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How does a city perform during a special event? At the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory we have developed a new technique to answer this question and applied it to an analysis of Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day in Washington, DC on January 20, 2009. This new project, unveiled today and entitled Obama | One People, offers an unprecedented view of the social activities surrounding the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States.
The Disseny Hub Barcelona (aka the Design Museum Barcelona) opened this week with the exhibition Turisme: espais de ficció (Tourism: spaces of fiction), which explores the reality of the tourism industry and of the designers that plan it. The exhibition features a new urban demo developed by the MIT Senseable City Lab called Los Ojos Del Mundo (The World’s Eyes), led by Fabien Girardin and in collaboration with David Lu, which explores Spain through the eyes of the thousands of visitors that paid homage to the country in 2007.
A short video on the Future of Connected and Sustainable Cities. Produced by Arup’s London innovation team, in conjunction with Cisco.
Thanks to Fabien Girardin for signalling this!
This Monday, after the roundtable on real-time cities, Adam Greenfield took the lead of the group with a formidable talk titled “The city is here for you to use – urban form and experience in the age of ambient informatics”.
Here are the notes I took during his talk.
On Monday, April 14 I joined a round table on real-time cities organized by the SENSEable City Lab and Fabien Girardin. The meeting started with a presentation of our lab our latest works. Then Fabien kick started the discussion, going over the concept of real-time cities and underlining that there is a need to raise awareness of the multiple issues that are inherent of the design of real-time cities.
The ‘real-time city,’ in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously, has arrived.
–Anthony Townsend
Pulsing cloud of data, instantaneous information, seamlessness integration, empowerment of the citizens, enhancement of our perception, reveal the city as we experience it, patterns of behavior, observe and improve.
–Fabien Girardin
Following are my notes from the 3-hour long discussion.
David Orban is the cofounder (together with Leandro Agro’ and Roberto Ostinelli) and chief evangelist of OpenSpime, a new technology startup that was born to accept the challenge proposed by Bruce Sterling of creating spimes, a new class of sensors that project in space and time (thus spimes) and enable individuals as well as businesses and institutions to sense, track, and understand the environment around us. OpenSpimes are GPS-enabled sensors that are aware of their environment and that allow to collect ambient data thourgh the use of open APIs and protocols.
I had the pleasure to meet David two weeks ago in San Diego, during the ETech 2008 (see my previous post). In that occasion, he briefly interviewed me about the New York Talk Exchange project that I presented at ETech on behalf of the Senseable City Lab, and he then published the video on YouTube. So here it is:
Today in a MIT CSAIL seminar, Dr. Ramachandran Ramjee presented his ongoing research on smartphone-based monitoring of traffic and roads conditions. The research is motivated by a need to go beyond GPS-based monitoring which proved to be ineffective in complex environments like those of developing countries. These environments (R.R. showed a video of an intersection in Bangalore, India) are characterized by an heterogeneous mix of vehicles, fatigued road pavement, liberal honking, continuous stop-and-go traffic, and so fore.
I just got back from San Diego, where I attended the ETech 2008 and presented the brand new New York Talk Exchange project, and I would like to offer my insider round up of the best of the best of the conference.
This year the focus was on “the brand new tech that’s tweaking how we are seen as individuals, how we choose to channel and divert our energy and attention, and what influences our perspective on the world around us.” In other words the eye was on the alpha geeks, as Tim O’Reilly calls them, who are working on ideas that are still in a early development phase, far from the publicity of the mainstream media and blogs but that will truly change our lives when they (or we) will hit maturity.
