This may or may not be the task of a sub-group of people acting on behalf of, and accountable to, all stakeholders.

12. BE CRITICAL: Realizing that our concepts are wrong might lead to the most striking and innovative solutions.