"Adam Greenfield of Urbanscale, LLC discusses the many technologies used to collect and convey information around public spaces, and the ethical issues underlying them, as well as a proposal for how technologies could be better harnessed for the public good. Jeffrey Schnapp of the Metalab moderates.

The Hyperpublic symposium brings together computer scientists, ethnographers, architects, historians, artists and legal scholars to discuss how design influences privacy and public space, how it shapes and is shaped by human behavior and experience, and how it can cultivate norms such as tolerance and diversity."

"Adam Greenfield, head of design director at Nokia, talks about the emotional aspects of living in a networked city. What happens when the choices of action in the city are not only physical, but also influenced by an invisible overlay of networked information?"

"In On The Brink we discuss the past, present and future of connectivity with a mix of people including David Rowan, chief editor of Wired UK; Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; and Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of Soundcloud. Each of the interviewees discusses the emerging opportunities being enabled by technology as we enter the Networked Society. Concepts such as borderless opportunities and creativity, new open business models, and today's 'dumb society' are brought up and discussed."

"Imagine: You’re looking at moving to a new part of town, you have a kid, and want to know where the hell you are, in terms of wards, schools, cops, services… So you enter an address, or you smack a button on your phone and you’re served up a whole bunch of information:<br />
<br />
• What’s the neighborhood?<br />
• What ward are you in—who’s the alderman, how do you get in touch?<br />
• What about state districts—who represents this place? Or who’s the US congressperson?<br />
• What’s the police district, and where’s the office?<br />
• What schools does that location feed into, and how are they doing?<br />
• What kind of transportation options are around you (trains, busses, bike routes & racks, etc)<br />
• Where is something green close by (a park, a playlot, a forest preserve, etc)?<br />
• Closest hospital?<br />
<br />
There are plenty of other possibilities, but you get the idea: Give a heads-up display for a place, the vital information for engaging in a location."

"the course also included some reading…we decided that compiling and designing a newspaper with all the reading for the course would be a better route to success. We had a 20-page newspaper printed by…Newspaper Club…The very fact of having a physical artefact, laying around on the desks in the studio, is a constant reminder that there is related reading to be done, and it invites browsing in a way a list of links or open tabs does not. It also has the advantage of being print — there’s much greater control (albeit with commensurately more effort) over presentation, of curating a selection, of removing distractions, no links, of considering what sits next to what. Texts from blogs can sit next to more historical texts, forcing the ideas to bounce and spark off each other. Not to mention, it ends up being a rather nice object to keep around, to glance at or refer to later.<br />
<br />
Find below a list of the content in the newspaper we handed out as a form of shortened reading list."

"Adam Greenfield talks about public space. Bare feet."

"Around the world, urban form and metropolitan experience are being transformed by the presence of networked computation. The urban fabric and discrete elements in it are newly empowered to capture, process, transmit, display and even act on information. At the same time, our daily tactics of doing and being — practices of citying that have remained invisible throughout recorded history, and have generally been lost to that history — are now being rendered explicit and gathered up by that same network.<br />
<br />
Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield of Do projects have run “walkshops” devoted to exploring these transformation and their consequences in cities worldwide. Through the Transformations series, they offer Systems/Layers, a quick guide to running a walkshop for yourself, covering the particulars of choosing a terrain, knowing what to look for, recruiting participants, and promoting your event."

"The city is filled with an invisible landscape of networks that is becoming an interwoven part of daily life. WiFi networks and increasingly sophisticated mobile phones are starting to influence how urban environments are experienced & understood. We want to explore & reveal what the immaterial terrain of WiFi looks like & how it relates to the city.<br />
<br />
This film is about investigating & contextualising WiFi networks through visualisation. It is made by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen, Einar Sneve Martinussen. The film is a continuation of our explorations of intangible phenomena that have implications for design & effect how both products & cities are experienced. Matt Jones has summarised these phenomena as ‘Immaterials’, & uses sociality, data, time & radio as examples. Radio & wireless communication are a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities. This generates what William Mitchell called an ‘electromagnetic terrain’ that is both intricate & invisible, & only…"

[More: http://www.nearfield.org/2011/02/wifi-light-painting AND http://yourban.no/2011/03/07/making-immaterials-light-painting-wifi/ ]

"This is the challenge we've taken up. Urbanscale is a practice committed to applying the toolkit and mindset of interaction design to the specific problems of cities. Through the design of products, services, interfaces and spatial interventions, our work aims to make cities easier to understand, more pleasant to use and more responsive to the desires of their inhabitants and other users. We hope you join us in the coming weeks and years, as we explore the abundant possibilities presented by a world of networked cities and citizens."

Presentation gem from Tom Coates, dConstruct 2010, some beautiful slides that apparently contained equally beautiful animation/video. [See notes from Matthew Culnane: http://www.matthewculnane.co.uk/post/1066001084/visiting-dconstruct-2010 ]

"I've created a public group at Flickr called Sensing the City, so if you have similar photos, do add them there. I'd be interested to see what turns up.

"On May 21st, 2009 the City of Vancouver passed a motion that directed City Staff to begin sharing the data and information the city collects, to share this data in open standards and to place open source on an equal footing with proprietary software.