Print shop used by Colleen for Open IxD 2011.

"The Urban Design Group started with the approach that unless you involve the real estate developers, the city will continue to be built without any thought towards urban design whatsoever."

YET MORE 2010 CENSUS LINKS

Once, a city was divided in two parts. One part became the Good Half, the other part the Bad Half.

At its simplest, OASIS is an online interactive map that visualizes information about open space and land use in New York City. Oasisnyc.net now delivers mapped data about transit, land use, buildings, combined sewer overflows, historical imagery, zoning districts and more.

More NYC 2010 Census maps

Pols crying to the press after census numbers for 2010 are released

Topographies & Tales is about the relationship between people, language, identity and place, revealing personal stories against the larger picture of how our concept of space and environment is shaped by “belonging” and “nationhood”, and how boundaries, barriers and borders come to be formed.

"When I think of what holds back cities, I don't think about, say, the farm fields of Iowa or the shale gas regions of rural Pennsylvania and New York. What I do think of is suburbia, and the way U.S. cities have been structured for half a century around the car -- specifically, around moving people via private transportation pods through a web of low-density suburbs that surround cities, on publicly funded roads."

The word charrette may refer to any collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem. While the structure of a charrette varies, depending on the design problem and the individuals in the group, charrettes often take place in multiple sessions in which the group divides into sub-groups.

Location services, space-time, and the importance of "soon" + near-future.

"Location is a matter of routine... These patterns are worn into our personal maps of the city, and usually it’s the **exceptions to it** that we record, or share – a special excursion, or perhaps a unexpected diversion – pleasant or otherwise that we want to broadcast for companionship, or assistance."

Suicidator City Generator is a Python script for Blender.

With it, you can automatically create entire, three-dimensional modern cities in a matter of seconds by adjusting various parameters, such as city size and complexity, rather than creating each building, each street, and each texture manually.

The Arduino microcontroller is a malleable tool used in art and design. Started as an educational prototyping tool it contiues to expand due to the thriving community and open source nature. Because open source initiatives allow for modification, derivatives, and sharing of intellectual property, artists and designers can evolve new Arduino-based microcontrollers specified to their work.

In a study conducted in 1969, Donald Appleyard provided the first emperical evidence of the impact of traffic on neighborhood streets. In particular, he investigated 3 different streets in San Francisco that were chosen to be as identical as possible in every dimension except for one - the amount of traffic on each street. The study was able to show that just the mere presence of cars, with their implied aspects of danger, noise and pollution, crushes the quality of life in neighborhoods.

Profile of the guy who architects the user experience at Microsoft Bing Maps

The streets of downtown Los Angeles have a different dream. They do not lead to the cardinal points of the compass but to the uncertain spaces in between. Ambiguity is written on our landscape.

oh my god there is a Voronoi wiki

I wanted to generate interesting game maps that weren’t constrained to be realistic, and I wanted to try some techniques I hadn’t tried before. I usually make tile maps but this time I decided to make polygonal maps. Instead of 1,000,000 tiles, what could I do with 1,000 polygons? I think the distinct player-recognizable areas might be useful for gameplay: locations of towns, places to quest, territory to conquer or settle, pathfinding waypoints, difficulty zones, etc.

The article is called Depth of field: discursive design research through film written by Timo Arnall and Einar Sneve Martinussen. It is about the role of film in interaction and product design research, and the use of film in exploring and explaining emerging technologies.

or all three days of PAX 2010, The Witness was publicly playable by anyone who came by the booth. However, it was unmarked and unattended, so it was easy to miss (as many people did).

Invisible Cities maps information from one realm—online social networks—to another: an immersive, three dimensional space. In doing so, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical urban environment. The interplay between the aggregate and the real-time recreates the kind of dynamics present within the physical world, where the city is both a vessel for and a product of human activity. It is ultimately a parallel city of intersections, discovery, and memory, and a medium for experiencing the physical environment anew.

"Don't forget the bigger picture".

Of the three official milestones in Ph.D. school--qualifying exams, thesis proposal and thesis defense--the trickiest is the thesis proposal.

Protocol Architecture was pitched as a team that "investigates potentials for future design through the creation and analysis of hyper-fictional documents. These document sets create evidence for future scenarios that string together a specific history of political, social, and technological developments."

"As more and more digital fabrication machines have been created their overall cost has gone down dramatically. This is affecting our ability as designers to build more robots. "

In 2010, anyway, this is my own personal vision of informatic technology at the service of the full range of human desire and complexity. Not a word of it is intended as a “solution” to what are inevitably and correctly local social or political challenges…but it is intended to give people everywhere better tools with which to join such struggles.

i can't get enough of these here voronoi drawings!

In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a special kind of decomposition of a metric space determined by distances to a specified discrete set of objects in the space, e.g., by a discrete set of points.

For Growing A Hidden Architecture, Christian Kerrigan proposed an awe-inspiring series of contraptions—collars, tourniquets, hinges, corsets, and belts—that could be attached to still-growing trees, thus bending and shaping their growth into a functioning, sea-ready ship.

"For those of you unfamiliar with the Myst series of video games, the basic designs of much of the architecture and machinery within the worlds explored are very much in the mould of Steampunk. And I figure it'd be really cool to be able to design a modern house with that stylistic idea in mind."

If we look at the functions of architecture with respect to games, however, some are meaningful and some are not. Weather, the primary reason for constructing most of the buildings in the world, is irrelevant. If it exists in games at all, it's usually cosmetic. Privacy, too, is normally immaterial -- most games don't let you take your clothes off anyway.

If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

Traverse Me is a map drawn by walking across campus with a GPS device to invite the viewer to see a different landscape to that which surrounds them. It questions the possibilities of where they are and inspires a personal reading of their movements and explorations of the campus.

Detailing the massive amount of work put into the branding, materials, and environment of Facebook's f8 conference.

EXPO 2010 – We are All Transistors
The Graduate Showcase for the MA Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice course at Goldsmiths, University of London.

"I decided to take a ride out to visit the Candela Structures on Flushing Bay.

The Candelas are two fiberglass prefab shells that sit at the World’s Fair Marina, just north of the Mets’ new stadium. These relics of the 1964/5 World’s Fair were designed by architect and industrial designer Peter Schladermundt."

A story about an unusual building and the places it may take you.

We should be thinking of all the things we can to make ourselves more watchable. And, for me, one of those things, is to engage physically with our materials - our presentation, our slides. We should be performing PowerPoint not just showing it. You ought to be able to buy a PowerPoint Hero controller that gets you engaged the way a Guitar Hero controller does.

Wouldn't it be great to link any object that direct to a 'video memory' or an article of text describing its history or background?

Historypin asks the public to dig out, upload and pin their own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the Historypin map. Uniquely, Historypin lets you layer old images onto modern Street View scenes, giving a series of peaks into the past.

The Hand Drawn Map Association (HDMA) is an ongoing archive of user submitted maps and other interesting diagrams created by hand.

Malcolm McCullough is the author of Abstracting Craft (1996), Digital Ground (2004), and Ambient Commons (someday...). He has lectured widely on urban computing and place-based interaction design. He teaches architecture and information design at the University of Michigan.

Alex Kauffmann's Master's thesis at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program: alternative paywalls.

The Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track of their original intentions.

Development Seed is a unique mix of a strategic consultancy and an open source product development company. As you can see from some of our past projects, we specialize in implementing technology projects for large international development organizations and leading open source research and development initiatives.

MapBox is a suite of open source tools for creating custom maps in Amazon's cloud infrastructure.

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) obtained elevation data on a near-global scale to generate the most complete high-resolution digital topographic database of Earth. SRTM consisted of a specially modified radar system that flew onboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour during an 11-day mission in February of 2000.

In a nutshell the project is about exploring visual relationships in Regents Park and this application is exploratory work for an intervention to amplify vistas across the main pond.

This post, then, is a first sketch of what a lesson plan for teaching Processing and data visualization might look like. I’m going to start from scratch, work through some examples, and (hopefully) make some interesting stuff.

Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online.

In the previous entry I wrote about an unsuccessful submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale Australian pavilion. As I noted, it grew out of an earlier internal ideas competition at Arup Sydney, in which I produced a set of 14 super-short stories, each pertaining to describe a particular Australian city of the future.

The 2010 O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference - Put Location Awareness to Work

Jeremy Hight is a Los Angeles-based scholar, artist and educator. He is the author of numerous essays on locative media, narrative and augmented reality. I responded at length to his recent essay Writing Within the Map and as evidenced by the transcript below, Jeremy and I have been chatting back and forth for the last few weeks. The following conversation touches on space, media and some of Jeremy's earlier projects.

Why not be able to search a place for its stories, its poetry, and its metaphors and why not be able to select what you desire as well as be able to create such things specifically for this place itself?

We launched driving directions for India in April this year. Today we are taking this a step further with the launch of landmarks in driving directions.

So, when I think of the iPad, I wonder if a new opportunity will exist for interactive applications, which will find a space somewhere between a computer and the TV. They'll need to do more than convey information, as most ordinary websites do. They'll need to be more user-driven than television but they'll need to integrate all forms of media. iPhone apps certainly look more like simple CD-ROM apps than they do websites.