Mediacity part 2

Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena Jens Geelhaar 路 Frank Eckardt 路 Bernd Rudolf Sabine Zierold 路 Michael Markert (Eds.)

PART 2

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Sensing Digital Identity and Stimulating Digital Co-Presence An Exploration of Digital Identity and the Application of this Concept Via a Virtual Pinboard Eleni Sotiriou, Marco Krechel, Hugo Loureiro, Madhav Kidao, Paul Goodship The Bartlett, UCL eleni.sotiriou.09@ucl.ac.uk, marco.krechel.09@ucl.ac.uk, hugo.loureiro.09@ucl.ac.uk, madhav.kidao.09@ucl.ac.uk, paul.goodship.09@ucl.ac.uk

Abstract This paper illustrates the development and findings of an interactive installation implemented by a team from University College London.

The installation takes the form of a digital pin board allowing users with Bluetooth capability to leave messages for one another within a public domain. Each user represented a specific yet anonymous graphic within the display and as such the aim was for real conversations and relationships to form between individual identities. This paper sets out to reflect on the ubiquitous and pervasive characteristics of the digital layers in contemporary society and analyses the results of one possible application of the Bluetooth technology as a social facilitator. It also draws on our own experiences in the design and trial of a virtual interface and its implications in the local Bluetooth networks.

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Introduction The notion of a digital identity as the digital representation of an individual within a virtual community is not a new one. However, with the increasingly pervasive nature of mobile technologies, as well as the diversity of their applications, the value of this alternate identity is becoming more important as it gets increasingly ingrained within our day to day lives. The mobile phone with incorporated technologies such as GPS and Bluetooth is an essential tool to navigate and communicate with or within different communities, creating a wireless interaction space, which enables the user to transfer data or to communicate with other users in a short range distance using one technology. The wireless interaction spaces are mobile, as they move with the users and can lead to unexpected events. O’Neill et al. defines interaction spaces as “... spaces that are created by designed artefacts. These spaces define the physical boundaries within which the device or artefact is useable.” (O’Neill et al., 1999).

The key for the research was to design an interaction space within a public place to explore the digital identity, created by users of mobile devices.

Therefore we had to implement a tool that would enable us to observe how people understand the digital space and how they use it in order to express themselves, communicate and interact. The aim was to create an installation that would start an interaction process and would give the opportunity to the users to better comprehend not only their digital presence in the hybrid space but also the potential of wireless technologies.

The general tool is wireless Bluetooth (BT) scanning of mobile devices.

The customisable name of an enabled Bluetooth device such as mobiles or notebooks is visualized on a virtual Pin Board that plays the role of a medium to project people’s presence and enable interactions, towards the formation of instantaneous virtual communities.

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In a first step the virtual Pin Board acts as a proactive display as it senses and responds to the physical presence of individuals or groups of people.

In the second step it tries to encourage the attendees to participate, being physically identifiable but due to the use of the technology anonymous, hidden behind the digital identity.

Aims and objectives Our research interests were defined around the following four key points: 1. Access to the interaction space Raise people’s awareness about their digital presence: Are they conscious of their presence in digital communities?

Usefulness of interaction design in a physical and architectural context: Do people realize the full potential of pervasive technologies to their lives?

2. Medium Understanding people’s behaviours in response to a specific application of BT mobile technology: Is it possible to engage people to communicate via digital devices?

Exploring the potentialities of BT technology: How effective is BT technology on promoting interactions?

3. Communication and interaction with others through the installation Can communication (in any form, digital or not) and expression be affected by anonymity? Can it be facilitated if people’s identity is hidden / protected? Do people express themselves more spontaneously?

4. Environment How can the nature of space and different locations in the same space influence or stimulate people’s interactions?

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Background To fully develop these aims and objectives, we looked at past examples of interactive urban installations, specifically focusing on three projects – Gyorol, Loca and txthealing. Each of these projects would enable us to develop the key points from our research interests.

Gyorol (access key) is a user led interaction game where 2D data matrix barcode scanning is used as a key to gain access. This led us to think about the way the public accessed interactive urban installations and how this was achieved successfully (http://gyorol.bascule.co.jp).

Loca (identity) is an artist led interdisciplinary project on mobile media and surveillance, confronting passersby with intimate knowledge, and is mostly controlled via BT. This helped us to reflect on the invasiveness of digital technology and the negative perception the public can have of it, as no one knows who is watching (http://www.loca-lab.org). txthealing (communication) is a performance format that encourages development of dialog through text messaging from mobile phones. It allowed us to consider the positive participation that can emerge within the public when simple and fun interfaces are created with the use of mobile technology. (http://www.txtualhealing.com)

Figure 01. Information received from Bluetooth scanning. This would not only be used to create our interface, but also represent the key points from our research – Access, Identity and Communication

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These three projects allowed us to reflect on the crucial elements of interactive urban installations and helped us create the methodology for our installation.

McDonald et al. summarizes two streams of existing research in the augmentation of physical social spaces: “One stream can be characterized as wearable or handheld technologies that attempt to facilitate interactions between people, between people and computers or between people and artifacts; the other focuses on the use of large displays in shared contexts.”

(McDonald et al. 2008). Our aim was to combine both streams in which the user with his enabled BT device communicates via a large display with other participants by manipulating his mobile settings. As mentioned by Rogers and Rodden most shared display applications require direct, explicit manipulation at or near the display, which may limit people’s willingness to step up and participate (Rogers and Rodden 2003). The virtual Pin Board as a proactive display overcomes this problem by detecting passersby via their enabled Bluetooth devices, projecting their digital identity on a large screen in a public space, starting a possible communication.

Methodology For the methodology, we drew upon the research methods of a similar installation in Bath by a team from University College London (Fatah gen. Schieck et al, 2008). This team set up an interactive urban installation to investigate people’s awareness of their own digital presence and how they responded when encountering this presence. The experiment displayed individuals’ BT usernames on a large projection and encouraged participants to respond by changing their BT usernames. It was an observational study into people’s responses to pervasive technology and MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 333

how it changes the spatial environment and people’s social behaviours.

This demonstrated to us how an installation of this type can greatly change the immediate environment, therefore making micro scale observations – before and during the installation – was very important for developing qualitative research results. This was mostly done with conventional observation techniques and allowed us to continuously develop and refine our experiments. We also similarly looked at differing locations for the installation, in order to gain a greater understanding of the type of location and people needed to encourage interaction with our interface.

By observing past studies like this we were able to build upon their findings and results in order to develop a methodology to study our own aims and objectives.

Therefore, the four underlining metaphors for our project, that were previously discussed – Access, Medium , Communication and Environment – have been developed to formulate a methodology that draws inspiration from past examples.

1. Access Make people aware of their digital presence. It is important to us that the public is aware of their presence in a digital space, therefore allowing them the choice to enter a digital space, or not.

2. Medium Create a semi-controlled installation to understand people’s behaviours in response to pervasive technology. By allowing the installation to be semicontrolled, this allows us to experiment with a variety of communicative methods, giving us a greater understanding of how people engage with pervasive technology.

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3. Communication Create a Virtual PinBoard to enable anonymous communication and exchange of information. This allows participants to engage with a larger community, through ubiquitous technology and a public interface.

4. Environment Develop an understanding of the type of environment that is needed to enable people to engage with pervasive technology. By understanding this type of environment – before and after the installations - at a microscale level, this will enable us to better appreciate the impact this type of technology has on the public.

These four underlining metaphors allowed us to structure our development work and installation to be focused and directed towards our principle aims and objectives. Whilst, they may have regularly been refined, these basic metaphors remain constant throughout the project. Bearing in mind this, the methodological approach to implementing the installation is as follows: a) The technology around which we designed the installation was live BT scanning, which offers an anonymous pervasive technology and gives the chance for live interaction. This technology is embedded into most mobile devices and can be scanned using Cityware software, installed onto a laptop. This scanning will allow an active dialogue to be formulated between participants in a digital space. b) Create a clear and easily understood interface, with simple instructions to illustrate how participants can engage with the interface. This allows participants to illustrate their digital presence and communicate through mobile technology, creating an interface where digital identities can engage publicly with one another.

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c) Run qualitative and quantitative studies of the locations, before and during the experiment, to show how the installation affects space and people’s behaviour. These included systematic observations of activities in the space, 3D and layout sketches of the space, people watching and, photographic and video documentation. This allowed us to develop an understanding of the effects that the installation has on the immediate environment and start to learn how pervasive technology can influence the physical environment, as well as the digital one. d) Develop and test the installation in different environments. This allows different behaviours connected to each time and place to emerge, since it will establish the way different types of people interact with pervasive technology and how a different time and place can greater affect someone’s engagement with this type of technology. e) Promote the installation. Use leaflets to advertise the project and instruct people how to interact with the interface and send automated BT messages to people, repeating the initial question on the interface. This will create a greater awareness of the installation and reinforce the instructions for interacting with it. f ) Test the installation with passive observation, and then test it with a more active participatory promotion of it, to compare and contrast between the two. This is designed to create a greater appreciation of the public’s awareness and willingness to engage with the installation and allows us to better understand the types of scenarios required to entice the public into exploring their digital presence and environment. g) Distribute questionnaires to analyse and understand the results from the installation and collate feedback from participants. This allows us to

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qualitatively and quantitatively understand the public’s response to the installation and to draw conclusion upon their reactions. h) Analyse all data to discuss successes and failures, in relation to the projects aims and objectives. This allowed us to quantify the results and discuss its implementation and future developments.

Revaluate and Redefine Throughout the development stages and after each installation, the methodology and its implementation was revaluated and redefined in order to address problems – both technical and related to its execution - to maintain our principle goals. This would become a very important element in our methodology, as throughout the project there were many unknown elements that could only be established through trial and error. This would include improving the location, enhancing its ease of use, increasing awareness of the installation, and visually enriching the installation, along with many other minor improvements.

By continually revaluating and redefining the installation and its implementation, this gave us the opportunity to constantly refine our aims and objectives and make them clearer and precise. However, whilst these aims and objectives persistently became more refined, the basic principles behind them remained the same, as the metaphors of ‘access’, ‘medium’, ‘communication’ and ‘environment’, would remain a constant guide to the implementation of the project and achieving our principle goals.

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Installation Our main aim was to implement a strategy to get people involved in a procedure that would have as its result the manifestation of the user ID on screen and a chance for communication with other users through that screen. The reactions of people were not predefined and hard-coded to allow the user’s creativity to alter or invent new patterns.

Figure 02. Layout of the virtual PinBoard

A script developed in the Processing Language scans and detects BT enabled phones and laptops. The individual’s device allows access to the local BT network which translates as visualization on a screen. Each participant is represented with a bubble floating on the screen displaying his mac address and the device’s username. The size of the bubbles is customized according to the size of the username. A question is displayed for some time on the same screen, with the intention of triggering some response from the users. The expected interaction would come by people changing their BT usernames, in response to the question. BlueMiner software was also used to send out automated BT messages to inform people of the question.

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Locations / Context We looked at two contrasting locations to answer our objectives and to give us a greater understanding of people’s awareness of pervasive technology.

These two locations, where the installation was implemented, were chosen considering that people would be more willing to socialise. The first one was a student Café, located inside University College London. It is one of the busiest and friendliest cafes in UCL, with a continuous flow of people and a relaxing environment. A Pub in the high street (Tottenham Court Road) was chosen as a second venue, for being as busy as the first one but frequented by working people, customers with very different social/ cultural profile.

Figure 03. Plan of the student café, UCL London indicating the position of the installation - 1st setup

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First Setup The first setup took place on a Friday during lunchtime. The location was the UCL Campus’ café, and particularly a small lounge next to the counter. The place at first looked suitable, because it is visible from some tables around and also, because the installation would attract the attention of people queuing to order. Our predictions proved to be wrong, first because the projection was rather small and could not attract attention immediately. Moreover, the people who queue obstruct the view of those sitting opposite the projection. Every 20 minutes we posed a question on the board and waited for people to give their answers by changing their Bluetooth names. On the board there was also a line of instructions.

Further improvements/refinements After the low interest in our first attempt the main observation was the strong connection between the location and people’s engagement. For the next setup, we had to rethink the location within the café and also, the improvements on the interface: static messages are not easy to read on the spot, therefore we had to keep only the necessary instructions and the question. Also, our passive observation of the installation did not have any effect, therefore, for the next setups the team would employ a more active participation in the process.

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Figure 04. Plan of the student café, UCL London indicating the position of the installation - 2nd setup

Second Setup The second setup took place on a weekday, in the same café during lunchtime. The board was projected on a central wall, between the two entrances, where it would be difficult for people to cross without noticing it. To encourage participation we started leaving our responses on the board. The reaction of the public was significantly improved compared to the first attempt, with a wide variety of different uses emerging, which also shows that the installation has the potential to inspire the public and extract creative behaviours. In order to advertise the project we had put leaflets on the tables, with an explanation and instructions on how to participate. It needs to be mentioned that the board worked better in cases where people were sitting with friends, and it was an opportunity to make fun, tease others or even talk to strangers. Despite the presence of clear instructions, in many cases there were people who didn’t understand how the installation worked and had to be guided through the procedure.

One of the most interesting moments during the setup was when a candidate for the UCLU elections walked in and started advertising himself. He was

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approached and offered the board to communicate with his voters. With his participation, questions related to his campaign started to be displayed on the pin-board which triggered a quick reaction from the public. The candidate’s initial estrangement was gradually replaced by intrigue and astonishment. He started replying to the questions out loud and instigated by curiosity, tried to unveil the anonymity of the BT users in order to give a direct answer in person. We recognised this event as one of the “magic moments” described by Reid, Hull and Cater [2005] as the unexpected moments when physical and virtual collides and coexist in a harmonic and synaesthetic cooperation.

Figure 05. Plan of TCR Bar, Tottenham Court Road London indicating the position of the installation - 3rd setup

Third Setup One of the main observations was the strong connection between the location and the people’s engagement. The next step was to test the installation against a different social environment, to observe the kinds of uses and behaviours arising from different contexts. The second setup took place on a weekday evening, in a local pub. The configuration of the space was not very convenient; however, a big projection wall made the installation visible. Technical issues (the fact that most of the customers 342 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

owned an iPhone) prevented people from participating. Those who did interact did not care about responding in the questions posed, but preferred to leave their own messages on the board, teasing their friends and announcing their celebrations. In some cases, large groups of friends participated through common use of the same phone.

Process of the experiment When the installation was left to run alone, without our active participation, the interaction rates were kept on a low level in contrast to the cases where the team actively engaged in the experiment. Moreover, the advertisement of our project with leaflets and BT text messages during the second and third setups created a dramatic difference compared to the first half setup with people being unaware of the project. As mentioned already, the success was strongly linked to location, and therefore we always tried to find the most prominent spaces that would facilitate engagement.

Also, throughout the experiments, the interface went through a process of refinement in order to make the messages easy to read, keep only the necessary instructions and use questions that would provoke reaction.

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Data Analysis Quantitative analysis The objective of the quantitative analysis is to assess people’s interactions in a bigger picture and measure the success of our experiment through the number of interactions and Bluetooth enabled devices. The following graphs illustrate the most representative moments of the three setups, measured by their higher numbers of participants and degrees of interactivity.

The graph in appendix A clearly reflects the overall results of our first attempt. Judging from the total number of people in the cafe, 36% (15 people) were connected to the local BT network. From these, around 93% were using personalised usernames, suggesting high degree of awareness of their digital ID or BT technology. Interestingly, on that particular moment, only 26% of BT users were actually interacting with the pin-board. Overall, these numbers showed a very small response from the public and certainly did not reflect our expectations. They exposed, nevertheless, some weaknesses of our project, making us rethink about a few aspects of this installation regarding interface, approach and location.

In our second attempt, the installation was better positioned in the cafe, allowing for greater viewing and interaction. Our participation as researchers, was also more active than in previous experiments. This is surely reflected in one of the moments represented by the graph in appendix B, which shows that 61% of the BT users demonstrated some interest in interacting with the pin-board, having their usernames changed in response to the question displayed on screen. Curiously, almost half of these were also performing active communication with other participants.

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The response was rather positive and two additional facts contributed to this outcome. The first is that a greater proportion (41%) of people in the cafe had their BT devices enabled, with 83% of these using personalised usernames and likely to be active users of this technology. The second is related to unexpected public events that happened alongside (i.e. the UCLU candidate event) and close to our experiment that jointly cooperated to an increased interest of the audience. But some issues were also noticed, pointing towards few refinements in our interface (i.e. positioning of elements on the screen) and questions with more engaging subjects.

In our third and last set-up, the main objective was to test the effectiveness of the installation in a different kind of environment and time. Although realised during happy hour, the place chosen was not busy and not many people had their BT devices enabled (33%). But even so, 55% of interaction was achieved from the local BT network. The most interesting aspect comes from a higher percentage of users performing active communication with one another. Probably due to a different profile of audience and particular interest from certain groups of people, this communication consisted of some of these users changing their ID names 6 or 7 times, a much bigger figure if compared with previous experiments.

For most of the experiments one could observe the emergence of different patterns of behaviour. The installation was mainly used to answer the questions posed, most of the times in a provocative way. But many other kinds of communication were created. The pin-board became a way to communicate with other unknown users, play with friends, make jokes, advertising and promoting people and ideas, etc. Also, there were many who changed their names constantly to respond to other users’ replies. The development of different and unexpected behaviours indicated that the openness of the installation may give plenty of room to user’s creativity.

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Questionnaire analysis The questionnaires, distributed during each of our experiments, allowed us to trace a better profile of the general public. The questions were formulated around two of the four key points of this study: access and communication.

From the information collected from the questionnaires, one could realise that the majority of the interviewed people (63%) are conscious of their digital identities being inherently related to the use of BT or other pervasive technologies. Almost the same proportion (69%) believes that this virtual identity can be intrinsically related and effected by our physical presence. Online communities or message boards such as Facebook, Instant Messenger were indicated as the most popular, along with Linkedin, Twitter and Myspace.

Interestingly, among all technologies available on a mobile phone, internet is the most used and, behind Wi-Fi, GPS and email, Bluetooth was the last.

Also, 73% of the people admitted to keep their BT devices off. Compared with the high popularity of BT some years ago, these figures may point towards a descending trend of this technology for the coming years. It might also indicate some actual degree of avoidance from users, given the vulnerability of BT enabled devices to constant or unknown tracking or surveillance.

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Discussion Public Reaction One of the most enlightening aspects of the project was discovering how to successfully gain user participation. Even though a certain level of wariness had been anticipated, as is true with anything new, what had been particularly interesting was how widespread this scepticism was within the general public. Even more surprising however was the complete lack of intrigue that many individuals seemed to possess, even those queuing adjacent to the installation.

The distribution of leaflets and the sending of Bluetooth messages allowed for individuals to learn about the project in more depth, from the comfort of their seats. This subtle method of advertisement was particularly effective especially in grabbing the attention of groups. Groups of friends tended to be the most prominent users rather than individuals. In these situations, any question posed tended to be ignored, and the display was used as more as a means of expressing personal messages to one another, ranging from messages of congratulations to petty mocking. In instances in which more than one group was actively using the installation at a time, private conversations began to emerge between the two, either through rival taunts or as questions and answers.

It was clear from the content of many contributions that the anonymity provided by the Bluetooth username encouraged bolder responses from individual participants. The board acted as a means of temporary graffiti in which any opinion could be displayed to a wider public without the worry of identification. This really came to light during the student body campaign event. The quantity and variety of questions posed illustrated

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a greater and more probing participation than could have normally been expected from the crowd. This success of this incident also emphasised a common response from the users that implantation of the installation as a simple question and answer forum created intrigue, however this was unsustained. Rather its use in conjunction with other events provided greater scope for wider implementation.

From the questionnaires users gave an average rating of 8 out of 10 for the success and interest in the project however only 50% believed that it was useful in its current incarnation, with the other 50% believing it to be a gimmick.

Success and Failures It had been our original aim to create an autonomous installation, however it soon became apparent from our first test, that active participation on our behalf would be required to initially attract users. The use of leaflets and Bluetooth messages to attract users had a significant effect upon the level of participation. They were particularly useful in quelling any anxiety potential users had about connecting their laptops or phones to an unknown medium. Another use of the leaflets was to clearly explain how to participate. From our preliminary testing we discovered that people would often overlook any text on the display in order to gain an overall impression. With this in mind the visual interface was simplified to make it more comprehendible from only a passing view. The position of the projection was changed to feature more prominently in the space, and importantly, in such a way that people would walk across its path.

This instantly drew attention to the presence of the project and, often, subsequent participation.

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Once we were able to consistently attract participants, we discovered a number of other interesting user traits. Notably social context was an important factor in the participation behaviours of individuals. Having tested the installation in both a cafĂŠ and a bar, during lunch and the evening, we noticed that the level and enthusiasm changed. At lunch time the usage tended to be lower especially with workers. Students with a more open schedule had more time to explore the project and would usually do so individually or in small groups. Bars tended to be more effective than cafĂŠs due to the more relaxed and jovial environment. This is particularly true of large groups of office workers in the evening, which tended to embrace the project for their personal amusement.

The unexpected success of the project came with uses of the project that we had not originally anticipated, such as the student election campaigning.

We received additional feedback from other members of the public interested in the commercial applications of the product, especially within corporate and office environments. However to realistically diversify or commercialise the project there are a number of technical issues that need to be resolved.

One surprising issue we came across was with the use of iPhones. To change the Bluetooth username requires a laptop to change the actual phone settings. This obviously excluded any iPhone user instantly from participation. This was a serious problem, as from our tests we observed that on average, roughly 30 - 40% of the population of a location had iPhones. This is not necessarily indicative of the whole population but is still a significant amount.

The use of Bluetooth technology generally however has a number of significant issues in this field. Starting from issues within our project,

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we found that the limited number of characters drastically reduced the potentially contributions from users. This could be argued as promoting concise responses, in a manner similar to Twitter, however most phones only allowed for a maximum of 20 characters, which was often too little.

The actually technology used to detect and obtain Bluetooth information provided us with a great deal of trouble, usually associated with the refresh rate and catchment size. However the greatest issue overall is the actual pervasiveness and use of Bluetooth. From our questionnaires we can see that on average less than a third of the public regularly keep their Bluetooth enabled. In addition most users were unaware of how to change one’s Bluetooth username on their devices. On the whole Bluetooth appeared to be a rather redundant medium in this context with little popularity.

Potential Applications From the questionnaires completed, a number of individuals suggested alternate uses of the project. Due to the diversity of the users, we received wide-ranging suggestions from photo sharing to speed dating. However some of the most popular and most exciting are those that work as an aid to existing events, providing new, anonymous forms of communication.

Of particular interest had been the use in lectures, presentations and conferences, in which an audience could pose their speaker a series of anonymous questions. It encourages those that would ordinarily not speak to participate in the debate. Other noteworthy suggestions were for pub quizzes, market research, product pitches, events listings and as a help point.

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The Wider Context Despite the fact that many aspects of our project had been implemented before for other installations, there is still nothing equivalent that is available commercially; it is not something pervasive in our everyday living. The level of interaction it allows generated an obvious interest and genuine intrigue among the public. The contribution and the importance of the installation can be realised when we consider the importance of social interaction and encounters in the public space of contemporary societies; mobile technologies can make a real difference since they have the ability to change the immediate environment and streamline our communication and interaction in a way that has never been conceived before. This project is a small yet robust attempt to map the way we perceive space (physical and digital) and our existence within it. It manages to use a common, ubiquitous technological means and convert it to the medium that facilitates social encounter and above all communication.

Acknowledgements This project was developed as part of the module: Embedded and Embodied Technologies of the MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation, UCL, London. We acknowledge the contribution of Ava Fatah for her constant guidance, Marilena Skavara, William R. Jackson and Kaiti Papapavlou for the support during the development of the work.

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Appendix

A: Illustration reflecting overall results of 1st setup and reaction to example question

B: Illustration reflecting overall results of 2nd setup nd reaction to example question 352 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

C: Illustration reflecting overall results of 3rd setup and reaction to example question

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References Brignull H., Rogers Y. (2003), “Enticing People to Interact with Large Public Displays in Public Spaces”. Interact Lab, School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton Fatah gen. Schieck, A., Penn, A., O’Neill, E. (2008), “Mapping, sensing and visualising the digital co-presence in the public arena”. In proceedings 9th International Conference on Design & Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning, Leende, NL. pp. 38-58.

Fatah gen. Schieck, A., Palmer, F., Penn, A., O’Neill, E., 2010 (in print), “Sensing, projecting and interpreting digital identity through Bluetooth: from anonymous encounters to social engagement”. In Foth, M., Forlano, L. Gibbs, M., & Satchell, C. (Eds.) From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen, MIT (a book chapter) Fatah gen. Schieck A., Kostakos V., Penn A. (2010) “Exploring Digital Encounters in the Public Arena”. In Willis, K.S., Roussos, G., Chorianopoulos, K.; Struppek, M. (Eds.) Shared Encounters, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany.

Kindberg T., Jones T. (2007)“Merolyn the Phone”: A Study of Bluetooth Naming Practices. In UbiComp 2007, 318- 335. Innsbruck, Austria.

McCarthy J. F. (2007) “The Challenges of Recommending Digital Selves in Physical Spaces”. Proceedings of the 2007 ACM conference on recommender systems Reid J., Hull R., Cater K. , Fleuriot C. (2005), “Magic moments in Situated Mediascapes” International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology Hosio S., Kukka H., Riekki J. (2008), “Leveraging Social Networking Services to Encourage Interaction in Public Space”. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia http://www.loca-lab.org/ http://gyorol.bascule.co.jp/ http://www.txtualhealing.co

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Public Space 2.0 Research Project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Sandrine von Klot space&designstrategies_research University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz (A) Research Project Partner: Institute of Computer Technology, Vienna University of Technology (A) Institute for Architectural Sciences, Vienna University of Technology (A) International Cooperation: SENSEable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Architecture (USA) School of Design, University of Pennsylvania (USA) http://www.strategies-research.ufg.ac.at/public_space/ http://www.strategies-research.ufg.ac.at

Public Space 2.0 “For the designer it’s a shift away from individual user practices to social practices, from discrete software interactions and the software application’s satisfaction of user transactions to talk and communication, which are ongoing and may not be “goal oriented”. Human factors in social media are social factors also. The software’s mediation of interaction and presentation of users through activity and profiles, posts and appeals involves user psychology, imagination, and the mediation of audiences that can sense presence across space and time.”[1]

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In this research project we raise the question whether current social practices in urban public space could possibly benefit from a mutual inducement with vital communication strategies often associated with various social media platforms of ‘Web 2.0’. New technologies evoking long-time changes generate virtual communities and social networks. Users increasingly form up addressing formats such as wikis, weblogs or other applications of the so-called Rich Internet Applications. They manage to make use of new information systems to follow personal agendas. In the near future the same users will not just accumulate new content on the web, stimulated by fast technological developments they will furthermore create individual web services that eventually produce data accustomed to changing requirements.

A strong tendency of constitutive socializing of the web will eventually challenge technology in unexpected ways.[2] Our focus lies on potential improvements of public life through innovative use of design and technology. Built environment serves as territory for intensified research on media visualization. We envision temporal collective spaces to appear and to allow for new kinds of social gatherings.

City inhabitants are anticipated as actors equipped to produce and to share information in the public realm of contemporary urban developments.

Research fields range from concepts of rezoning public media sphere to further developments of interface and wearable electronic design as well as to the re-definition of media use and media surfaces.

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Degrees of Freedom: On What We Do In her book Vita Activa – Vom tätigen Leben, Hannah Arendt (1958) presents three main categories of human activity entitling them as work, production and taking action.[3] While in her understanding, work reassures our ongoing lives as well as the existence of our species, production allows for an artificial world to arise, independent of our human mortality, and it may even counterbalance mortality with something like continuity and duration. Finally taking action - as long as it serves basic needs and the preservation of commonwealth - provides the crucial condition for generations to prolong consistently, for memories to occur and therefore for history to remain. Arendt seeks to reengage possible remaining aspects of choice and inherent dimensions of beauty in modern and postmodern societies. She relates back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle who reflected on optional historic lifestyles of Greek men liberated from any notion of necessity. In this sense, taking action leads beyond temporal states of being, allowing for experiences of beauty as dimensions to produce and share collective identity. Ranging from life as it slowly dissipates as men indulge in and consume the beauty of body related pleasures to a life based on beautiful action still within the boundaries of the Polis, Aristotle finally speaks of the life of a philosopher who manages to remain within a sphere of beauty by means of research and observation of whatever may not pass by.

The presence of others as they see what we see, and as they hear what we hear, reassures us about the actual reality of the world. But then highly developed degrees of intimacy of our private life we are thankful to have since the modern age, and ever since the decline of the Public, were able to increase and enrich our spectrum of subjective feelings and private

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sensations to a maximum degree. By nature, this process of intensification could only emerge at the expense of our trust in the substantiality of our real world, and of our confidence in all those who appear in it.

Hannah Arendt refers to it as a literal expansion of the private, as if people had put a spell on daily life, which in consequence denies the existence of the public realm. This leads almost to an entire cancellation of highly virtuous performances in the life of a society, so in the end delight and magic, rather than virtuosity and significance, may govern the social public atmosphere.

Dissolving the Public as inherently Political Realm Social realm evolved as the inside of the household including all activities, worries, and forms of organization stepped out of the dark of the house, into the bright light of the public political sphere. In doing so, the former distinguishing line between private and public became diffused, the actual terminology of public and private started to become endlessly rededicated beyond recognition as it used to relate to both spheres in the life of each individual - as a private person and as a citizen of a local community. In ancient Greek society, citizens used to be able to meet and compete as virtuous agents of public concern. After reformation, Christianity evoked deep changes as in the case of the individual who no longer acts upon a virtuous mind on his or her own, but as an accompanying instance to god. (“Weltverlust”) Modern sciences introduced statistics as normative force neutralizing any former understanding of ‘excellence’ or highly virtuous performance. Economy, originally located in the private realm of society, took over public space, and all societal relations became inherently

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determined by aspects of necessity. In mass society, work has been assigned with higher significance than agency and production; proceeding ‘as acting citizen’ therefore lost in relevance. What remained is some kind of complying with the rules, as statistics, economic considerations as much as necessities evolving out of daily life as such may presuppose. The modern Public as synonym for a political realm or even for The Political has become dissolved.

Sensual Experience and Mobilization According to Richard Sennett (1991), the most crucial difference between the old Greek culture and our modern culture addresses the fact, that we no longer trust our eyes.[4] While making political, religious or even erotic experiences, the ancient Greeks could rely on what they actually saw; as for now, in modern culture we suffer from a division between outside and inside, a division between subjective experience and the experience of an exterior world, between the self and the city. Therefore whenever we try to give concrete form to an inner state of mind, to an intimate degree of inwardness, eventually we become involved in conflicts with others. City planning strategies tend to negate many differences between citizens since planners take the notion of difference as instance of potential threat between people, rather than as mutual encouragement. To Richard Sennett, this explains why contemporary urban settings very often are shaped by neutralizing spaces which do not communicate, and discard potential danger possibly invoked by diverse social contact, through implementing street frontages made of reflecting glass, motorways separating poor districts from the rest of the city, and urban dwellings primarily as sleeping communities. Furthermore, Sennett describes the specific phenomenon

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linked to a common disbelief, grounded in that the exterior world of things does not necessarily represent the inner world we relate to as individuals. As he recommends to deal with whatever we see in this world, he actually points to a very important moment of contemporary crisis: by not relying on our own senses anymore, we contribute to a general mood of demobilization; but if whenever we decide to pay close attention to our senses, we will start to develop skills to deal with complex environments, and to achieve the capability to remain internal stability. This would lead to developing a kind of art of self-exposure, and according to Sennett this art form eventually enhances mobilization, opposed to turning one citizen into a victim of the other.

Contemporary Design Production Beyond questions of contemporary public and privatized worlds, and those of most relevant sensual experiences in non-private spaces, we seek to analyze forms of public use and interaction practiced in modern and postmodern culture. If we look at the triad of producer, recipient and (art-) work, it reveals certain aspects of a rather complex relationship between one instance producing and providing, another one using and transforming, and finally an interfacing instance as manufactured, desired product to undergo further transformation.

In redefining the (art-) work as a process-oriented artefact, the same triad starts to serve current requirements of adaptability and customized massproduction. Appropriate concepts of work envision theoretical product profiles that imply multiplicity and extensibility, while turning away from the idea of being substantiated, self-contained, modern objects. Whenever

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the (art-) work is being assigned and handed over to its recipient, it presents itself in one possible, exemplified formulation of itself, though its in-depth potential will only be fully exposed in the course of programmatic extension and reallocation. In the long term, this relationship invokes collaborative, participatory practices, due to the fact, that everyone once associated with a certain product may have an impact on how it is being developed any further. In this way recipients find themselves enabled to take active part in processes of production and ongoing transformation; evolving social milieus may eventually allow for specialized practices to unfold.

Participation as a favoured marketing strategy of our consumer culture today, is successfully based on a related principle. We are offered adjustable artefacts operating as a mirror surfaces to our own varying needs. One finds different profiles incorporated in just one product to chose from or even to alter; simultaneously this product consists of a complex identity structure ensuring long term self-promotion. On one hand, the user experiences an increase of competence while discovering abilities to re-design the artefact; but then her/his redesigning measures almost as unconscious agents essentially aid in to propagating the producers ID. In this sense, increasing entanglement of consuming and producing modes, might surprisingly lead to an accelerated decrease of lee for individually motivated action.

To anticipate further inherent dynamics of various interactive, participatory practices we propose to look at exemplifying works in the field of fine arts and social media.

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Participatory Practices in the Fields of Fine Arts and Social Media In the year of 1976, Rosalind Krauss assigned a symbolic mirror function to the TV monitor as the essential element of early video art works. Since viewers were enabled to interact with themselves watching the screen, the integrated feedback loop of the video footage would turn into the reflection of the mirror.[5] Implicitly Krauss paralleled impressions of a mirror reflection to the proceedings of appropriation in which, supported by illusion, former differences between object and subject seem to be dissipating. In psychoanalysis, comparable forms of exclusion of the object, like the negation of the other, comply with behaviour motivated by narcissism.

In comparison, performance works of the same time were to follow similar strategies of creative cooperation between artist and recipient, while consciously choosing not to assign any of the produced sensuous experience only to the artwork itself. One successful example of an anti-narcissistic art project called ‘Tap and Touch Cinema’ was made by the Austrian artist Valie Export (1968). Carried out as an offensive, confrontational performance, the artist furnished concrete moments of exploration of the female body in public space.[6] She understood her work as critique of the commercial 1960ies cinema as it delivered over-staged presentations of the female body.

Within the range of participatory artworks, the gesture of ‘giving’ has a special connotation since the one who receives a gift acknowledges reciprocal responsibilities and therefore within the creative artistic process unmistakably ethical questions will arise. In her performance ‘Cut Piece’ the artist Yoko Ono (1967) took over the role of the sparing instance, and

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confronted the recipients with their own self-determined actions based on merely obscure agendas.[7] In using scissors, observers of her performance were allowed to literally cut off pieces of the artist’s clothes while she was sitting quietly. Until today, the integration of various gift related rituals allows artists to present themselves more clearly as gender-specific subjects in the context of power-oriented networks.

In the work of Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July ‘Learning to love you more’ (2002) the public is asked to respond to a creative catalogue of small tasks to cope with. Curious people follow simple online instructions (notation of a recipe, image of family member etc.) and in return leave documenting material on a website. The artistic framing of the chosen task will redirect the attention of the observer to small details of her/his own past while simultaneously creating public space for share and exchange.

Here again, under different circumstances, the position of the artist/ producer and that one of the recipient/user fall into one, immanently asking for a self-critical view. The artwork in its scattered appearance will be assigned to multiple co-producers. Indirectly they form a group sharing related interests; meanwhile they receive ‘resonating’ gifts assimilating the recently produced.

Collaborating Strategies and Tactics Online Associated notions of collaboration correlate with current developments on the Internet. The introduction of ‘social media’ allows for intensified communication and various forms of co-operation. From this development one can read a basic change happening: the Internet has gone through a major transformation, changing from a medium of publication (starting in

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the 1990s) to a medium of communication (since 2005).[8] Independent of any academic background and individual profiling, ever since it has become possible as much as probable to generate, edit and distribute independent text formats to be shared and re-evaluated with others. The accompanying formation of self-organized interest groups lead to high expectations about intensified processes of democratization and a resulting atmosphere of social confidence on the web. Implied analogies as in this case start to sketch virtual public space as encouraging instance to enhance democratically motivated behaviour and interaction. As this kind of analogy points to a dualistic view that claims that mind and matter are two ontologically separate categories, we move right into the core of a general dispute of today. Do we agree on the existence of virtual worlds separated from materialized worlds? How do we choose to categorize different qualities of space?

In many ways, categories originally introduced by Michel de Certeau in the 1980s, seem not to have lost much in relevance: de Certeau defines two modes of urban behaviour, strategies and tactics.[9] Strategies are being developed merely by institutions and power related centres, as they evoke specific merits to reassure the production of potentially big spheres of influence. Hence, tactics are generated by individuals as means of negotiation though subordinated to the overall realm of given strategies.

City maps or street signs clearly represent strategies, the short cut of a given route or the un-aimed strolling through the city refer to tactics by non-producing instances. According to this definition, individuals may not cause long-term structural changes within their environments but they do have the capability of adapting concrete circumstances temporarily according to changing, individual needs.[10] De Certeau emphasizes on the operational dimension of the so-called tactics, temporarily allowing

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individuals to withdraw from any direct impact of strategically aligned spaces; they allow for corresponding activities up to unforeseen subversive acts to happen. Temporal dimensions of invisible enactment space become assigned with disguised unconscious desires to inhabit things as spaces.

If we try to relocate these categories within the environment of social media practices of today, we might find strategies and tactics directly linked to one another, causing for multiple reverse meanings to appear. Media firms such as Facebook are asking their users to write additional software packages to achieve the ability to offer even more services. Until now we still do not know how creative producers will respond to this ‘subtle engagement’ which eventually might imply a long-term involvement and co-production of our cultural achievements.

Towards Possible Agendas of Contemporary Design As our starting observations reveal multiple, intertwined and partially contradictory conditions, we acknowledge the necessity for them to be laid open in much greater detail as the project progresses. In correspondence, we want to state that Design as one urgent task of today has been crucially expanded; its terminology no longer only implies significance and hermeneutics, but maybe also evokes a moral dimension.

The extensional application of the actual word ‘design’ has increased since design may easily be applied to growing settings of production; the spectrum of things to be designed has been enlarged by far, and no longer can be reduced to a list of functional or luxury objects.

According to the sociologist Bruno Latour (2009), our heritage from the

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modern era slowly dissolves: we have started to lose sight of the former dichotomy between materiality on one side, and design on the other side.

So he argues if we manage to alter anything considered as ‘matter of fact’ into a ‘matter of concern’ we truly start allowing for design objects to come into our world. The contemporary historic situation is defined by a radical break between two great narratives or if you want you could say passions: on one hand we have the history of emancipation, of disentanglement, modernization, innovation and control. But then we also have the history of devotion, entanglement, dependency and care.[11] In this context, Bruno Latour suggests design as ‘touchstone’ to find out which way we are going.

If we all say that everything has to be designed and also redesigned – including nature – then we do not need to revolutionize or modernize anything any more. If we see ourselves as socially active and creative members, who or what else will we have to accept as such member in the near future? We will have to substitute the ‘undeniable’ by the ‘arguable’; and connect the terminology of objectified science and with the one of controversy.

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Endnotes [1] Chan, Adrian, 2007, Social Media: Paradigm shift?, http://www.gravity7.com/paradigm_shift_1.html (accessed Sept 24, 2010).

[2] Stocker, A., Tochtermann, K., 2008, (Virtuelle) Communities und Soziale Netzwerke, in: Back, A. u.a. (ed.), 2008, Web 2.0 in der Unternehmenspraxis. Grundlagen, Fallstudien und Trends zum Einsatz von Social Software, Oldenburg Wissenschaftsverlag.

[3] Arendt, Hannah, orig. 1958, 1967, Vita Activa oder vom tätigen Leben, Verlag Piper, München.

[4] Sennett, Richard , orig. 1991, 2009, Civitas, Die Großstadt und die Kultur des Unterschieds, S.Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.

[5] Krauss, Rosalind, 1976, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcism, ‘October’, Vol.1, MIT Press [6] Export, Valie, 1968-71, Tap and Touch Cinema, Performance in various European cities .

[7] Ono, Yoko, orig. 1965, 2003, Cut Piece, original Performance at Carnegiehall New York, restaged at Ranelagh Theatre Paris .

[8] Chan, Adrian, 2007, Social Media: Paradigm shift?, http://www.gravity7.com/paradigm_shift_1.html (accessed Sept 24, 2010).

[9] de Certeau, Michel, 1984, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley University of California Press.

[10] de Certeau, Michel, 1984, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley University of California Press.

[11] Latour, B., 2008, Ein vorsichtiger Prometheus? Design im Zeitalter des Klimawandels, in M. Jongen, S.van Tuinen, K. Hemelsoet (eds.), 2009, Die Vermessung des Ungeheuren: Philosophie nach Peter Sloterdijk, Fink Verlag München.

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Drawing Circles Search on Mobile Devices Mathias Mitteregger DI, Research Fellow Institute of Architectural Sciences/Department of Architecture Theory, TU Vienna http://www.a-theory.tuwien.ac.at

Preface “Imagine that your business had a complete log of your customers’ wanderings – every trip to the grocery store, every work commute, every walk with the dog. What could you learn about them? Armed with that knowledge, what sorts of goods and services might you try to sell them?”

This telling quote of published in Business Week (Baker 2009) suggests why search engine companies boldly invest in location-based services and undertake large efforts to gain market shares. Location search on smart phones has the potential to reshape urban structures as it enables to navigate in space and run applications that relate to the user’s location.

By restructuring public space and disconnecting many actions from a physical location this technology challenges the traditional idea that social and political action need a distinct, and the city hence being a stage par excellence where such actions are performed. This illustrates the importance any search technology – the data they provide – will have in structuring the urban. Navigating using a smart phone will shape a customized view on urban structure and limit the places that visible. This in turn might lead to a

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kind of personalized urban space; established according to the constraints of the technology. The user profile will create the structure and relevance is a function of nods and edges, experienced only with other individuals sorted in the same group.

Introduction As search technologies hit the streets, available anytime on mobile devices, their possible relevance to architecture and urban planning is recognized.

They charm artists, researches in architecture and urban planning, software engineers, graphic designers and, of course, the advertising industry.

Already there are numerous applications available that make use of the current position of the user. Only since the iPhone smart phones have enough processing power, bandwidth and other built-in hardware (GPS, camera) to constantly augment the users surrounding with external data.

Thus any software to enable location-based technology evolves under the two constraints of (1) the device and (2) the data it processes. Here, the former is left aside and I’d like to concentrate on the data, data that is in most often a product of search.

Accounts on ubiquitous computing, augmented reality and the like, tend to outline the general novelty of such technologies and summon the pioneering powers they are about to expose. However, the more we claim for the unprecedented capabilities of any technology, the more we are obliged to check the past for the validity of our claim, otherwise: How do we know what is or is not unprecedented? The motivation for the research that resulted in this paper, I owe to a keynote given by Paul Duguid (2009) at the Deep Search conference in Vienna, were he emphasized, from the

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perspective of the historian, exactly this. To back up my own research on location technologies I set to look at the history of search for findings relevant in a discussion on architecture and urbanism. In a tentative and inevitably incomplete manner I want to follow up search tools and technologies from the invention of the removable type to the present, occasionally making notes from a wider historical range. The largest part of the argument naturally follows the history of the book, books as means to store and distribute information and the technologies that developed to organize and make available the stored information.

Two competing ways of information retrieval are dominating the web and thus will or are dominating location-based services. One is to trust the algorithmic authority of search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and the like, the other is to go with Facebook (and other Social Services) and it’s “Like” button that involves a more social, participatory narrative. Both have their ancestors, both are not at all unprecedented.

Quantity In 1471, only some 20 years after Gutenberg, the Italian humanist Niccolò Perotti wrote a letter to Francesco Guarnerio were he vents his disgust about what the press has done to the readers. “My dear Francesco, I have lately kept praising the age in which we live, because of the great, indeed divine gift of the new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany. In fact, I saw a single man printing in a single month as much as could be written by hand by several persons a year (…) It was for this reason that I was led to hope that within a short time we should have such a large quantity of books that there wouldn’t be a single work which could not

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be procured because of lack of means or scarcity (…) Yet – of false and all too human thought – I see that things turned out quite differently from what I had hoped. Because now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or, better still be erased from all books. And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.” (Perotti 1471 cited in Danton 2009 pp. xvi) The number of books on the market before 1500 is indeed remarkable.

It is estimated to be at around 20 million volumes and that is at a time when about 100 million people lived in countries where print developed and certainly only a few of them could read. (Febvre and Martin 1976 p.

248) What Perotti argues in the fifteenth century turned to be a scholarly commonplace for the thinkers of the Enlightenment and still resonates in current discussions on the net. Kant and Hegel talk of a “Bücherflut” [flood of books] and Novalis even speaks of a “Bücherseuche” [book epidemic].

Arthur Schopenhauer is very figurative in his 1851 essay On Reading and Books. He complains about “writings [that] have been printed today and are still wet from the press.” They “breed every year in countless numbers like flies” and the public swallows them with a never-ending appetite, since “similis simili gaudet”, he states. And it is due to a conspiracy of “author, publisher, and reviewer [that] have joined forces” only to take “a few shillings out of the public’s pocket”. (Schopenhauer 1851 p. 34) Even at the library of Alexandria (3rd century B.C.) the librarians faced the problem of making information available as the various collections grow to be over 500,000 volumes large. As the collection proliferated, so did the demand by outsiders to gain access – and need for a more advanced system 372 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

to search. Zenodotus, the first librarian, started to introduce a spatial concept of order and arranged the collection by type. He later set forth the idea to record the volumes in an alphabetical catalogue, superimposed over the spatial arrangement. Callimachus, his possible successor, enhanced the catalogue so it covered author and category. Even though 120 volumes large and including an elaborate system of categories and subcategories, the catalogue only involved the “eminent” authors. (Casson 2001, Duguid 2009) The framing of a collection in categories and subcategories is still the standard for large collections; the problem of incompleteness too.

Returning to the more recent history of the printed book (by removable type) market shifts, caused by the mass production of information is of particular interest. The large centers of commerce became the centers for publishers and booksellers. This testifies to the fact that printing was never really a scholarly mission, rather big business from beginning. Basel, Nürnberg, Augsburg, Venice developed as centers for printing and selling of the books, not the large university towns. On possible reason might be the large shipping costs for the books. At the time the large “folio” was the standard with the more handy formats “quadro” and “octavio” still to come.

Shipping was a big concern, for printers could expect to sell only a few copies in the town were they produced. Printers thus relied on networks of agents all over Europe, especially in university towns, to mediate between customer and supplier (between those who produced data and others that search for it). (Febvre and Martin, p. 105) The situation of mass production puzzled historians until recent days. To keep costs for transport low printed sheets (the raw data so to say) were shipped unbound in and the buyer would then bind them according to his taste.

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In the 16th century the market (and information retrieval) underwent another shift. As authors and publishers became aware of the large audience they were able to address and the fame this implied, the number of books flourished again. The ongoing debate on authorship, royaltyand copyrights started at the time authors began to sign their works and reaches to the present with legislations like the “Micky Mouse Protection Act” (Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998) without which Michy Mouse would by now be “Open Source”. (Danton 2009 p.

7) Authors then chose vernacular language over Latin to address a growing national audience. The shared European market split in to smaller national ones that now were more prone to be influenced by national political and religious interest and censorship. Permanent segregation between cultures and countries was established across Europe. The project of Enlightenment found the citation to circumscribe literature, to include and exclude from within. This will be covered in detail below (Structure).

Quality As pointed out above, search is also productive in assessing information.

The stone tables that held the Epic of Gilgamesh were stored in boxes of different material. Made of cedar, bronze and lapis lazuli they strongly suggest a hierarchy, a secondary order implied on the text. It is very likely that the stone tables were rearranged respective to changing customs and fashions. This relates to conventions for newspapers layouts - lead story far right column, off-lead left, soft news onside or below the fold, features set off by special headlines. (Turtschi 2003 p. 65f ) At the beginning of the printed book, instead, the quality of what came

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from the press mattered in the first place. In the quotes above Niccolò Perotti as well as Schopenhauer show as much regret to how much the presses were able to produce, as to what they produced. “[M]erely for the sake of entertainment” they print “what would best be forgotten, or, better still be erased from all books.”

Printing, publishing a book, was (and still is) quite an expanse. To issue one bad-selling text certainly wiped out the publisher/printer. The decision of what to publish hence was basically an assumption on what the audience might like. As a consequence the first texts to issue from the press were almost exclusively re-editions and re-prints of texts that were already widely disseminated as manuscripts. The multiplication of texts to the hundreds resulted in a more restrictive selection; it lead to a pushing of ideas that were already well established. The early history of printing suggests, the press and the market orientation initially increased the circulation of widely popular texts and reduced the number of different texts on the market.

Not so far off that the first major books to issue from the press were bibles. Early publications were above all religious works, medieval and contemporary literature and only a few texts on what might be called scientific issues. However, print turned public interest to technical issues.

Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture was published only in 1485, Pierre de Cresce’s Treatise on Agriculture in 1486 and Vulturio of Rimini’s Treatise on Machines even in 1472. (Febvre and Martin 1976 p. 249) 16th century scholars, on the other hand, began to set up small presses at large European universities. (Italy is the exception, as Humanist thought established well before the rest of Europe) The first of the kind was installed by Guillaume Fichet und Johann Heynlin at the Sorbonne and

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had large influence on numerous scholars. (Febvre and Martin 1976 p.

253; Rendaudet 1969 p.69f ) But those scholarly printers did not seek, propelled by humanist interest, to publish the recently rediscovered texts, instead they set to extricate texts from medieval corruptions and those emerged by early publishing and re-edit them in their pure Latin form. (Rendaudet 1969 p.71) Quality of printed text and manuscripts was generally overestimated until the groundbreaking work of Donald F. McKenzie. (McKenzie Printers of the Mind) He has shown, among other things, that many different printers where involved in the production of a single page and several print shops worked together on the production of one book. Books and pages could thus no longer be related to as the work of a printer and the research shed a new light on the many different books (and texts passages), for example in the work of Shakespeare.

Increased scientific interest furnished an increase in scientific publications, printed not only by the small presses at universities but also in the commercial centers. As scientists and publishers faced a very selective market, many printers turned their offices into translation workshops to increase their audience and scientific publication developed just conversing the national literatures. Some fields of study could truly benefit of press and translation; but generally the publications faced the again market constraints: large volumes rather popularized long established ideas and to a rigorous selection, print was rather an obstacle in the way of new ideas.

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Structure The large and growing industry of book making in Europe from the 16th century longed for technologies to keep up with the published texts. The splitting in smaller nation or country sized markets further increased the necessity.

The publishers first propelled the development of technologies to record what was already on the market and how much of it. A system of barter printers and booksellers had established to acquire new texts for their shops and stores grew insufficient and unmanageable. In 1648 a publisher called Father Jacob began to issue the Bibliographia Parisiana and the Bibliographia Gallicia. A little later in 1657 A Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England appeared to take record of the British book market. Completeness in the case of bibliographies was important, but as the “most vendible” suggests that those compilations, starting four times a year and later being published monthly forced delimitation. Those lists helped the publishers to oversee the market but scholars too had large demand to keep up with new literature. (Febvre and Martin 1976 p. 271) In his utopia written in 1771 L’An 2440, Louis-Sébastien Mercier visits the library of the king and finds to his surprise “only a small cabinet, in which were several books that seemed to me far from voluminous.” Wise man “extracted the substance from thousand in-folio volumes, all of which they transferred into a small duodecimo-sized volume”. (Mercier 1971 (1771) p. 247, 250) Bestsellers of the time were the multiple volumes collections that promised to cover the entirety of knowledge in a certain field: the bibliothèque. Either periodically – thirty one of them published in France between 1686 and 1789 – or bought at a stroke, they were regarded as “saving space” and as delivering concentrated knowledge “distilled like a chemical substance”. (Chartier 1994 p. 68) MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 377

Scholarly research relied on a network of personal correspondence: scholars who had the reputation of knowing the field. Nicolas-Claude de Peiresc, who discovered the Orion nebular, was known as the ‘”Procurator General of the Republic of Letters’” and grew to be the biggest celebrity of this networks, the nod with the most edges, at the time. Others were Chapelain, or the brothers Dupuy Glaisy. With the advent of the periodical press, a vast number of scientific bibliographical journals spread across Europe. The first scientific periodical was the Journal des Savants that went to press on January 1st in 1665 in France. But the journal did originate not inside the scientific community; in fact it was Colbert who sought for a means to control the sciences. (Botein, Censer, Ritvo 1981) The Journal des Savants allowed Colbert not only to register new publications, evaluate and review them; the biggest influence the publication had (and scientific publications still have) by just covering arguments or not. This relates to Foucault and the idea of constructing a discussion to create power-knowledge relations. (Foucault 1991 p.

92f ) Dennis de Sallo, the first editor of the Journal, was too harsh in his critique and was felt to be offensive by many authors. In fact it didn’t need Sallo: Jean Gallois replaced him only one year later and the Journal then grew to become a great success. Febvre and Martin note that this kind of (search) technology “although in its infancy, exercised from the beginning a profound influence on the evolution of ideas.” (Febvre and Martin 1976 p. 236) In Britain the Royal Society initiated the Philosophical Transactions for the same reasons in 1665. What followed was a large number of periodicals by various interest groups and institutions (like the Jesuits Journal de Trévoux, The Nouvelles de la République des Letters, Bibliothèque universelle et historique).

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Today exclusion works in another direction. As commercial publishers learned that professors and students are used to and do not pay for the journals they get at the library prices for journal subscriptions prices exploded. The price for a one-year subscription for the The Journal of Comparative Neurology (Wiley) is at $ 30.212 in the US and € 19.980 in Europe. It goes with out saying that this has serious influence on academic teaching and research, and accessing recent scientific information.

l’Encyclopédie. The project of Enlightenment In 1785 Etienne-Louis Boullée proposed the revealing project for the reconstruction of the Bibliothèque du Roi. In the “immense basilica”, one hundred meters long and thirty wide, bookshelves are placed along the sides arranged in four stepped tiers lit from the top of the vault and the two ends. The bookshelves would form the base for a colonnade that would be completed on each end by something like a “triumphal arch (…) under which two allegorical statues could be put”. (Chartier 1994 p. 62) The reading room of the British Museum (1857) and the Library of Congress Reading Room (1897) too involve the idea of a corpus of useful knowledge that can be encircled and overlooked. To relate and organize information from within the books Enlightenment thinkers began to make use citation as a means of structure.

In 1784 the Berlinische Monatsschrift published Kant’s essay Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? even starts with a citation: “ S.(iehe) Decemb.

1783. S. 516”. It points to a page in the middle of a text, one year earlier in another volume of the journal by Zöllner Ist es ratsam, das Ehebündis nicht ferner durch die Religion zu fancieren? This article in turn is a reply

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to another essay by Biester. (Wellmon, forthcoming) Scholars made use of the citation to include what they thought was relevant literature and, on the other hand, to gain authority to what they have written.

The 17 volumes of articles and the 11 volumes of illustrations of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie may be the largest intellectual project of Enlightenment, for sure it’s biggest market success. (Darnton 1979) It was sold more than 4200 times. What the 142 Encyclopedists tried to achieve may be best accounted by what Diderot had to say in his article on Encyclopedia. The purpose of the Encyclopédie was “to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe (…) and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race.” (Available online: University of Munich) What distinguished the Encyclopédie from all other Enlightenment publications was its internal organization. It compromises three structures: alphabetic order, taxonomy of human knowledge and cross-references to other articles to indicate the link between the subjects. The Taxonomy was a tree diagram developed by the authors, based on Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning, to graphically represent the knowledge as covered in the Encyclopédie.

The Encyclopédie was the last to structure its knowledge according to the taxonomy by Bacon, but the elaborate system of “renvoi” (citations) gave way to the link and we witness today. The renvoi point from one article to the other, link it with others, setting relations, suggesting connections, neglecting others.

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The article on “Eucharist”, points at “cannibalism” and “bread” but not at “theology”. This relates to the common etymological roots of encyclopedia and search. Both encyclopedia (cyclos) and search are related to the Latin circare to go round, or circus circle. Gilles Blanchard and Mark Olsen have analyzed which terms are well included and which were left outside. Notions like “Historie”, “Historie Naturelle”, “Géometrie”, “Antiquité” show strong connectivity to other articles, whereas “Morale” or “Théologie” are weak links. (Blanchard and Olsen 2008) With the organization the renvoi, Enlightenment thinkers had a tool at hand to structure information by using the very means of “Büchersprache” [book language]. Outside of political control and censorship the authors of the Encyclopédie were able to assess information, include some and exclude other parts. By establishing an evaluative link structure the authors were able to re-construct a discourse, re-name things and re-categorize knowledge.

The Enlightenment’s citations and footnotes established in the late 18th century, at a time when the number of scholarly publications exploded.

Politics and other interest groups, as referred to above, tried shape discourses and ideas from the outside, by establishing journals that would cover some and exclude others. Within these journals, however, scholars established another structure that is inclusive and exclusive in a similar way and provides the early predecessor of the Hyperlink structure of the web.

Above all citations and footnotes give authority to the broader argument of the main text. The placid objectivity of Roman thinkers attests to that. Plinius significantly gave account of “all cited authorities” and “the number of facts and empiric observations” in each of his 37 volumes large encyclopedia Naturalis historiae. ( Jormakka 2007 p. 54) Modern search

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engines “of the Google kind” use this logic and represent the far end of the authority and logic of the footnote.

Web Search and “Like” Tim Berners-Lee, famously introduced the hyperlink structure to the web, as an off-schedule project at Cern. What they tried to achieve was to, link the work and scientists of the Electronics and Computing for Physics Group, scattered in different departments and cities. This indicates the close relation of Hyperlink and the academic citation, which it resembles.

Early search engines were ignorant to that and relied on various degrees of hierarchical order to gather their results. Yahoo! is the acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Information was in aggregated in a web catalog and sorted in categories and sub categories. Search in the early internet resembled a system much like the taxonomy of knowledge used in the Encyclopédie.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin sought to “evaluate the citational structure of the web”, presented in their first paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. (Brin and Page 1998) The value of a page according to PageRank is a function of the number of links by other pages and to the value of the pages that link. As in academic literature, the number of citations gives authority to the text. Further more, the organization of the web that search engines imply is essentially chronological; the value of a page is determined by its history.

To further increase quality and relevance of the results, search engines more recently introduced personalization of search results. As Larry Page puts it, the perfect search engine would “understand exactly what you mean 382 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

and give you back exactly what you want”. (Google 2010) Personalized search opens spaces of individual information based on the user profile that resembles the search history. This resembles the sorting of users into groups with demographic or statistic others that share the information as in database marketing where customer’s profiles (based on their shopping behavior – bonus cards in supermarkets) and is largely criticized by privacy groups. To provide individual information based on the shopping behavior of a customer might be one thing, but the affinity of search engines and marketing instruments is clearly outlined by Google’s Eric Schmidt: “Think about it first as an advertising system.” (Vogelstein 2009) Facebook’s Like-button turned a social network site (that should be thought of first as an advertising system) into an information retrieval service. When the Like buttons API was opened in 2010 the use of it proliferated.

Conclusion In tentative approach towards a history of the data that is the basis for location-based services and augmented reality tools I have tried to sketch what Bachelard called an epistemological profile for this technology.

(Bachelard 1984) After all: as the search algorithms are kept secret and more so the structure of Facebook a historical account on some parts it’s structure might reasonable to start with (other than making educated guesses).

As search technologies start to restructure public spaces we witness the constraints of search are still at hand. The Google Index is incomplete in the same way as the index by Callimachus was. The organization it provides is

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largely market-driven and the idea of personalization introduces strategies of marketing, that relates to what Foucault called governmentality, to search technologies. (Foucault 2006 p. 52) To account on the history of the book was to account the prehistory of the search technologies. Prehistory as “the discourse (or a bundle of discourses) that eventually transformed into the science [technology] in question.” (Kuhn 1996 p. 21) The second intend was to show that the citational structure that is being superimposed on public space originated in books and periodicals. Facebook’s way to supply data appeals to a kind of vanity and getting and trusting importance in networks you choose. Either way search technologies structure the “raw material” by the according to markets and peer groups. “Raw material”, is not the information out there, but the subject matter as constituted by knowledge, its technical means, and by relation between technology (science) and society. (Althusser 1979 in Althusser and Balibar 1979) Search is productive process that creates an inside and an outside. With algorithms based on the link-structure, or networks one “likes”, search is productive and essentially temporal.

The pushing of well-established ideas, is fundamental for both technologies to search the web and derives form its ancestors; be it the citation-logic of Google that knows stronger and weaker nods or the Like narrative.

Notions of personhood, individual freedom and identity vary in different societies, still, the true self usually relates to be a part of a person that is not under control. ( Jormakka 2003 p. 220) With this said any virtual landscape overlapping the actual must have an effect on the latter – only due to the fundamental difference of sustained surveillance.

The constructivist view depicts the city as a stage for public and political actions, an “in-between” that gathers people together in order to both

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relate and separate them Hannah Arendt argued that material objects embody and transmit conventions and thus communication across human generations, past and the future. Personalized “raw material” provided by search engines and superimposed on public space may restructure social interactions as well as spatial relations; groups of people may be created who act at locations that they do not share physically. With the personal profile responsible for what I can experience, the system of objects, to use Baudrillard’s phrase, may then be replaced by a system of actions bounded to the citizen/the user and its virtual duplicate. (Baudrillard 1999)

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Literature Althusser L., 1979. From Capital to Marx Philosophy in Althusser, Louis et Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital. London: Verso Arendt, H., 1959. The Human Condition. Doubleday Garden City, NY: Doubleday Bachelard, G., 1984. Epistemologie. Ausgewählte Texte.

Frankfurt/M., Berlin, Wien: Ullstein Baker, S., 2009. Mapping a New, Mobile Internet. BusinessWeek, 26. Feb. Baudrillard, J. 1988. The Ecstasy of Communication. Paris: Éditions Galileé) Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and simulation. 1999. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press Becker, K. and Stalder, F. (Eds.). 2009.Deep Search. The Politics of Search beyond Google. Wien: Studienverlag Botein, S., Censer, J.R., Ritvo H., 1981. The Periodical Press in EighteenthCentury English and French Society: A Cross-Cultural Approach. In Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 23, No. 3. pp. 464-490 Brin, S., Page, L., The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. [online] Available at: http://infolab.stanford. edu/~backrub/google.html [Accessed 26. Sept. 2010] Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex”. New York: Routledge Casson, L., 2001. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven: Yale University Press Chartier, R. 1994. The Order of Books. Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Darnton, R., 1979. The Business of Enlightenment. A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press Darnton R., 2009. The Case for Books. Past, Present, and Future. New York: Public Affairs Duguid, P., 2002. The Social Life of Imformation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press Febvre, L. and Martin, H.J., 1990. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing 1450 – 1800. London, New York: Verso Foucault, M., 1977. Überwachen und Strafen. Frankfurt am Main: STW 184 Foucault, M., 1980. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, New York: Vintage Books

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Foucault, M., 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books Foucault, M., 2006. Die Geschichte der Gouvernementalität 1 & 2. Frankfurt am Main: STW 1808 Glaisyer, N., 2007. Calculating credibility: print culture, trust and economic figures in early eighteenth-century England. Economic History Review, 60, 4, pp. 685–711 Jormakka, K., 2003. My Dinner With Arendt in Kuhlman D., Hnilica S. Jormakka, K., building power. Architektur, Macht, Gender. Wien: Ed. Selene Jormakka, K., 2007. Geschichte der Architekturtheorie. 3rd ed. Wien: Ed. Selene Kuhn, T.S., 1996. The structure of scientific revolutions.

3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Lyon, D., 2007. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge, MA: polity Markoff, J., 2009. The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives. The New York Times, 17. Feb. Renaudet, A. 1969. Paris from 1494 to 1517: Church and University Religious Reforms; Culture and the Humanist Critiques. In Gundersheimer W. eds. 1969. French Humanism 1470-1600, New York: Macmillan Schopenhauer, A., 1851. On Reading and Books. in Parerga and Paralipomena. 1851 Thomson, D.G., 2006. Blueprint to a Billion. Hoboken, N. J.: Wiley Turtschi, R., 2003. Praktische Typografie. 5th ed. Sulgen, Zürich: Niggli Vogelstein, F. 2007. As Google Challenges Viacom and Microsoft, Its CEO Feels Lucky. Wired 04.09.07 Wellmon, C., Organizing the World: Projects of Universal Knowledge from the Enlightenment to Google. (forthcoming)

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“Small Texts”?: Text Messages, Art and Public Spheres Frauke Behrendt Research Fellow Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute (CoDE) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge www.fraukebehrendt.com f.behrendt@sussex.ac.uk

Introduction Imagine you walk along a street and suddenly you hear a voice that invites you to send a text message to a certain number. You cannot quite make out where the voice comes from, but send a text message anyway. Your message is broadcast loudly into the street once, then becomes interspersed with messages from other people, becomes shorter and quieter, until the voice falls silent. You realise the voice comes from one of the security cameras in the street (figure 1). This is how you might encounter ‘smSage’ by Ralph Borland and Tim Redfern that I researched at the ‘Conflux’ festival in Brooklyn in 2007 and experienced again at the ‘ISEA’ festival in Dublin in 2009.

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Figure 1: ‘smSage’ by Redfern and Borland, installed at a festival in Brooklyn (NYC) in 2007

The tradition of new genre public art often located art in public places in order to intervene in the public sphere, either through dialogue or by making a statement. In this paper I investigate how mobile sound art might also be thought about within the tradition of public art, either because artists are actively seeking to intervene in it or because an artwork makes a statement in a public space which seems to question certain aspects of what might constitute a public sphere, and who gets to speak in it.

During the course of the 20th century, electronic media (including broadcasting media such as TV and communication media such as the telephone) tended to be situated in private and indoor spaces. Networked media such as the internet that arguably enable people to participate in

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public debates or contribute to public spheres (Dahlgren, 2005; Roberts, 2009), have also been largely tied to indoor spaces (such as homes, offices or cafes) that were also often private spaces. Mobile media started to reverse this development and allowed people to use (their own) media (devices) in public and outdoor spaces. At present, mobile media are mainly used for forms of private communication and consumption such as phone calls, text messages or iPod listening. This paper however discusses artworks that experiment with a different use of mobile media; they open up private messages to public broadcasts. Drawing on Augé and Flusser, Föllmer (1999) suggests that public space has lost many of its social and communicative functions to the media over time, but hopes that public sound art can be one contribution to a reviving of public space. This paper explores the relationship between the act of reviving public space and notions of public spheres.

I approach this through an investigation of how the mobile sound platform ‘smSage’ engages in ‘making’ a (transient, micro) public sphere, however I am at least as interested in the failures of that space as in what succeeded. Sound Platforms are designed by artists to invite the audience to contribute sounds that are then placed in the public in specific ways (as part of a GPS sound walk, or broadcast by a speaker, for example).

[1] I also briefly introduce two other artworks (‘TextFm’ and ‘Tool for Armchair Activists’) that also invite the audience to send text messages that are broadcast publicly. Habermas’ public sphere concept and in particular the contention that acts of communication can constitute an artwork (Kester’s concept of ‘dialogical aesthetic’) open up and frame these discussions. In particular Habermas’ consideration of the problematic of the public sphere as “small texts” and their interactions are discussed in relation to the practitioner’s understanding of their engagement with the

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public in ‘smSage’ (Habermas, 1996: 374). Habermas’ concept of episodic, occasional and abstract publics, as well as the notion of mobilising public spheres and his description of how issues can move from the periphery to the centre of the public further inform the analysis of the artworks in this paper.

1. Habermas’ Public Sphere Habermas understands the public sphere as “a social phenomenon” (1996: 360). Communication is central in establishing the public sphere: “The public sphere can best be described as a network for communicating information and points of view” or as a “social space generated in communicative action” (Habermas, 1996: 360). [2] Habermas explains further: In complex societies, the public sphere consists of an intermediary structure between the political system, on the one hand, and the private sectors of the lifeworld and functional systems, on the other. It represents a highly complex network that branches out into a multitude of overlapping international, national, regional, local and subcultural arenas. (Habermas, 1996: 373) Underpinning the public sphere is the “ideal speech situation”, a space between two (or more) people who communicate with each other, constituting the speech situation by doing so: “Every encounter in which actors do not just observe each other but take a second-person attitude, reciprocally attributing communicative freedom to each other, unfolds in a linguistically constituted public space” (Habermas, 1996: 361). Ideal speech acts have the goal to produce some sort of mutual understanding,

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not in terms of a binding law, but in terms of trying to persuade the other person with the better argument.

As we can see, for Habermas, communication is central in establishing the public sphere, a “social space generated in communicative action” (1996: 360). We can read the act of participating in the art works discussed in this paper - sending a text message - as a communicative act that generates a social space. The texts messages that establish these works do not stay in the realm of private communication as they would do in everyday mobile phone conversations, instead, they are broadcast into public spaces.

In ‘Conversation Pieces’, Kester (2004) develops a “concept of a dialogical aesthetic” and draws on Habermas to make a link between aesthetics and dialogue. In one of Kester’s case studies – ‘Intervention to Drug-Addicted Women’ by WochenKlausur – the artists invited a diverse range of concerned parties to discuss the drug problem in Zurich during several boat trips on the lake Zurich (Kester, 2004: 110-111). The participants were not listening and speaking as people with official roles, but as individuals, and the artists provided the space and time for this. Kester argues that this resembles Habermas’ ‘ideal speech situation’: the artists were “able to create a physical and psychological ‘frame’ around the boat talks, setting them apart from daily conversation and allowing the participants to view dialogue not as a tool but as a process of self-transformation” (Kester, 2004: 111). The project did actually lead to a local solution to the problem.

In the mobile sound art platforms discussed in this paper, the dialogue is not aimed at resolving a specific social problem, but they are offering a platform for dialogue, they enable private communication (text messages) to become part of a public dialogue (a work of public sound art). In these artworks the frame is the sound, the noise of having these messages

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broadcast into public spaces. Kester argues that communication art works tend towards establishing their framework by the very process of communicating and this observation is relevant for ‘smSage’. [3] The key is that you do not have to ‘like’ an art work to start engaging, to open up your sense, to enter the process of “self-transformation” - Kester argues that the very process of participating in the communicative encounter triggers the process of critical reflection (Kester, 2004: 111).

1.1 Multiple Public Spheres Habermas’ public sphere concept has been critiqued extensively, in particular demands for consideration of multiple and diverse public spheres have been prevalent (e.g. Calhoun, 1992; Fraser, 1992; Silverstone, 1999; Crossley and Roberts, 2004) with Fraser’s 1992 account being one of the most prominent ones. Fraser values Habermas’ concept as “conceptual resource” but rejects key assumptions of Habermas’ concept of the public sphere as inadequate for existing late-capitalist societies (1992: 110). One of the main critiques of Fraser and others is Habermas’ idea of a singular public sphere.

In ‘Between Facts and Norms’ (1996) it becomes clear that Habermas has taken some of this criticism on board. [4] His concept has become more fluid and he seems to embrace the idea of multiple public spheres: he observes a “substantive differentiation of public spheres”, for example (Habermas, 1996: 373). Where he talks in the plural he seems to use the terms “publics” and “public spheres” interchangeably, e.g. when he names some publics to illustrate his point about differentiated public spheres: “popular science and literary publics, religious and artistic publics, feminist

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and ‘alternative’ publics, publics concerned with health-care issues, social welfare, environmental politics” (Habermas, 1996: 373-374). He still talks about a “universal public sphere” referring to it as “the one text”; but he then clarifies that within this overarching public sphere there are numerous “small texts” or “segmented public spheres” (Habermas, 1996: 374). He is insistent about the porosity of the boundaries between them; they “remain permeable” and small texts “can always build hermeneutic bridges from one text to the next” (Habermas, 1996: 374); this is a main difference to system theory with its auto-poetic systems (Luhmann, 1994).

In Habermas’ theory, systems can communicate with each other, they do not develop a language of themselves; systems are not auto-poetic. All the various public spheres operate with “natural language” and thus “remain porous to one another” (Habermas, 1996: 374).

That Habermas speaks of micro-public spheres as “small texts” (1996: 374) resonates with my study of sms-based art - where the audience sends in ‘small texts’. Can these small text messages also be a way to build hermeneutic bridges, to communicate from one public sphere-let to another? Is making private small texts being broadcast into public spaces contribute to building the “small text” of a micro public sphere? How can we further describe these small texts, these ephemeral and fragile assemblages?

1.2 Episodic, Occasional and Abstract Publics Also in ‘Between Facts and Norms’, Habermas distinguishes three different levels of the public sphere - episodic, occasional and abstract - depending on the “density of communication, organisational complexity, and range” (Habermas, 1996: 374). These levels of public spheres range from episodic

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publics found in taverns, coffee houses, or on the streets; through to occasional, or ‘arranged’ publics of particular presentations and events, such as theatre performances, rock concerts, party assemblies, or church congresses; to abstract public sphere of isolated readers, listeners, and viewers scattered across large geographic areas, or even around the globe, and brought together only through the mass media (Habermas, 1996: 374). Habermas regards the abstract public that is constituted by the mass media as “isolated” and “scattered” and the only connection between them are the mass media (Habermas, 1996: 317). It is the location (episodic), the event (occasional) or the media (abstract) respectively that bring the public together in Habermas’ model.

In the contemporary environment of pervasive mobile media, are we dealing with episodic, occasional or abstract publics? Mobile media users certainly are often isolated and geographically dispersed, suggesting an abstract public. However, now that mobile media are networked, the listeners, readers and viewers that Habermas describes as “isolated” for the mass media are now also speakers, writers and image generators, for example when making a phone call, sending a tweet or uploading a picture from their mobile phones. These (potentially) collaborative and connecting activities would traditionally have taken place in specific locations or events, pointing to episodic or occasional publics.

In the age of the internet, the locations of episodic publics do not need to be physical locations (such as pubs or coffee houses) they can also be established online, thereby combining features of episodic and abstract publics. At the same time, occasional publics are still (surprisingly) important, audience figures of all sorts of life events have been growing for years, with music festivals being a key example (despite - or maybe because of - the ‘digital revolution’). I argue, that it is in the occasional publics that 396 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

we find the key to understanding how to engage publics in mobile media projects. It is a space where the abstract/episodic publics of mobile media come together in a physical space for a specific reason or event, such as an art festival, a smart mob or a demonstration. Here, they can engage in an embodies, multi-sensory, social way.

With Habermas’ concept of episodic, occasional and abstract publics in mind, we can now return to the mobile sound art work ‘smSage’ in more detail and, explore how the piece opens up private text messaging to the public sphere.

2. ‘smSage’: A Mobile Sound Platform ‘smSage’ by Ralph Borland and Tim Redfern was premiered at the Conflux Festival in New York in 2007. [5] ‘Conflux’ [6] is a festival of contemporary psychogeography where projects investigate “everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice” and aims to “reimagine the city as a playground, a space for positive change and an opportunity for civic engagement”, as festival organiser Ray writes on the website (Ray, 2008). ‘smSage’ was one of many projects at the festival that were engaging with public space in the streets of the Williamsburg quarter in Brooklyn (NYC). For this case study I draw upon my experience of the piece, my observations, and on the interview I conducted with the artists.

This is complemented with material from the project website. [7]

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Figure 2: Close-up of the camera housing of ‘smSage’, Brooklyn (NYC), 2007

The ‘smSage’ unit (with its speaker and mini-computer) sits in a security camera housing that is attached to a surface in a street as shown in figure 1 and figure 2. The ‘camera’ is silent but every few minutes it says “please text to this number”. If someone does send a text message to this number, the ‘camera’ reads out the message at full volume once, then immediately starts breaking the message down, replacing some of the words with ones from previous message, then the number of words is reduced. Redfern and Borland explained that the text messages are read out “loud and then as it starts to disintegrate the message it also starts to diminish in volume and number of words, so eventually it dies out and goes silent”. After a few minutes the piece starts to advertise itself again by asking passers-by to text to its number.

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‘smSage’ is self-contained [8] and wireless, consisting of a computer, a mobile phone, an amplifier and a speaker, all squeezed into a security camera housing (as detailed in a diagram by the artists, see figure 3) - that does not contain an actual camera. [9] The ‘computer’ carrying out the sms-to-speech processing is an embedded gumstix [10] computer running the open source operating system linux and the incoming messages are stored on a flash memory card. ‘smSage’ works with an open source speech synthesis system and though this phoneme-based system is more sophisticated than earlier sms-to-speech projects [11] it still features the unavoidable computery voice. [12] ‘smSage’ is also constantly scanning for devices in the vicinity that have their bluetooth status set to ‘discoverable’ and are thus revealing their ‘name’. This bluetooth scanning aims to “use their [the mobile phones] advertised names to try to elucidate a response, i.e. by saying ‘hey there Ralph, why not send me a message on 087 1234567?’,” as their website explains (Borland and Redfern, 2007).

The artists conceptualised the project as “disguised and embedded in the city”. They imagined “a surreal experience for somebody walking down the street and then hear this voice and they stop and then they are like ‘where is the voice coming from, this mad mumbling voice?’ And the security camera is the last place you’d expect it to come from”.

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Figure 3: Technical set-up of ‘smSage’ as illustrated by the artists

However, when ‘smSage’ was set-up during the final day of the ‘Conflux’ festival, this coincided with a festival ‘Block Party’ on the street outside the festival venue ‘glowlab’ with street painters, workshops, puppetry, performances and a DJ playing a large sound system (see figure 4). ‘smSage’ was located close to the block party, and the music was dominating the soundscape. The artists comment that the location of ‘smSage’ at Conflux was at odds with their aim to have the project “embedded” and passersby hearing it on their normal walks. The artists acknowledged that one of the aspects of the piece is to work with restricted space, but they had

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a less ‘festival’ location in mind. From my own observations I agree that the project works much better in a quiet everyday environment such as a side street. As soon as the quite street chosen as ‘smSage’ location at the festival turned noisy during the party it was impossible to hear the artwork advertising itself, or the messages sent by the audience.

Figure 4: Part of the crowd attending the ‘Block Party’ on the final day of the ‘Conflux’ festival (The sound system and DJ that are dominating the soundscape are not visible in this picture)

When I asked Redfern and Borland about other locations where they would like to put ‘smSage’ up in the future they name a pedestrianised street in Dublin (where they both live), as this is a location “where there’s people passing by and possibly where there’s a social scene, a bar, people

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hanging out anyway”. At the same time the artists are looking for a “quiet place”, underlining how difficult it is to find an ‘ideal’ location for public art and how especially public sound art has very specific needs in terms of location (I return to this discussion below).

One of the main inspirations for the project was “an article that had been in the paper about talking security cameras in England”. [13] There cameras enable the officials watching the camera footage in real time to ‘talk’ to any ‘offenders’ from their remote viewing location via a speaker that has been connected to the camera. Borland explains that the difference between what they are doing and the speaking cameras in the UK is that the latter are a way for authority to control people, to enforce the rules - whereas their work turns the intended function of a talking camera upside down.

[14] For me, there seems to be an interesting tension between the heavily visual reference of housing the piece in a security camera housing (figure 2) [15] and the sound focus of the piece - there is no camera but a speaker (and other technology) in the housing. I asked the artists if they had considered that people might interact with the camera in a specific way because they might expect that they are filmed while they are texting. They replied that I am not the only one to assume that there is a camera in the housing as well, Conflux organiser Sarah Pace also thought they would “have a record of what happens in front of it”. In the interview, the artists briefly consider the idea of including a camera as it would be a way of building in a documentation method but they then agreed that “It is definitely not part of the concept of the piece”.

The talking CCTV camera that inspired ‘smSage’ is a symptom of the CCTV society, of surveillance culture. In ‘smSage’ this power relationship

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of being watched and being talked at is turned around. The audience is not watched (although it probably still feels watched because of the visual reference of the camera housing) and the audience itself contributes the messages that are then broadcast, not the disembodied and remote instance of the security firm or state institution that is operating the speaking camera.

The assumptions of what a security camera is - visual surveillance, being watched - are ‘broken’ in ‘smSage’ because the visual reference of the camera housing is in fact concealing a sonic broadcast device - a speaker (and not a camera). The artist’s use of a surveillance camera housing for their piece is problematic as it raises the question why people should respond to a ‘surveillance’ voice invitation. The artist’s own surveillance position seems to deter people from contributing to the piece, rather than moving them to send in a text message, as I discuss further below.

‘Smsage’ is quite a transient intervention, due to security and power concerns it can only stay up for limited amounts of time. Also, the auditory communication of broadcasting ‘small texts’ into public space is of an ephemeral, transient nature. This temporal scale of the piece seems to recapitulate what is found inside it. In the set-up of the piece the ephemeral nature of sound seems to be amplified as each message is only broadcast once in its entirety, and then fades and gets mixed with other messages.

It would have been possible to program the platform in a different way, for example where messages are repeated. The materiality of the private texts messages changes as they are transformed into voice messages, they are given a voice in public, but it is an ephemeral voice.

The public constituting the piece by sending messages is linked to the location of the installation. Does it mean the platform operates like

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a traditional location of episodic publics? [16] Whereas the episodic publics of taverns of coffee houses would rely on ‘real’ voices of people communicating with each other in an indoor location, in ‘smSage’ a computer voice is reading out people’s written text messages. Traditional episodic publics would come together again and again over time, people returning to the same pub or cafe. Some art platforms might function in a similar way [17] (but often over shorter periods of time such as weeks or months), [18] but ‘smSage’ is only installed for a limited amount of time, making it more like an event.

Is the public made by ‘Smsage’ thus more occasional? Habermas names performances, concerts and part congresses as examples of public forming around an event. These more traditional occasional publics have a defined location and time frame. ‘smSage’ however has a more open time-frame than a concert or congress, participants can send their messages anytime (while the installation is up), but in terms of location it operates in a similar fashion to occasional publics: you have to be in the location to participate and experience it. The occasion for ‘smSage’ is an art festival, and I will return to the significance of this later.

The participation in the public sphere of ‘smSage’ does not only require bodily presence in the location of the installation, it also requires the mediated communication of sending a text message. This would be more indicative of Habermas’ abstract public, of scattered media consumers.

Here, the media are both produced and consumed at once, sending sms and listening to them. The participants are not scattered around the globe, as in Habermas’ concept of abstract media publics, they need to be in the very location of the installation.

However, the participants are still scattered (not in space but) in time, a

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temporal scattering that is amplified by the transient nature of sound. The micro public that is established by the ‘small texts’ sent in by the audience and broadcast by the installation has aspects of episodic, occasional and abstract publics. The piece’s engagement with the public can also be described as ephemeral, transient and fragile, resonating with the artist’s own description of ‘smSage’ as “voicing and remixing participants comments and observations in a transient, ephemeral way” (Borland and Redfern, 2007).

3. Mobilising Public Spheres Mobile sound art platforms like ‘smSage’ aim to give a ‘voice’ to passersby in public spaces, to “transmit the voice of the public” (Borland and Redfern, 2007), by amplifying their private text messages with a speaker.

Could platforms, artworks like these be a way to mobilise dormant public spheres? In returning to Habermas’ public sphere concept, I discuss the mobilisation of dormant public spheres and the ability of topics to move from the periphery of the public sphere to the core and illustrate these by introducing two more artworks, before returning to ‘smSage’ in the final part of this paper.

Habermas introduces the idea of two different states of the public sphere, a dormant one and a mobilised one. In a “public sphere at rest” the influence of the civil society on the political system is rather small, but “in periods of mobilisation, the structures that actually support the authority of a critically engaged public begin to vibrate” (Habermas, 1996: 379). A mobilisation of the dormant public sphere takes place in a “perceived crisis situation“ (Habermas, 1996: 380). According to Habermas,

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the actors in civil society thus far neglected in our scenario can assume a surprisingly active and momentous role. In spite of a lesser organisational complexity and a weaker capacity for action, and despite the structural disadvantages, mentioned earlier, at the critical moments of an accelerated history, these actors get the chance to reverse the normal circuits of communication in the political system’s mode of problem solving.

(Habermas, 1996, p. 380-1) One of the first prominent examples for mobile media being used to mobilise a public was the use of text messages (SMS) to summon people for demonstrations in the Philippines in 2001 (Rheingold, 2003: 157).

Gordon (Gordon, 2007) also discusses interesting case studies of mobile phones being used in moments of Crisis (e.g. SARS, London bombings).

Mobile technology can facilitate two forms of mobilisation. As in the Philippines example, they can be used to gather people for ‘traditional’ forms of protest such as demonstrations. But devices such as mobile phones can also be used for remote forms of activism, where the mobilisation does not result in a physical gathering. The art work ‘smSage’ illustrates this potential and if we imagine that this platform could be ‘taken over’ by a specific local or political group, this potential would become even more apparent. Another mobile sound art platform , the ‘Tool for Armchair Activists’, illustrates this.

The ‘Tool for Armchair Activists’ is another example of a mobile sound art platform where the audience is invited to send text messages that are then broadcast publicly. The piece was designed by the interdisciplinary art group ‘Troika’ (Sebastien Noel, Conny Freyer and Eva Rucki) in collaboration with Moritz Waldemeyer in 2005. As can be seen in figure 5, it is a self-contained unit meant to be strapped to a lamppost “in front of pro-eminent [sic] buildings like the house of parliament, or other 406 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

institutional buildings in front of which many protests occur” (Troika, 2005). Participants can send text messages to an advertised phone number.

The unit receives the messages, reads them with a computer voice and plays them loudly via a bullhorn.

Figure 5: ‘Tool for Armchair Activists’ by Troika 2005 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 407

Troika advertise as one of the main features of the tool that the activists can stay warm in their comfortable living rooms instead of the “hassle of sitting in the rain, waiting for your favourite MP to pass by” (Troika, 2005). One of the main differences to the other artworks discussed in this paper is the attitude of the artists: Troika regards the work as ironic (Baker, 2006), labels protests as “rants” (Troika, 2005) and thus the group was amused when the work was featured on an activists’ blog (Debatty, 2006).

Troika seems to be cynical both about traditional forms of protest (“rant’”) and about the remote kind of protest that their work comments upon (“armchair”). Consequently, they do not see themselves in the tradition of ‘remote activism’ with its culture of online campaigning and hacktivism that has invented numerous new ways for remote (electronic) intervention.

My discussion of ‘Tool for Armchair Activists’ is based on documentation by the artists, and on reviews of the piece. From the material at hand I cannot comment on the actual use of this platform (as I do for ‘smSage’).

With its contradiction of enabling remote protests while having a cynical view of it, ‘Tool for Armchair Activists’ still shows the potential of (mobile sound art) platforms to mobilise dormant public spheres by enabling the public to send private forms of communication such as text messages to a public address system that broadcasts these messages into the public.

4. Moving from Periphery to Centre Habermas also gives a detailed account of how issues can move from the periphery of the public sphere to the core in three different ways. To answer “the central question of who can place issues on the agenda and determine what direction the lines of communication take”, Habermas modifies

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a model by Cobb, Ross and Ross (Habermas, 1996: 379). Cobb et. al. have three different models for how new topics can be pushed from first initiatives to decision-making bodies: “inside access model, mobilisation model, outside initiative model”, depending on who is raising the issue and how it is moved to the decision making bodies (Habermas, 1996: 379).

If the initiative comes from inside the political system, and stays inside it without any influence or inclusion of the public sphere, they talk about the inside access model. If the “proponents of the issue must mobilise the public sphere” to successfully pursue an initiative that originated inside the political system, it is the “mobilisation model” as Habermas summarises (Habermas, 1996: 379). These first two models are the most common ones because the power of agenda setting is with the Government leaders rather than with the “parliamentary complex” (Habermas, 1996: 380), at least in times of relative political stability.

For this paper most relevant is the third model - the “outside initiative model” - where the forces of the initiative are located “at the periphery, outside the purview of the political system” (Habermas, 1996: 380). For Habermas, the mass media mainly draws on sources by professionals that originate in the centre. Therefore it is much more difficult to “start and manage” issues from the periphery, but Habermas gives a long list of successful examples that made this move, from environmental to Third World issues (1996: 380). Habermas credits initiatives on the periphery - from “associations (...) and cultural establishments (...) to ‘public-interestgroups’ (...) and churches or charitable organisations” - as examples for the “informal, highly differentiated and cross-linked channels of communication” that operate at the periphery of the public sphere (1996: 355-356).

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Along this process of moving from the periphery to the core, the issues need to be taken up by institutions such as “newspapers and interested associations, clubs, professional organisations, academies and universities” (Habermas, 1996: 381). Here, the mass media have a crucial role; they are the main means of moving issues from the periphery onto the public agenda: “Only through their controversial presentation in the media do such topics reach the larger public and subsequently gain a place on the ‘public agenda’” (Habermas, 1996: 381). Habermas describes various activities that can boost this process, such as “sensational actions, mass protests and incessant campaigning” (1996: 381). I argue that art can also be part of this process of moving issues form the periphery to the centre.

For Habermas, art is part of the “‘literary’ public sphere”. He argues that art can be a way to connect personal life experience and public spheres with its own ‘language’: Besides religion, art, and literature, only the spheres of ‘private’ life have an existential language at their disposal, in which socially generated problems can be assessed in terms of one’s own life history. Problems voiced in the public sphere first become visible when they are mirrored in personal life experience. To the extent that these experiences find their concise expression in the language of religion, art, and literature, the ‘literary’ public sphere in the broader sense, which is specialised for the articulation of values and world disclosure, is intertwined with the political public sphere. (Habermas, 1996: 365) [my emphasis] Habermas thus makes an interesting link between art and the political public sphere in describing art, literature and religion as “specialised for the articulation of values and world disclosure” (1996: 365). If art has the capacity to find a language to voice personal life experience, this is

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potentially quite a powerful position. Art can produce condensed versions of personal life experiences and then bring them out into the public sphere.

If these experiences are problems that are situated at the periphery of the public sphere, art might take up a similar function as media in moving issues from the periphery to the core of the public sphere. For the examples discussed in this paper, this function is not only centred around the content of the messages sent in by the participants, it also functions through the very process of communication itself.

To illustrate my argument that (mobile sound) art projects can be one of these activities that can help agenda-setting from the periphery, I introduce another example of a mobile sound art platform where the public sends in text messages from their mobile phones that are subsequently broadcast publicly. ‘TextFm’ [19] is an interactive installation by the British artists Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood where text messages are transformed into a sound collage that is broadcast on radio or via a sound system. [20] Participants are invited to send messages to a phone number that has been published in advance. In addition to the content of the message, people can add parameters concerning the style of the computer voice by adding specific code: the language (e.g. English or German) as well as pitch and speed of the voice (both on a scale form 0 to 9). The text messages are then read out by speech synthesis software according to these parameters and finally broadcast on a local radio station. The work is constantly changing, depending on how many people participate at any given moment. When many people take part, the incoming text messages weave a seamless carpet of words, whereas during quieter periods only the a continuous background sound, (a mix of unprocessed bird song) [21] with the occasional messages in between were broadcast on radio or “by anything with a sufficient sound output, such as a public address system” (Fuller and Harwood, 2004: 238).

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Figure 6: The technical set-up of ‘TextFm’ by Fuller and Harwood (my illustration). Here, only the radio output is illustrated, but in some instances of the piece, the messages have also been broadcast via sound systems

In summer 2002 ‘TextFm’ was installed in collaboration with ‘Public Netbase’ to support a campaign for the re-location of this local alternative media institution. ‘Public Netbase’ put up a ‘Basecamp’, an orange tent in the streets of Vienna’s museums quarter, which was open to the public (see figure 7). “With the tent’s new site, Public Netbase calls attention to the many preconditions for its relocation into the Museumsquarter [sic] that have yet to be realised”, as the institution’s website claims (Netbase, 2002).

The ‘Public Netbase’ website adds that the orange tent is a “’blazing’ symbol for a critical cultural practice, i.e. a monolithic landmark for the much desired cultural diversity that is regularly and ineffectively conjured up in the context of the Museumsquarter” and in addition that ‘Textfm’ turns it into “a ‘sonar’ media installation” where “passers-by and remote users can listen to and interact with Text-FM” (Netbase, 2002).

In an interview Fuller describes that during the three-month installation in the tent in Vienna, “the use got really out of control, turning into a social 412 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

process itself ” (Dauerer, 2002). [22] In a later article, Fuller states that ‘Public Netbase’ supported ‘Textfm’ and also “took it and turned it into something with their own flavour and daring, connecting the system up to, at different times, a public address system; CB radio, with sets installed in bars and cafes; community radio” (Fuller, 2009). The way ‘Public Netbase’ used ‘Textfm’ in their campaign echoes Habermas’ concept of moving issues from the periphery to the centre of public spheres.

Figure 7: ‘TextFm’ as a public installation in Vienna in 2002.

The sound is broadcast via a PA system (and via Internet)

As we can see from these descriptions, at this particular TextFm installation, the sound was not broadcast on radio, instead, a PA was used for audio output. In addition, people could listen to the audio stream on the internet (and also send messages via a web interface). The internet access was the idea of the host institution that aimed to promote Vienna’s media culture and to locate it in a global context. The artists remained sceptical about the internet option: “This initiative effectively de-localised the installation”

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that was originally meant to “find out whether a rich interactive culture of use could - following the London pirate radio scene - be developed in an urban area restricted by the broadcast range of a radio transmitter, or other means of broadcast using the materials of ‘TextFm’ (Fuller and Harwood, 2004).

The artists’ log of the text messages sent in to various ‘TextFm’ installations shows that the participants invented all sorts of uses for the platform: Some people used the system for “sloganising, conversations, insults, meeting arrangements, flyering for DJ sets, asking questions, setting up conversations”, as the artists discuss in an interview (Kasprzak, 2002). A very different use was more “reminiscent of concrete or sound poetry. Such users would send repeated clusters of characters. For instance a message might comprise of: ‘ugh a ugh a ugh a ugh a ugh a ugh a ugh a...’ et cetera” (Fuller and Harwood, 2004).

Fuller and Harwood’s key interest was “creating an open media system” that addresses issues such as censorship, legal issues and technological limitations (e.g. length of a text message) (Fuller and Harwood, 2004: 241).

The artists understand ‘TextFm’ as an open system that illustrates their sense of the term “Media Ecology”. [23] The work also illustrates Fuller’s concept of “speculative software [that] can be understood as opening up a space for the re-invention of software by its own means” (Fuller, 2003: 30).

Harwood and Fuller’s ‘TextFm’ platform opened up a dynamic space that is played by the participants and their mobile devices. Inspired by “Bertholt Brecht’s vision of radio as a two-way device” amongst others, their aim was to “open up a novel space for communication” and allow the mobile phone to “tak[e] voice in the city” (Fuller and Harwood, 2004: 240-241). I argue that in allowing private text messages to enter public space loudly, pieces like ‘TextFm’ can take part in mobilising public spheres, in moving issues 414 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

from the periphery to the centre of the public spheres.

To go beyond the discussions of concepts of mobile sound art platforms, it is now time to return to the experience of ‘smSage’- and to discuss the pragmatics of it, the ‘making’ of the piece by the audience rather than the ‘making’ of it in the concept of the artists. After relating specific aspects of Habermas’ public sphere concept - the mobilising of dormant public spheres and the moving of issues from the periphery to the centre of public spheres - to the mobile sound art works ‘TextFM’ and ‘Tool for Armchair Activists’ it is time to revisit the key example of this paper: ‘smSage’.

5. Making and Breaking ‘smSage’ In this section I return to discussing the art work ‘smSage’ and shift my focus from the aims and concepts of the artists to the actual experience of the piece at the ‘Conflux’ festival. Borland and Redfern’s ‘platform’ aims to “transmit the voice of the public” (Borland and Redfern, 2007). The actual experience of ‘smSage’ challenges some of the artist’s concepts and it is this ‘breaking down’ of several aspects of the art work, for example the ‘breaking’ of the communication required to ‘make’ the piece that holds an interesting tension. The making and the breaking of the alternative, transient public spheres of the mobile sound art works discussed in this paper are intrinsically linked. If ‘small texts’ establish the piece, what happens if they are not being sent or if they cannot be heard?

Urban sociologist Sassen argues that art and activism are ways of ‘making public’ that are outside the corporate world (Sassen, 2006: 20). She distinguishes between “public access space” on one hand and “public space” on the other hand - “the latter requires making” [my emphasis] (Sassen,

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2006: 21). She links her discussion of the relation between globalisation and locality, the complex interstices of various networks and localities, to art and activist projects such as ‘Digital City Amsterdam’ or ‘Mongrel’.

Sassen suggests that new media artist allows for: the possibility of constructing forms of globality that are neither part of global corporate media or consumer firms, nor part of elite universalisms or ‘high culture’. It is the possibility of giving presence to multiple local actors, projects and imaginaries in ways that may constitute alternative and counter-globalities. (Sassen, 2006: 25) Sassen reminds us that the alternative spaces or (globalities) that these media art projects suggest require making. The projects she mentions as well as the projects discussed in this paper - are making a public space capable of supporting communicative action. But I argue that the making of these spaces is at least as interesting as the breaking of these spaces. For ‘smSage’ it seems to be impossible to make this alternative public sphere, this counter globality, without breaking it at the same time. I am not attacking the artists for the fact it breaks, I am discussing how difficult it is to make these spaces. I am investigating their project not through its formal architectures only but through how it worked in practice - when it always broke.

5.1 Texting Impossible For the first two days of the ‘Conflux’ festival in 2007 ‘smSage’ was not installed yet, and the artists nowhere to be seen - they were working around the clock to get the piece up and running. The main technical problem was related to the difference between European and US mobile phones

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networks. For the remaining two days of the festival ‘smSage’ was up, but was not working as intended: it was still not possible to text in - the camera was broadcasting messages that had been pre-recorded by the artists. This gap between the concept of the piece and the actual experience at the festival was caused by technical problems. The supposedly global communication technology of mobile phones turns out to be not that easily adaptable to different countries. This caused huge problems when the piece came to be set up in a specific location. The artist’s frustration with this unravels the promise of easy global communication.

One of the main challenges in developing the piece was the interaction between mobile phone and computer. The artists developed the piece in Europe (Ireland), with a European mobile phone and network. On arrival for the festival in the US, Borland and Redfern realised that although the mobile phone was supposed to work on the US network as well, it did not: “We brought a number of phones (...) with us and as we arrived on Monday we put a SIM card in and expected it to work - and it didn’t connect”. They tried to solve this by “order[ing] the exact same model of phone but one that is made for an American band”. But even with this American phone the communication between phone and “computer seems to be a bit tricky.

We’re so nearly there. We did get it running. And then it crashed. It keeps crashing”. The artist’s frustration with the technology (that is meant to be global, to not care where it is) ‘breaking down’ is understandable, because this means that the audience was not able to send in their text messages to ‘make’ the piece.

In the interview, the artists also discuss the relation between the technical difficulties, and the economic background of the piece: “we are just a small partnership of artists rather than a huge engineering firm who can get people to solve these things on an engineering level”. Redfern and Borland MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 417

work with a tiny budget and did not receive any funding from the festival or other sources to develop the piece. They applied for arts council funding in Ireland to cover the travel costs but are not sure if they will receive it.

Their department at the University of Dublin is paying for some of the hardware and they hope to receive some funding for future exhibitions of ‘smSage’.

At the ‘Conflux’ festival the piece was technically not working and the audience could not send in their text messages that were supposed to constitute the piece, by “transmit[ing] the voice of the public” (Borland and Redfern, 2007). The ‘making’ of public spheres that ‘smSage’ was aiming to enable was ‘broken’ on the level of the technology that was meant to facilitate this communication.

5.2 No Messages Even when ‘smSage’ is working technically, there is room for ‘break down’.

The piece (as most interactive/interventionist media art) is asking quite a lot of its users, expecting them to walk around the neighbourhood, to stop and listen to the installation, to get their phones out and send a text message to the advertised number. The ‘breaking’ of the piece discussed in this section concerns the possibility of non-participation in the piece.

When I encountered ‘smSage’ again, at the ISEA 2009 [24] in Dublin (Ireland), the piece was working, as the artists assured me. (For unknown reasons I was however unable to send a text message from my specific English mobile phone.) This Dublin set-up is shown in figure 8 and figure 9. I observed the ‘smSage’ installation outside one of the festival exhibition openings for about an hour. [25] In figure 8 we can see festival visitors

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standing in front of the windows of a gallery with ‘smSage’ positioned above their heads. During this time, several members of the festival audience sent in text messages that were broadcast into the Dublin street.

These were members of the festival audience who knew about the piece from the conference material and the exhibition the piece was a part of.

Figure 8: ‘smSage’ at the 2009 ISEA festival in Dublin: A member of the festival audience texting to the installation (‘camera’ at top of the photo)

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Figure 9: During my short period of observation after the festival audience had moved on from the exhibition opening, I did not see any passers-by interacting with ‘smSage’ (on the facade on the left) at the ISEA 2009 in Dublin

After a while, the festival audience that was attending the exhibition opening moved on to the next event. I stayed on for a little while, keen to observe passers-by stopping to interact with ‘smSage’. During this - very limited - observation period, I did not see anybody that stopped to listen to the installation or to send in their own messages (see figure 9). If the making of mobile sound art platforms relies on the participation of the audience, on the sending in of text messages for example, to establish the piece (in action, not as concept), then non-participation is also a way to ‘break’ the piece, in the same way that participation ‘makes’ it. This observation is not meant as criticising the piece, it is an observation that is also true for many other pieces of interactive and public art, but that is not 420 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

often discussed. ‘Smsage’ attracted some members of the festival public to ‘make’ the piece (in Dublin), but not the general public.

To grapple with this question on what kind of audience ‘smSage’ is speaking to (or not), what kind of public is ‘making’ the piece (or not) I return to my earlier discussion of Habermas’ model of episodic, occasional and abstract public in the age of pervasive mobile media. ‘smSage’ aims to speak to an episodic public that frequents the streets of a specific neighbourhood, but also engages with the occasional public of the audience of the art festival it is part of. The interaction with the piece is via mobile media, pointing to an abstract public of media users. Like many other mobile media projects the intended audience seems to be very broad: anyone who happens to walk past regularly (episodic) plus the festival audience (occasional) plus remote media audiences (abstract) - without taking into consideration the specifics of the particular mobile media public. For platforms of mobile (sound) art the occasion needs to be ‘made’ by the artists, not only by the media (setting up the kit to broadcast text messages) but also by an engagement with the physical and social context of the ‘occasion’ and its location.

A critical engagement with the actually physical location and its social context, the people who inhabit and frequent and ‘make’ the space is crucial.

Engagement with the way mobile media already operate in these spaces is necessary to find a fruitful dialogue between the physical, the social and the media context in establishing publics. This is difficult - but the ‘anytime anywhere’ promise of mobile media does not work. ‘Platforms’ ask people to be engaged, to interact, to contribute, to ‘make’ the piece. The audience does need to have the interest to engage, and this needs to be realised in platform pieces of mobile sound art.

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The artists seem to presume that ‘people’ (the public) would want to ‘contribute’ to ‘smSage’. Working with an invitation to contribute spoken by an unknown computer voice (“please text to...”) and broadcast by a surveillance technology (CCTV camera) in a fairly random location, does not take into consideration the context of the specific public in the location of the installation. This explains partly why the public choose not to respond or did not see this as speaking into the public.

5.3 Cannot Hear Another ‘make or break’ moment in mobile sound art is the sound itself.

If the actual installation blends in visually (CCTV cameras are ubiquitous in many Western cities, and especially Irish and English ones), and the sound of it is not heard (because of a noisy urban environment), then participation becomes difficult because the piece is in effect invisible and inaudible.

In Dublin, because of the traffic and the many conversations going on amongst the festival audience it was difficult to understand the ‘smSage’ messages being broadcast. And if we think back to the ‘Conflux’ set-up of ‘smSage’, there the sound of the installation was overpowered by the sound of the block party that was going on at the same time (figure 4). It is almost an irony that a piece of public sound art that intends to generate a public sphere is being so easily displaced by a more traditional kind of sonic public space activity – the block party. For ‘smSage’ to be able to ‘give a voice’, everybody has to be silent first. The technological set-up implicitly makes these impossibly disciplinarian demands on its potential audience and thus fails to live up to its artists’ intentions.

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The examples discussed in this paper have illustrated that artistic interventions in public do not need to be “eye-opening”, they can also be ear-opening. Sound art challenges dominant textual cultures and visual paradigms of art. The artworks discussed in this paper are using speakers, public address systems or bullhorns to broadcast sound into public spaces.

The sonic politics of public sound art, the way it engages with the local soundscape is also crucial in establishing the piece. While loud sound art can be imposing, quiet sound art can be overheard, rendering the piece ‘invisible’.

6. Conclusion Drawing on Habermas’ concept of (multiple) public spheres, I argued that the kinds of public spheres that mobile media establish are a curious mix of episodic, occasional and abstract (Habermas, 1996:374). Abstract and scattered media publics can be brought together as occasional publics at certain events (such as participating in an artwork) that are rather episodic (e.g. on a street corner). These micro-publics are established through small texts in a temporary intervention or platform, making them ephemeral (sound) and transient (you walk past). The notion of mobilising dormant public spheres that begin to “vibrate” (Habermas, 1996:379) was examined in relation to the mobile sound art work ‘Tool for Armchair Activists’. I then argued how art can be one way to move issues from the periphery to the centre of public spheres, and illustrated this with the artwork ‘TextFm’.

In the light of these concerns, I discussed the mobile sound art platform ‘smSage’ throughout this paper, focussing on the concept of the piece first, and on the actual experience of the piece later on, cumulating in a debate around the ‘making’ and ‘breaking’ of public spheres in this piece.

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This discussion demonstrated how complex and difficult it is to ‘make’ public art spaces that can act as a public sphere. Even when working in an art space (installation at a festival), and with accessible technology (text messages) which are idealised spaces - it is difficult, always provisional and ‘in the making’. In the process of ‘making’ the piece, I pointed out several ways this process broke down: when the technology was not working (i.e. it was not possible to contribute), when people choose not to contribute (i.e. just walk past) and when people did not hear or see the piece (because of the surrounding noise and the ubiquity of CCTV cameras). The text messages that ‘make’ ‘smSage’ can only be broadcast if the piece works technically and people do actually send in messages, and the broadcast messages can only be heard if the urban soundscape the installation is positioned in does not drown out the ‘voice’ of the piece. This illustrated the complexity of ‘making’ a mobile sound art platform. ‘smSage’ and the other artworks discussed in this paper were examples of the category sound platforms that I developed in my taxonomy of mobile sound art. The artists build the platform, the audience contributions make the piece - this is how they operate in s nutshell. The building of the platform and the audience contributions are of course intrinsically linked. This paper has highlighted how difficult it is to build such platforms where the audience contributes to the piece, making the artwork by mobile media interaction, and it is precisely because the contributions by the public are required. This makes the spaces made by these platforms so fragile: they require more generosity from the people participating than often acknowledged by the artists.

I argued that critical engagement with the - physical, social and media context of the platform is crucial for the audience to take up the invitation of contribution to the platform. The public needs to have a desire to engage 424 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

with the piece, for example by sending a text message. Those platforms (‘textFm’, for example) that were situated in a body of discourse, an existing discussion had more ‘small texts’ to establish a temporary public sphere, than those who were more focused on the technical aspects (‘smSage’ for example). This suggests that situating platforms of mobile sound art in an existing community or discourse, for example in relation to a contested issue (such as regarding the ownership or history of a certain public place) would allow for a more critical engagement with the relevant physical and social context, and thus allow for more ‘small texts’ to establish temporary but relevant publics.

This argument brings ‘new’ ways of public art where audiences contribute with mobile media back to established discourses of ‘new genre public art’ and especially community-related public art projects. Criticisms of public art (e.g. who is in a position to give ‘a voice’ to the community?) and its sometimes dominating intentions (e.g. who got asked before somebody installed a statue that is supposed to relate to a neighbourhood?) and excessive expectations (e.g. how happy the community will be to engage) - remind us that public art does not work ‘better’ just because we use ‘new’ media, and art isn’t ‘public’ just because it appears in a public place.

However, the presented examples feature a use of sound in public that is not commercialised (e.g. Muzak) and individualised (e.g. iPod). Instead the use of sound in these examples enables some sort of collaboration, where the process of communicating ‘makes’ the work of art by opening up the private communication (of text messages) to a public exchange. This is a slightly hopeful argument, hopeful that despite ever more commercialised public spaces and (mobile) media, artists find ways to open up alternative spaces, to establish local, episodic, fragile public ‘sphere-lets’ or micro publics. The making of these is idealistic, and difficult, but needed - even if they break.

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Notes [1] For a definition of sound art ‘platforms’ see (Behrendt, 2010) [2] Parts of this section of this paper have been published previously as Behrendt, F. (2008). Texting and Calling Public Spheres: Mobile Phones, Sound Art and Habermas. In M. Hartmann, P. Rössler, & J. R. Höflich (Eds.), After the Mobile Phone? Social Changes and the Development of Mobile Communication (pp. 35-54). Berlin: Frank & Timme.

[3] and also ‘TextFm’ and ‘Tool for Armchair Activists’, as discussed below.

[4] I work with the 1996 translation of Habermas’ 1992 ‘Between Facts and Norms’.

[5] I experienced the piece again in 2009, as discussed below.

[6] The Conflux festival was founded by Christina Ray and David Mandl in 2003 and is produced by glowlab.

[7] The project got some brief press coverage. Most noteworthy is that is was mentioned in a New York Times article about the conflux festival (Schwendener, 2007). ‘smSage’ was also featured on two more prominent blogs: MAKE magazine blog (Brucker-Cohen, 2007), and the Networked_Music_Review Blog (Green, 2007) as well as on several minor blogs. However, none of these sources contribute further information about the piece.

[8] Redfern and Borland also aim to make ‘smSage’ self-sufficient by powering it with a solar panel (at the moment they cannot leave it up as the battery needs recharging).

[9] I return to this issue later on in this paper.

[10] Gumstix are a popular choice in the mobile developer community and advertised on the company website as: ‘the world’s smallest full function, open source computers [...] marketed to companies, product designers and hobbyists in more than forty countries worldwide.’ (gumstix, n.d.)

[11] E.g. ‘Simpletext’ that was developed by Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Tim Redfern and Duncan Murphy and has been performed since 2003 (Brucker-Cohen et al., 2003). The audience can influence the audiovisual performance with text messages from their mobile phones (and alternatively via internet from their laptops).

[12] In the future, the artists might design different voices for it, for example with different personalities, from manic to calm, by adjusting pitch and volume, as they discuss in the interview.

[13] The BBC news article ‘’Talking CCTV scolds offenders’ covers this story they mention (BBC News, 2007).

[14] Another link between CCTV, sound and art was explored in TrackThe-Trackers (2003) by Annika Ruest (Ruest, 2003). While walking through town one hears the presence of surveillance camera on the earphones. Areas densely populated with surveillance cameras produces a dense texture of

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knocking sounds; each knocking represents one camera and gets louder when approaching it. Participants are invited to add more camera positions to the database using the mobile tracker device they also carry around for listening.

[15] The discussion of the camera brings up another interesting topic public art is always facing: how can artists make sure that their piece is not stolen (unless this is part of the piece of course)? Initially, Borland and Redfern were hoping to just leave the ‘camera’ up, but then it started to become quite precious with all the technology in it.

The artists thus need to consider “to carefully place it in terms of it being somewhere where it’s out of easy reach”. Redfern and Borland know from previous experience with public art that they also need to “look at methods of attachments which are hard to take down (...) and you got to use special lock nuts” - the irony is that not only public sculptures, but also “ordinary security cameras also have to be protected in that way”.

[16] As discussed above, see section ‘Episodic, Occasional and Abstract Publics’.

[17] For example ‘Park Fiction’ in Hamburg (See Wieczorek, 2006; Schmidt-Wulfen, 2004).

[18] Hirschhorn’s ‘Bataille Monument’ (2002) for example (see Basualdo and Laddaga, 2004).

[19] The spelling of this work both by the artists and by the press is inconsistent, including ‘Text FM’, ‘Text.fm’ and ‘Text-FM’. Here, I use only one spelling: ‘TextFm’, unless using quotes that include a different spelling.

[20] ‘TextFm’ has been shown several times in 2001 and 2002.

[21] The artists used this ‘background sound’ in order to signal to the audience that the ‘system’ is still working even if no messages are currently being received and broadcast (Fuller and Harwood, 2004: 240).

[22] My translation of a German newspaper article. The original reads: “Wir haben es seit drei Monaten in einem Zelt in Wien installiert. Es ist interessant, wie der Gebrauch dabei völlig außer Kontrolle geriet und selbst zu einem sozialen Prozess geworden ist. “ (Dauerer, 2002).

[23] Fuller’s understanding of “Media Ecology” - a term originally coined by McLuhan (2008: 271) in the 1970s - is that “all media be taken as mutational fields and aggregations of force, subject to change by multiple dynamics, conjunction with new devices, techniques and usages” (Fuller and Harwood, 2004; see also Fuller, 2005).

[24] ISEA is the International Society for Electronic Arts that holds biannual (now annual) conferences and exhibitions at host institutions.

[25] Due to my own speaking engagements at the conference I was unable to spend more time with the piece. It was only installed during the afternoon and evening of this specific day of the conference (31 August 2009).

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References Basualdo, C. & Laddaga, R. (2004) Rules of Engagement: Art and Experimental Communities. Artforum, XLIII, 166–169.

BBC News (2007) ‘Talking’ CCTV scolds offenders. [online] Available at: <http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6524495.stm> [Accessed 02 April 2010] Behrendt, F. (2008) Texting and Calling Public Spheres: Mobile Phones, Sound Art and Habermas. In After the Mobile Phone? Social Changes and the Development of Mobile Communication, (Eds, Hartmann, M., Rössler, P. & Höflich, J.R.) Frank & Timme, Berlin, pp. 35-54.

Behrendt, F. (2010) Mobile Sound: Media Art in Hybrid Spaces. Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex.

Borland, R. & Redfern, T. (2007) smSage: About. [online] Available at: <http:// www.eclectronics.org/projects/smsage/about.php> [Accessed 02 April 2010] Brucker-Cohen, J. (2007) SMSage makes surveillance fun. [online] Available at: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/09/ smsage_makes_surveillance.html> [Accessed 02 April 2010] Brucker-Cohen, J., Redfern, T. & Murphy, D. (2003) Simpletext.

Calhoun, C.J. (Ed.) (1992) Habermas and the public sphere MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass ; London.

Crossley, N. & Roberts, J.M. (Eds.) (2004) After Habermas: new perspectives on the public sphere Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review, Oxford.

Dahlgren, P. (2005) The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation. Political Communication, 22, 147–162.

Dauerer, V. (2002) Kunst reflektiert den Code. Interview with Matthew Fuller. die tageszeitung (taz).

Föllmer, G. (1999) Klangorganisation im öffentlichen Raum. In Klangkunst : tönende Objekte und klingende Räume, (Ed, MotteHaber, H.d.l.) Laaber Verlag, Laaber, pp. 191–227.

Fraser, N. (1992) Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actual Existing Democracy. In Habermas and the public sphere, (Ed, Calhoun, C.J.) MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass ; London, pp. pp109-142.

Fuller, M. (2003) Behind the blip : essays on the culture of software. Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY. Fuller, M. (2005) Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Leonardo Book). The MIT Press, Fuller, M. (2009) The Telephone and its Keys. [online] Available at: http://www. spc.org/fuller/texts/the-telephone-and-its-keys/> [Accessed 02 April 2010]

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Fuller, M. & Harwood, G. (2004) TextFm, an account. In Acoustic Space. Trans Cultural Mapping, (Eds, Tuters, M. & Smite, R.) The Centre for New Media Culture RIXC, Riga, pp. 238-241.

Gordon, J. (2007) The Mobile Phone and the Public Sphere. Convergence, 13, 307-319.

Green, J.-A. (2007) smSage. [online] Available at: <http://transition.turbulence. org/networked_music_review/2007/09/06/smsage/> [Accessed 02 April 2010] gumstix (n.d.) About gumstix. [online] Available at: <http://www. gumstix.com/about.html> [Accessed 02 April 2010] Habermas, J. (1996) Between facts and norms : contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Polity, Cambridge.

Kasprzak, M. (2002) TEXT FM: Open Broadcasting System. An interview with Graham Harwood and Matt Fuller. YEAR ZERO ONE FORUM, Spring 2002, Kester, G.H. (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. University of California Press, Luhmann, N. (1994) Soziale Systeme : Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main.

McLuhan, M. (2008) Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. MIT Press, Netbase, P. (2002) Basecamp Text FM. Ray, C. (2008) Conflux. Festival for contemporary psychogeography. [online] Available at: <http://confluxfestival.org/conflux2008/about/> [Accessed 02 April 2010] Rheingold, H. (2003) Smart mobs : the next social revolution. Perseus, Cambridge.

Roberts, B. (2009) Beyond the ‘Networked Public Sphere’: Politics, Participation and Technics in Web 2.0. Fibreculture, 14, Ruest, A. (2003) Track-The-Trackers.

Sassen, S. (2006) Public Interventions. The Shifting Meaning of the Urban Condition. Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, 11, 18-26.

Schmidt-Wulfen, S. (2004) On the “Publicness” of Public Art and the Limits of the Possible. In Public Art. A Reader, (Ed, Matzner, F.) Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 414-421.

Schwendener, M. (2007) In Brooklyn, a Confluxion Junction. New York Times, Silverstone, P.R. (1999) Why Study the Media? Sage, Redfern, T. & Borland, R. (2007) Interview at Conflux.

Troika (2005) Tool for Armchair Activists. [online] Available at: <http:// www.troika.uk.com/armchair_activists.htm> [Accessed 02 April 2010] Wieczorek, W. (2006) Park Fiction - Eine andauernde Geschichte der praktischen Stadtkritik. Park Fiction präsentiert: Umsonst & Draussen

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Social Media Platforms as Strategic Models for Local Community Development Tanya Søndergaard Toft MA in Media Studies The New School New York Website: www.tanyatoft.wordpress.com

Abstract The use of new media technologies for social collaboration and information exchange online has become widespread in the beginning of the 21st century, connecting social media users in countless global, social communities. It seems however like social places online are increasing in tandem with local distances between people offline, where social media provides an alternative to the social engagement in local, physical environments. The thesis of this paper explores the possibilities for redeveloping a local sense of place through the kinds of social practices that are customarily employed online, in order to create a connected, local sense of place. I will thus propose a strategic social media model for local community development as an extension of existing urban and rural planning and development practices; a social media-strategic architecture that facilitates the potential of the contemporary nature of participation and collaboration in online social media networks to develop a rural village through activities in the local community.

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Developing a meaningful sense of place I hardly even recall how we managed to arrange for our late afternoon play dates on Nørrebro Street, equipped with roller blades, small-size basketballs and hula hop rings. Maybe we captured a word of mouth on the bus home from school; maybe we were able to see the other kids starting to gather on the street. We were always about ten of us, and we came from different streets of the village. Our social engagement had a beauty of randomness to it, as we rarely pre-planned for meeting up. We were a local bunch of kids, sharing the “kid-scape” of this rural village of Hallund in the northern part of Denmark, and we had a strong sense about what it meant to be a local kid around this place. Maybe this was because, in our miniature world, this was the only opportunity we had to be social among our ‘peers’. It was sometime in the early 1990s; I was only familiar with the phenomenon of the cell phone through a radio-based, portable “calling-machine” that my dad brought with him into the pig shed, and my parents had not yet bought our very first computer. As children, we do not think about how our practices of playing and dreaming form a symbolic,

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meaningful space over-layering the physical place, or how the constellation of our ‘practices’ forms what a place means to us. But children’s play creates local spatial stories, from their imaginations and memories, and these stories are in continuous exchange with the physical place. As Michel de Certeau reminds us, stories carry out a labor that transforms places into spaces and spaces into places (De Certeau 1988, 118). In that sense, our engagement with a place develops our attachment to it, and in that, we are developing a sense of it. The thesis of this paper emphasizes the importance of a strong sense of geographic locality as a premise for preserving cultural capital and natural assets of a destination, stimulate social engagement and for developing a place from a bottom-up approach.

The place-making complex of rural villages Rural villages all over Europe are losing the sense of place they once owned.

Young people are moving away; the influx of new inhabitants is low; local shops, schools and kindergartens are being shut down; and rural businesses like fishing and farming are loosing their economic significances (Sørensen and Skou 2010, 10). Financial structures are increasingly formed by economies of scale, and small businesses are facing deadly competition from chain stores in the neighboring bigger cities. As the villages are loosing their population and drivers, they are loosing their lifeblood and the foundation for preserving and developing a local sense of place, too.

A local town or city can be considered the stage set of the inhabitant’s hopes and aspirations (Morley 2001, 429), and without a strong sense of local place, the foundation is fragile. One such village that is slowly loosing its sense of place, is the rural village of Hallund, situated in the northern part of Denmark, in the Municipality of Brønderslev. Hallund consists

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of approximately 120 houses and small farms. The village originally developed around the train track as the most progressive village in the province. Houses and farms are spread out in an oblong formation as if hanging on to what used to be the main infrastructural nerve of the main street, Sølvgade, except from a few detached and disused farms. Hallund is a quiet city, however it has a significant number of local associations, with a local sports club, a hunting club, a scout association, a citizen association as well as political associations and a weekly local newspaper. Although the village is tied together in small associations, these associations have limited means of communicating to the outer edges about their activities, both in terms of inviting newcomers to join, as well as of promoting the village as an attractive place to live. Most of the channels for informing about local initiatives and events have disappeared over the past few decades. Social connection and information sharing used to take place via three different physical channels in the village of Hallund: on the back of the weekly local newspaper, on the side façade of the bus stop at the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main traffic intersection, and at the bulletin board at the local grocer. These channels served to announce jobs and services such as babysitting, window cleaning, bikes for sale, the starting dates of sport seasons and event announcements by the local gym, invites for open communal dinners, Monday nights traditional board games for the elderly, and collections for funerals or charities. In 2009, the grocer shop closed and the bus stop space was sold to advertisements. An enclosed, transparent information box on the facade of an old warehouse on the main street is the only way of rapid distribution of mass information, on small paper notes, to the general inhabitants of Hallund. These may live several kilometers from each other. The facade of the warehouse is not a natural gathering place, so except from a few elderly passing by through the day, the information box is not an effective information channel.

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The weekly newspaper is also a way of distributing information about local activities, however with a weekâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s delay and only to the people who keep the newspaper on top of the more informative regional edition.

The neighboring town of Jerslev acts as a suburban connection point for surrounding rural villages like Hallund, providing a kindergarten, a school for children up to the 9th grade, a village hall, and a handful of small businesses. Relaying media messages across villages such as Hallund and Jerslev is impossible, unless people physically travel to the respective city grocers, bus stops, or purchase the local newspapers for the particular neighbor village to gain information. Hallund is an example of a rural village with social activities, but poor channels to organize these and communicate them to all inhabitants. The lack of immediate communications channels makes it difficult for newcomers and local inhabitants to engage with the established associations, and to participate and create new social initiatives.

Social, local practices serve to make the villages vibrant and alive, and to create a shared sense of locality.

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The qualities of a geographical sense of locality Locality in this context is referred to as a somehow geographically based concept. Arjun Appadurai describes locality as both a structure of feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated community (Appadurai 1996, 189). Beyond the beauty of an emotional attachment and the comfort of a sense of belonging to the place in which one lives, a strong sense of geographical locality among inhabitants frames the coherence of a place. Coherency in this perspective does not relate to a coherent and shared way of lifestyle or religion, which might carry a sense of gentrification and exclusion; instead, I will emphasize the main quality of geographical locality as the motivation for engaging with a place’s local social offerings, and for participating in taking part in the place’s positive development. As rural villages are loosing their sense of locality, the social life disappears in tandem with the decaying attractiveness of the place, and in this process, the sense of locality is declining as well. What I strive to emphasize is the connection between a sense of locality and a strong and lively community. In Appadurai’s description of the concept of locality, he relates it directly to the idea of a neighborhood (Appadurai 1996, 179). A shift from place to people in terms of “situating” where locality should be recreated carries new potential in the new media paradigm.

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Sense of place in new media We are becoming less and less dependent on the activities and entertainment of our physical environment, because social engagement can easily be achieved through far-distance connections in social media networks.

Facebook and other such networks can be considered for types of online communities or ‘neighborhoods’, in which people connect and cluster in social groups that fit to their interests and social history. This is why a sense of place is no longer something that comes with simply spending time in a place, like by living in it, because today, we might live in one place but carry out most of our social engagements in other spaces. With our constant travels global spaces through digital realms, we might physically be ‘here’ while the environment we are building up familiarity with is out ‘there’ – or brought in here through our digital screen. Therefore, a local sense of place is not just automatically there, because it needs to develop through an engagement with the place. As people are increasingly engaging with social groups through new media, they might decreasingly engage with their local social environment. The social stories that people create are thus as much (if not more frequently) constructed through digital narratives and relationships as through offline social participation, which threatens the reproduction of a local sense of place. This observation carries similar traits to David Morley’s notification of how mediated processes of flux are destabilizing traditional forms of place-based identity (Morley 2001, 427). As new possibilities for joining communities of a distinct interest are increasing with new media, so are the alternatives to local social offerings.

Perhaps, we are experiencing a second epoch of Joshua Meyrowitz’ concept of no sense of place, only this time we are not dislocating a sense of place by bringing the world to our local environments through the mediation of our TV screen (Meyrowitz 1985, 158); we are connecting ourselves with

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the world via the non-place of the Internet. In Sybille Lammes’ description of the prime component of the Internet as a void that provides ground for the establishment of virtual relations, she refers to it as a non-place, meaning a ‘place’ that is characterized by a lack of history and therefore in lack of an identity (Lammes 1997, 1). Lammes’ concept references Marc Augé’s original definition of the concept of non-places as places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places” (Auge, 2002). The non-place is filled with some sense of identity however, from the networked relations that interact with it, which makes it form into a transitory and dynamic hub (Lammes 1997, 9). The challenge seems to be the practice of connecting this dynamic hub with the development of a local place, by giving new media a role in place-making. Place and space have developed an abstract relationship, which fosters a much more complex condition for the development and maintenance of a sense of place that is local.

Development through a social media architecture The construction of media networks as facilitators of social interaction and collaboration can be characterized as a form of social media architecture. In these interface frameworks media users can create personal profiles, group their friends, create sub-groups, receive and distribute digital invitations within their social network(s), engage in discussions, collaborate on cultural, ethical and political projects, support good causes, share thoughts, follow each other’s social path online and directly communicate with each other across space and time. A social media architecture is engineered for collaboration, information sharing, and participation, and enables people to connect with remarkable ease while organizing themselves in

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complicated social webs across the world. Yochai Benkler notes how this form of engagement with new technologies is causing a shift in online social practices (Duffy and Turow 2009, 327). In a sense, these practices can be considered as spatial, since social media networkers are gathering in online ‘social spaces’; like abstract, virtual echoes of the production of spaces through our spatial practices of our everyday lives (Lefebvre 1974, 26). What if the nature of these social spaces and the engagement and excitement they develop upon could build up the social public sphere of a local environment? The task is then to “time” the social spaces online with local offline practices, by establishing a relationship between the social digital space and events and initiatives of the physical local place.

Using social media for offline activities There seems to already be a tendency for people to connect online in relation to the local, physical sphere. Meetup™ is an example of a social media site where people can connect on the basis of shared interests for a particular taste of music, game, sport etc., and this has proved successful for facilitating the organization of offline events (www.meetup.com).

The photo storage/sharing site Flickr™ has ‘grouping’ at the heart of organization of its content, and many of these groups are local in nature and allow people to connect around photos and news, and events in their area (www.flickr.com). The website StumbleUpon™ allows users to make local searches on things to ‘stumble upon’ in their hometowns, which is a similar network-feature to the one Facebook proposes where people can join local networks and subgroup their social connections (www.stumbleupon.com), (www.facebook.com). Twitter™ offers a “geo-search” option that enables the user to sort messages or “tweets” from people in a specific area (www.

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twitterlocal.net), and Placeblogger™ provides an overview of personal blogs based on their local registration and relevance (www.placeblogger.

com). Finally, Foursquare™ emerged in 2009 as a location-based network intended to connect friends in real life locations using GPS technology via one’s mobile phone (www.foursquare). These examples are just some of the social media architectures out there and display an existing desire for tying social media practices to a local, physical space. The digital media initiatives enable people to connect around local matters, and hereby shape social practices that engage with the development of urban hubs.

This is taking place in a digitally organized dimension of the local realm.

Scott McQuire describes this phenomenon with his concept of the media city as an expanded matrix of media feedback loops that increasingly shape the ambiance and intensities of urban space” (McQuire 2008, 57). This is why new media has become an integral component in the condition of urban, suburban and rural community formation. Moreover, media carry the potential of enhancing place-making through repeated conventions of language, storytelling, identity-formation, and the communication of ‘ways of knowing’. As Elizabeth Ellsworth describes, media deliver cultural signification to the spaces and times of inhabitation (Ellsworth 2005, 127). The potential of letting this ever-increasing social desire to connect, share information, and collaborate online materialize in the offline environment, is what spurs my proposition of a rethinking of online social media networks as strategic models for improving the life and activities of a local community.

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Towards a strategic social media model for local community development

The social media architecture I am suggesting as a model for local community development seeks to transfer the social media-architecture of online communities to the offline environment, in order to allow for peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s social practices online to be directed towards local initiatives.

As online and local communities might build on very different social premises and needs, a locally bound social information network should be an organic local platform that is user-generated, and propelled by the needs and interests of the local inhabitants. While the specific content categories must be developed with the specific community, the local media network might offer a forum for information sharing on what is going on in their own village and in neighboring areas, together with a facilitation of discussions and debates, and it might enable locals to arrange activities and events in open groups where everybody from the local network can participate. This would allow newcomers to integrate much faster in their new surroundings, which might open up these rural areas to a potential influx of ideas and skills. In terms of business opportunities, local businesses could be allowed to announce their services and opening hours, and collaborate across businesses and villages. The network may also carry a political potential of informing about local rural and suburban development initiatives and providing a democratic forum for debating these, as well as for debating local politics. For example, the school in Jerslev could use the local social network for hosting a democratic forum for parents to participate in its development strategies. As not all rural inhabitants are digitally connected and comfortable with the Internet or social media technology, the media network should ideally be supported by physical screens in the villages that would bring real-time updates on

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social events, clearances and statuses of projects. In a longer perspective, these screens would replace the plastic box with paper notes as a much more effective, updated and flexible public communication channel. What distinguishes this suggested model of a local social media network with existing ones is the potential of subgrouping local areas to avoid the smaller villages to be marginalized by the bigger ones, whereby the distinct ideas and resources of every single image has a space for establishing initiatives no matter what scale these might take. The subgrouping of local areas might also enable more collaborative villages to establish their local social network and inspire the surrounding villages. Villages should also be able to connect and collaborate across districts. As Appadurai notes, as logics of neighborhoods are sometimes adopted by surrounding neighborhoods (Appadurai 1996, 183), a local social media network might generate a basis for living by virtue of its activation in several local neighborhoods, and thus locality as a relational achievement can be context generative (Appadurai 1996, 186). The strategic potentials of the local social media network stretches across place-branding, recognition and local investments.

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Conclusion My proposal of a strategic model of a local social media network for developing local communities, is organized around a strategic planning of the encounter between media and urban space, in the hands of the local inhabitants. It is a digital tool for structuring activities and experiences in a local area and acts for the sake of bolstering the local community and the local sense of place, because these components embody the heart of a healthy, socially sustainable, and attractive place to live. As Appadurai remarks, “…as local subjects carry on the continuing task of reproducing their neighborhood, the contingencies of history, environment, and imagination contain the potential for new contexts (material, social, and imaginative) to be produced.” (Appadurai 1996, 185). The perspective I am proposing seeks to go beyond De Certeau’s notion of places as spaces of activities and “stories” of people (De Certeau 1988, 110), and regards places as means of spatialities that are constructed from an online sense of connection to form a local sense of place. The local social media network adds a digital dimension to rural and urban planning and development strategies. It emphasizes the importance of planning for creating a local sense of place that is coherent, adaptive, and that stimulates a strong sense of belonging and empowerment to the local area and its community. For rural villages like Hallund, a local social media network could become a revitalization strategy for regaining social life and make a basis for growth and survival.

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References ARJUN APPADURAI: “Modernity at Large: cultural dimensions of globalization”, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1996 MARC AUGE: “Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity”, (London and New York: Verso), 1992 WALTER BENJAMIN: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, 1936 YOCHAI BENKLER: “Peer Production and Sharing”, in Key Readings in Media Today, Mass Communication in Contexts, ed. Brooke Erin Duffy and Joseph Turow, (New York and London: Routledge), 2009 MICHEL DE CERTEAU: “The Practices of Everyday Life”, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1988 SØREN MØLLER CHRISTENSEN AND KAREN SKOU (ED.): “Trods dårlige odds. International inspiration til danske yderområder”, (Copenhagen: Realdania), 2010 ELIZABETH ELLSWORTH: “Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy”, (New York: Routledge), 2005 MARKUS FOTH, HELEN KLAEBE AND GREG HEARN: “The Role of New media and Digital Narratives in Urban Planning and Community Development”, (Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology ePrints), 2008 SYBILLE LAMMES: The Internet as Non-Place” April, 2007 http://www.mediaengager.com/spacesofnewmedia.pdf HENRI LEFEBVRE: “The Production of Space”, (Massachusetts: Editions Anthropos), 1984 KEVIN A. LYNCH: ”The Image of the City”, (Massachusetts: The MIT Press), 1960 SCOTT MCQUIRE: ”The Media City”, (London: SAGE Publications Ltd.), 2008 JOSHUA MEYROWITZ: “No Sense of Place: The Impacts of Electronic Media on Social Behavior”, (New York: Oxford University Press), 1985 DAVID MORLEY: “Place, Space and Identity in a Mediated World”, (European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 4 No. 4, November), 2001

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Referenced websites: www.allprinceton.com www.facebook.com http://www.flickr.com/groups/columbus-meetup/ http://foursquare.com/ www.linkedin.com www.meetup.com www.myspace.com http://www.placeblogger.com/ http://www.twitterlocal.net/

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Infrastructure: An Instrument Of Urban Morphology Seung Ra Assistant professor of Architecture Oklahoma State University School of Architecture seung.ra@okstate.edu http://architecture.ceat.okstate.edu

Figure 1 Satellite image of Northeast Blackout 2003(Left: before the blackout)

The 2003 New York City blackout might be vague in our memories now, but the incident created some surreal scenes for the city that never sleeps (Fig.1). This satellite image shows a clear picture of the enormous scale of the outage. Our dependency on current technology, specifically networks, defines us as a culture now and relates our everyday lives to those across the global. This connectedness of information and distribution reflects urban infrastructures and the flow of energy. The transformation of cities will be examined by how we rethink about the uses of infrastructure.

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As an instrument of urban morphology, INFRASTRUCTURE drives the direction, speed, and scale of development. We must question, â&#x20AC;&#x153;How is the city changing? How fast? How much?â&#x20AC;?. These are all relevant questions for us to examine the changing world around us.

Figure 2 Fullerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world map with high voltage transmission network map

As a future investment for the economy, society and environment, infrastructure is the critical element of urbanization. How to apply sustainable infrastructure into urbanism for cities in emerging countries; structurally at a global level, and on a local level will be the key issues for this study. Globally, the rapid urbanization rate gives us an opportunity to fully integrate architecture and infrastructure. It is imperative that we progress from current energy generation and distribution methods to a more sustainable and flexible energy network (Fig.2). Infrastructure proposes integrating sustainable development and architecture into a network which will connect large and small scale endeavors in complex urban spaces. This integration of infrastructure and architecture will be a mode of solution for the current issues in cities and the next step for future development.

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Automobiles were a primary element that reshaped the city and architecture, as the precedent transformation of the city and the factors influencing its growth (Fig.3). Because transportation immensely impacts our everyday lives, we cannot separate automobiles and contemporary urbanism. But the usage of energy will bypass the automobile in shaping the future of our cities and will rapidly reshape existing cities in a short period of time. Just as individual works of architecture were adapted over time, strategies for development and the driving forces of those strategies will continue to evolve as well.

In the Architecture of the City by Aldo Rossi (1982), the elements of Roman cities, such as amphitheatres, reversed their functions; “the theatrecity functioned like a fortress and was adapted to enclose and defend its inhabitants.” The city overtook the architecture and transf ormed it. As a living organism, cities are structured and restructured simultaneously (Castells, 2004) and transformed by merging the architecture into the dynamic of the city, according to Rossi(1982). How the city is transformed must be considered together with how the city grows because the overall pattern of the city will impact the value of its future (Rossi, 1982). “The city is not a static entity but a mutable organization made of different components, adaptable to varying circumstances.”(Angelli, 1999; Klingmann, 1999). As energy and resource use become of primary concern in today’s urban centers, sustainable infrastructure projects become vital, and further justify architecture that embraces the ambiguity of the city’s future.

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Figure 3 Aerial view of Roman amphitheater transformed into a marketplace(left), Edward Burtynsky, Highway #1 (Intersection 105 & 110, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003.)

The Future of the Metropolis In response to climate change and developing green technologies, sustainable architecture has become a contemporary measure of success in the architectural design community, but sustainability at the urban scale has not been fully discussed. This creates a challenge for rapidly developing cities in both developed and emerging countries. These cities must begin to consider sustainable infrastructure in concert with architecture. It is critical that we consider the methods of future growth; large-scale infrastructural thinking will facilitate the foundation of future sustainable development. The relationship between architecture as individual and the city as collective urban elements needs to be studied by the flow of energy and environmental constraints. Infrastructure is a conduit for the flow of energy, and naturally plays a vital role in sustainable development.

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A recent article in the Economist (2010) suggests that Asian cities will determine the prospects for global CO2 emissions in coming years. As an emerging society, and perhaps the global stakeholder of urbanization, Asia is faced with great opportunity and great risk. The current rate and type of development are unsustainable. But unlimited possibilities lie in a sustainable exploration at the infrastructural scale. Expanding infrastructural urbanism is not only relevant to the Asian discourse, but globally. For example, the global demand for both quantity and quality of electrical power will need a global scale of investment in the near future: The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) predicted the total annual worldwide electricity investment needs through to 2030 average around $350 billion and more than half of this investment will be spent on transmission and distribution (Stevens, 2006; Schieb, 2006; Andrieu, 2006).

Many large cities share a common type of geographical character: location on a delta or waterfront. This feature provides a natural source of energy and cooling, among many other reasons why cities relate well to large bodies of water. The city of Toronto is adapting the fundamental idea of using Lake Ontario to cool downtown buildings (Fig. 4). This system is an example of Deep Lake Water Cooling (DLWC). It is a $170-million project and will reduce overall annual power usage by more than 40 megawatts, and greenhouse gas emissions by almost 40,000 metric tons.

This will be comparable to removing 8,000 automobiles from the road (Graham, 2004). As the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest lake-source cooling system, the City of Torontoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s DLWC system goes beyond energy savings. The system (ENWAVE, 2004): (1) Reduces electricity use by up to 90% compared with conventional air-conditioning (2) Eliminates 79,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually (3) Cuts 45,000 kg of polluting CFC refrigerants (4)

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Saves more than 61 MW of electricity annually – the equivalent power demand of 6,800 homes (5) Eliminates the need to install cumbersome, expensive cooling equipment and to dispose of it at the end of its useful life (6) Eliminates 145 tons of Nitrogen Oxide (7) Eliminates 318 tons of Sulphur Oxide (8) Provides fresh, potable lake water to taps across Toronto.

Figure 4 The city of Toronto’s Deep Lake Water Cooling system.

Image from MASSIVE CHANGE and the City of Toronto.

Metro Hall, a 27-story office building in Toronto, went online with ENWAVES’s Deep Lake Water Cooling system in June 2006. Energy consumption at Metro Hall will be reduced by 3 million kilowatt-hours per year and reduce CO2 emissions by 732 tons annually - equivalent to taking 160 cars off the road. The resulting reduction in water consumption 452 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

from Cooling Towers for the building was 4,400 cubic meters per year, and the power saved is sufficient to supply 300 homes (The City of Toronto, 2006).

While the concept of cooling by water is not new, and many waterfront cities have taken advantage of their geographical benefit, the scale of infrastructural networks has not yet been ambitious enough to have an impact citywide or beyond. What if DLWC could replace the entire cooling system of a city? And what if high-rises in Shanghai could eliminate massive cooling towers, using all of their mechanical space as usable space?

Perhaps Buckminster Fuller’s (Mau, Bruce Mau et al, 2004) worldwide energy grid could be adapted into the scope of the cooling system in order to “produce energy locally and distribute it globally.” (Mau, Bruce Mau et al, 2004). Surplus energy generated by the water cooling infrastructure would be redistributed and ultimately less energy would need to be generated through conventional means.

In order to demonstrate infrastructural thinking, a hypothetical project, GEOPLEXUS, was developed in response to an existing site in Chicago.

The location provides a new opportunity for regeneration at the urban scale, developing infrastructure to serve spaces beyond the site (The Chicago Architectural Club, 2010). GEOPLEXUS utilizes the destruction created by a real-estate collapse as an opportunity to reconfigure energy flow within the city. Lake Michigan is the city’s greatest natural resource, providing a moderating effect on the local climate. It has the potential to serve as an energy source as well, in the transfer of unlimited energy from the earth to the city. The host transfers energy from the lake, and distributes the cool water through a capillary network to breath into buildings, creating a mass infrastructure which utilizes geothermal technology to cool buildings (Fig.5). It demonstrates how energy needs could drive a large-scale urban MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 453

intervention. Commercial buildings now account for the greatest growth in consumption of energy (Hughes, 2008). In the coming years, the U.S. will invest over 467 Million dollars in funding for Geothermal and Solar Energy Projects (U.S. Department of Energy, 2009). GEOPLEXUS investigates the broader potential of connecting existing natural resources to the areas in greatest need of a revolution in energy usage.

Figure 5 GEOPLEXUS by Seung Ra, Sam Sanders, and Dane Zeiler

Urbanization and New Urban Morphology How can Infrastructural urbanism be applied to rapidly developing cities? This concept of the city engaging natural resources is necessary to halt the rapid and growing resource consumption of these urban centers.

The Economist (2010) described China’s metropolitan developments as “superblocks”, which create supersized carbon footprints. The West has already experienced the results of such development patterns. Charles

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Dickens described Victorian London as the great and dirty city because of airborne pollution by emission from burning coal (McDonoug, 2002; Braungart, 2002). During the 2008 Olympic Games, the world watched the return of Industrial Revolution-era skies in Beijing. To serve the rapidly expanding cities, they add more new coal-fired power plants. In Asia’s growing urban population, energy consumption grew by 70% in the ten years leading up to 2008. Continuing this trend, it will be inevitable to change the direction for the future of the metropolis. “According to the Asian Development Bank, 44 million people join city populations each year. Every day sees the construction of 20,000 new dwellings and 250km of new road (The Economist, 2010).” This incredible rate of growth opens possibilities for the relationship between infrastructure and architecture.

They could potentially be considered in parallel due to the speed of development. Infrastructural elements would still need accommodation for growth, but could be integrated more fully with smaller scale architectural design. The large and small scale design of infrastructure could work in concert to successfully create self - sustainable places within a network.

At the large scale, “the radical transformation and creation of landscape through infrastructural development is a global phenomenon (Shannon, 2010; Smets, 2010).” Increasingly, the infrastructural projects are more and more complex and radically alter our environment and landscape at both the global level and the local level. For example, at 2.3 kilometers long and 101 meters high, China’s Three Gorges Dam(Fig. 6) is the world’s largest hydropower project and most notorious dam in the world (International Rivers, 2009). Despite submerging a number of cities and towns, relocating 1.3 million people, and destroying the ecosystem along the river, this dam is equal to ten modern nuclear power plants (International Rivers, 2009) and will save 50 million tons of coal per year

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(Mau, B. Bruce Mau et al, 2004). This is a conventional infrastructural solution for supporting expanding energy needs. But in addition to increasing the number of plants, we must look into infrastructure within the city; more energy efficient urbanization. In Aldo Rossiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (1982) view toward the growth of cities, the broader contextual idea of how cities will grow and impact the surrounding areas must shape our future.

Figure 6 Edward Burtynsky, Dam #6 (Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2005)

Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s infrastructures, as public endeavours, are not simple and large scale objects, but improve the public realm and quality of the landscape of cities.

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In Stan Allenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (1999) Infrastructural Urbanism: Seven Propositions, the characteristic definition was given : (1) Geography as a medium (2) Flexibility (3) The participation of multiple authors (4) Local contingency and maintaining overall continuity (5) Organizing and managing complex systems of flow, movement, and exchange (6) Managing the flows of energy and resources (7) Facilitating an architectural approach to urbanism. Infrastructure is often non-linear: hierarchical and tree-like forms relate the large scale portions to the small scale parts (Allen, 1999).

This relationship between the scales is a key to make Infrastructure part of the urban pattern of development.

Figure 7 Solaria by AMO

At the smaller scale, the solution of effective urban planning for new developments starts in more efficient energy generation and it must end

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in comprehensive distribution and consumption in a multiplicity of scales and systems (Addington, 2010). For example, individual places create complimentary ‘subsystems’ instead of creating a large solar energy farm separated from the city. It could be part of the city’s landscape (Fig. 7).

Even if the scale and impact might be minimal, in large context, this will truly make a difference at the comprehensive level. We must also look into more fundamental issues of how we use the small-scale renewable energy; more precisely how efficiently we use the environmentally friendly energy.

For example, photovoltaic and fuel cells produce direct current and when these energy sources are converted into the alternating current grid, they automatically lose about 25% of their energy (Addington, 2010). In order to be more efficient, we have to use these sources directly without converting. For instance, most digital equipment and LED lighting could use direct current from the renewable sources. Also, generating less heat from the lighting and electronic equipment will reduce unnecessary cooling loads, which are the largest internal heat gain source for commercial buildings. There are three types of internal heat gain sources for the typical commercial buildings: (1)electrical for plug load and lightings, (2) mechanical for motors, compressors and other equipment and (3)space and water heating (Addington, 2010). Smaller scale energy networks must participate in the energy solution. The result will be much more critical and fundamental change in attitudes at the local level.

Roadmap 2050 by the European Climate Foundation and OMA proposed an EU-wide decarbonized power grid by 2050 (Moore, 2010). The plan would reduce Europe’s GHG emissions by 80-95%, which needs to achieve a 2% energy efficiency savings per year, by 2050. “Through the complete integration and synchronization of the EU’s energy infrastructure, Europe can take maximum advantage of its geographical diversity. The report’s

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findings show that by 2050, the simultaneous presence of various renewable energy sources within the EU can create a complementary system of energy provision ensuring energy security for future generations.” According to the Roadmap 2050, emissions from power, road transportation, and buildings will be reduced by 95% which will be the most critical part of the overall 80% CO2 reduction. Two sectors, Power and Buildings, will be most influenced

by INFRASTRUCTURE and will become a new territory for architecture to return to the where it began. The plan also proposed an EU-wide power grid system with diverse and decarbonized energy sources which will be traded within the network. This return to Fuller’s idea, “Electrical-energy integration of the night and day regions of the Earth will bring all the capacity into use at all time (Mau, Bruce Mau et al, 2004).” This integration could be key to accommodating energy flow in developing cities (Fig. 8).

Figure 8 Decarbonized grid power distribution by AMO (Left) Solar / wind energy map by AMO (Right)

What kind of change can infrastructure create? “Spatial transformation is a fundamental dimension of the overall process of structural change. We need a theory of spatial forms and processes, adapted to the social, technological, and spatial context where we live (Castells, 2004).” The increasing focus of MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 459

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Figure 9 Evolution of the city, past, present and future from the Vegetal City

by Luc Schuiten

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climate change requires revolutionizing how society lives, and this change will be a fundamental dimension of spatial transformation of our cities. A recent exhibition of Belgian architect Luc Schuiten, Vegetal City brings a visionary glimpse of how a city was reconciled with nature and inspired by it (Fig.9). In the Evolution of the city, past, present and future from the Vegetal City, Schuiten presents the city “in motion and continuously renewed through a slow progression around a lake where the migrations of its inhabitants follow the rhythm of the lifespan of the city’s main structure, the tree (Schuiten, n.d.).” While this is a radical example of infrastructure, this kind of visionary exploration is needed in order to make extraordinary change a reality.

As a response to contemporary problems of the city, socially and environmentally, the large and small scale infrastructural proposition must be critically considered as the resolution again. Infrastructure is a medium to facilitate the ground for the city’s future and generate the conditions for architecture (Allen, 1999). The dual relationship of architecture and city should again be examined through the lens of energy and environmental constraints.

Conclusion The International Energy Agency (IEA) in the World Energy Outlook, 2004 reported that the projected increase in worldwide electrification rates from 74% in 2002 to 83% in 2030 would provide a huge impact on social development, education and public health (Stevens, 2006; Schieb, 2006; Andrieu, 2006). The results would bring changes to basic human life, as well as environmental impact. For instance, reduction in the use of traditional fossil fuels for energy purposes, with attendant benefits of 462 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

slower deforestation (Stevens, 2006; Schieb, 2006; Andrieu, 2006).

As these changes take place, we must simultaneously look at infrastructure on a multi-level scale. The current trend is moving away from a monolithic infrastructural development, yet still the large scale projects create greater impact, economically, socially, and environmentally influencing the future urbanism (Stevens, 2006; Schieb, 2006; Andrieu, 2006). Because of the massive increase of urbanization and proliferation of cities, we must identify how the vital resources will flow and create new styles of urban infrastructure for global cities (Hodson, 2010; Marvin, 2010). Mega projects are not necessarily the answer for mega cities with mega problems.

Common urban problems, such as energy intensity and population density, require thinking beyond physical size to issues of efficiency and sustainable generation. Smaller scale approaches combined with advanced technology will help to bring a larger impact on the global level, even if the physical scale is as small as changing a light bulb.

The growing uncertainty of Architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mission in current urbanism, especially implementation of multi-scale infrastructural development as an urban intervention, will require its reposition and integration. Based on the historical aspects of transformation of the city and the outlook of global investigation in terms of infrastructural investment, we continue to engage the future relationship between architecture and urban space and how the environment will be rapidly influenced by urban growth. The objective of infrastructural urbanism is to not only encourage more efficient building for the future, but also to facilitate much more efficient networks within the current grid system. As the usage of energy becomes the driving force sculpting the future of our cities and reshaping existing cities, we must fully integrate Infrastructural development and architectural design within this new framework.

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References Addington, D.M., 2010. Energy Sub-structure, Supra-structure, infra-structure .

In: Mohsen Mostafavi with Gareth Doherty, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, ed. Ecological Urbanism. Lars Müller Publishers, pp. 244-251.

Allen, S., 1999, Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Angelli, M. and Klingmann, A., 1999. Hybrid Morphologies: Infrastructure, Architecture, Landscape. Daidalos, 73, pp. 22.

Banyan., 2010, THE ECONOMIST, Asia’s alarming cities, [online] Available at:<http://www.economist.com/node/16481295> [Accessed 24 August 2010].

Castells, M., 2004. Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age. In: Braham, M. and Hale, J., ed. Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 440-455.

China’s Three Gorges Dam: A MODEL OF THE PAST, [online] International Rivers (Published 2009) Available at: <http://www.internationalrivers. org/files/3Gorges_FINAL.pdf> [Accessed 26 August 2010].

ENWAVE, 2004. Deep Lake Water Cooling. [online] Available at: <http://www.enwave.com/dlwc.php> [Accessed 28 August 2010].

Graham, S., 2004, Scientific American, Big Chill: An ambitious new project uses lake water to cool off city slickers, [online] Available at: <http://www. scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=big-chill> [Accessed 28 August 2010].

Hodson. M., and Marvin. S., 2010. Transcendent Eco-cities or Urban Ecological Security?. In: Mohsen Mostafavi with Gareth Doherty, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, ed. Ecological Urbanism. Lars Müller Publishers, pp. 208-217.

Hughes, P., 2008. Geothermal Heat Pumps: Market Status, Barriers to Adoption, and Actions to Overcome Barriers. [online] The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Publication. Available at: <http://info.ornl. gov/sites/publications/files/Pub13831.pdf> [Accessed 12 March 2010].

Mau, B., Leonard, J. and Institute Without Boundaries., 2004, MASSIVE CHANGE. London: Phaidon Press.

McDonoug, W. and Braungart, M., 2002. A Brief History of the Industrial Revolution. In: Braham, M. and Hale, J., ed. Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 421-425.

Moore, R., 2010. Roadmap 2050 by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA. The Observer, [online] 9 May 2010. Available at: < http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/ may/09/roadmap-2050-eneropa-rem-koolhaas > [Accessed 27 August 2010].

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Rossi, A., 1982, The Architecture of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Schuiten. L., Evolution of the city, past, present and future. [online] Available at: < http://vegetalcity.net/13.html > [Accessed Accessed 27 August 2010].

Shannon, K. and Smets, M., 2010, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Stevens. B., Schieb. P., and Andrieu. M., 2006. A Cross-sectoral Perspective on the Development of Global Infrastructures to 2030. In: Infrastructure to 2030: telecom, land transport, water and electricity / Organisation for Economic Co-opertacion and Development. Paris: OECD. The City of Toronto, 2006. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the City doing to shrink its footprint? [online] Available at: < http://www.toronto.ca/environment/ initiatives/cooling.htm> [Accessed 28 August 2010].

The Chicago Architectural Club, 2010. The 2010 Chicago Prize Competition: MINE THE GAP. [online] Available at: <http://www.chicagoarchitecturalclub. org/competitions/competitions.aspx> [Accessed 12 February 2010].

U.S. Department of Energy, 2009. President Obama Announces Over $467 Million in Recovery Act Funding for Geothermal and Solar Energy Projects. [Press release], May 27, 2009 [online] Available at: <http://www.energy.gov/news2009/7427.htm> [Accessed 8 March 2010].

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C@rchitecture: The ArchitectureInfrastructure Synergy An Open Design Platform To Maximize And Optimize The Spatial Development Of Urban Design In Integrating Architecture With Infrastructure.

Marthijn N. Pool Technical University Delft, Faculty of Architecture, Hyperbody Research Group Abstract The thesis location of a high density office district is approached from an alternative development strategy. Form the social psychological perspective the thesis is focused on the development of a design alternative to the current developments of underground infrastructure with an additional layer of urban tissue on top resulting in a separated upper and under world.

The authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research emphasizes on an integral approach, benefitting the development and end users perception of the local infrastructure in combination with architectural spatial development. The social psychological benefits feed the design concept while the computational project approach is an innovative and experimental research strategy for optimizing the multi stakeholder development on this A+ location.

Maximizing spatial quality for all of its end users is the main objective. The author has developed an open design platform which enables the architect in the initial stage of the design process to filter experts input and reflect real time in the multi-disciplinary design process of the Amsterdam South axis development.

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Introduction The paper consists of two main research topics. At first the design process in architectural design is determined on the basis of researching bottom up principles and reflecting on modernist top down design process strategies. The aspect of collaboration in the design process and the use of the computation describes a more optimal and efficient design process. Secondly a brief historical review of infrastructure and mobility is described and itâ&#x20AC;şs social and psychological impacts are researched to determine itâ&#x20AC;şs vital components for the design of infrastructure in our landscapes and city lives. The strategy of a more efficient design process and the awareness of the psychological effects of infrastructural design are combined in an urban design proposal. The urban design proposal is embedded in a high density thesis location. The author has developed a design tool that functions as an open platform facilitating the collaborative design of the multi-disciplinary group experts involved. The design tool has a strong emergent capacity, but is open for external users input. The design tool is developed with gaming software to exploit the interactive relation between external influences of the design team experts and the internal influence of the processed algorithms which determine optimal geometrical alternatives. The tool enables a rapid exploration of complex design alternatives on the basis of visual and numerical output.

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Illustration 1: paper structure integrating two research topics in a design strategy

1. Towards an open design process 1.1 Reflecting the modernist top down design process The modernists claimed to have the new insight and being convinced to have the solution for the complexities at the time. Directly from the mind of the architect the city could be built and people will have to live with it, the city became a machine, built in one instant. This overwhelming production has taken away a lot of knowledge from ancient time by replacing entire city quarters with the modern architecture. Design as the process of evolving towards fit solutions, was thought to be of little importance. This goal-oriented approach is too little concerned with the urban processes that run when inserting a building. Contemporary architecture in the modernist period became to be driven by ideology, so that appearance, form, evaluation and justification were no longer related to a buildings use by human beings. The effect that built form has on human sensibilities is easy to ignore by argumenting a buildings particular style [Alexander 1980]. This modernist architecture imposes its abstract forms on people, who are not supposed to question them. Like this the feedback is neglected resulting in no connectivity. A major flaw in this top-

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down implementation is that it ignores forces that would make it adaptive.

Every step has to allow divergence to be adaptive. The design process has to be an open process. It has to have the ability to process input in each step in the correct sequence of the design, that’s what maintains it evolutionary properties and determines its inherent qualitative aspect emerging from the collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence The input at each step given by different sources makes the result highly adaptive to human physical, sensory and psychological needs.

The environment thus has become a database of stored information.

Information stored in built form is immediately accessible and works as a working memory for society. [Salingaros 2004] A city built over time is the product of the collective intelligence of generations of people acting together. This enormous database is the sum of small decisions taken over time.

Experiments When looking into historical descriptions of the ruling modern architects it’s often clear that they believed in their own approach. The reason that there was a yearly congress called the CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) was to exchange ideas on these large-scale experiments. The results of these real-time architectural and thus social experiments were discussed and reformulated. The practising architects had the hope to find the key answer to reply to the complex problems in

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society. The top-down modernist approach is criticised a lot, but because it has been decades of experimental research the current architect has to learn from it. From the sociological point of view these experiments have yield lots of knowledge on big scale housing projects, which should not be neglected because the architectural approach is criticised. Like in all experiments; proceed on what went right and filter out what went wrong.

1.2 Evolution and adaptability in the design process Architectural design can be classified in different design approaches.

These are defined as ‘form giving’, ‘form finding’, ‘form follows function’ principles and so on. Every architect has his personal touch in the design task, but two main categories can be described; the bottom-up and topdown approach. The bottom-up approach can be characterised as an open method considering all relevant influences in shaping the future space.

The top-down approach is applied the other way around; a preferred form is imposed on the site and the influences are considered, but will have to adapt to the given form.

Evolution Scientific research is leading to a better comprehension of the world around us. The acquainted knowledge has to be properly applied in different practices to improve life. In architecture these new insights must be applied to improve the process of shaping the artificial environment.

An interesting research field is the investigation of evolutionary processes.

Nature is a complexity of continuously running processes. New processes

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emerge while others vanish. The main principle in the natural shaped environment is evolution. Evolution can be seen as the process by which the physical characteristics of types of creations change over time, new types of creations develop and others disappear [Cambridge Dictionaries].

In evolution a great deal of any future definition is based on already existing structures which inform the to be defined structures. Evolution is a process of adaptation and coexistence. Coexistence can be seen as the adaptation to what was already there and was on its right place. The existence of an origin can be extended with additions, but these additions have to coexist to assure it’s an extension of the whole. Architecture will have to evolve; the process consisting of small steps to build up bigger scale steps to make wholeness. Each process runs at a certain time, so from time t to time t +1 the structure unfolds. All steps in the process describe the wholeness of the structure. [Salingaros 2004]. The authors research into Gaudi’s chain model experiment has led to the development of a computer model that characterises the evolutionary behaviour of forces of gravity onto a structural mesh. The linkage of all elements and their flexible connections result under the external influence of gravity into a parabolic shaped dome.

This dome is characterised by it’s geometrical optimal properties of having a maximum inner volume with a minimal outer surface, while the structural capacity uses the minimal material in order to create stability (illustration 2). This is a very elegant example of evolutionary wholeness to be applied in the design proposal for the high density urban development.

Illustration 2: Gaudi’s actual hanging chain model and the author’s programmed model 472 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

This fact of an optimal geometrical form created by the internal and external natural processes inspires the author to develop a second principle based on a natural algorithm defining maximum efficiency. The individual soap bubble describes a maximum inner volume with a minimal outer surface.

In the cluster with multiple soap bubbles the spatial properties remain to be intact and create fascination geometrical definitions. The author has developed the soap bubble spatial principle in scripting software to make it applicable in an architectural spatial organisation. The organization emerges from the clustering of various soap bubbles into a compact system, defining maximum compactness and wholeness (illustration 3).

Illustration 3: the soap bubble principle and the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s programmed spatial behaviour

Selection and adaptation Evolved form generates organized complexity, whereas random growth generates disorganized complexity. Depending thus on the selection which is an important step in the evolution procedure. By making this crucial selection process interactive and adaptive, the integrated input from participants (concerned parties) will lead to an unexpected and surprising output of new configurations. All input is used to guide the process; the final result is the effect of the concerned parties collective intelligence. The organization of complexity follows the principle of optimizing the energy flow. This kind of self-organization can be MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 473

interpreted as ‘learning’. Self-organization is a property of a system that uses internal forces to influence its own structure on growth [Bentley 1999]. Adaptability however is driven by external constraints; it uses input of its surroundings. The adaptive system, resulting in a coherent complex system (the whole) will use feedback to influence both the smaller and the larger scales. Within the combination of the two described spatial optimization principles an adaptive design tool is developed to rapidly explore programmatic architectural organisations. The schematic principle defines complex behaviour. The coloured soap bubbles describe different programmatic components variable in size and volume, the components are linked to build programmatic relations. Subsequently the various parts of programme cluster are compacted in the described Gaudi dome. Each component remains to be adaptive. The vertices defining the dome’s corner points can be modified as well as the entire outer surface, but also the volumetric properties of each programmatic entity can be redefined. This very accessible and adaptable cluster is a continuous running process, that can be perceived as playing a game (illustration 4). The visual and numeric feedback enables the architect and it’s collaborating experts to judge the impact of every decision in real time.

1.3 Collaboration and efficiency in design processes

Illustration 4: real time modeling of programmatic spatial configuration

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The possession of the calculative powers of computers and technologies opens up new ways on approaching the architectural design task. The theory of evolution and emergence can be applied with the help of computers processing the large number of steps and processing large amounts of data in a short time. The computer can be of great support in developing different solutions in a short period, so the time spent for the iterative manner in which the design solution will evolve, is compressed and thus economically affordable [illustration 5, Love, Gunasekaran, Li 1998]. The computer can be seen as an evolutionary accelerator and a generator to develop ideas. The results will be more novel and have surprising configurations. The selection and evaluation of different solution is analogous to natural selection. Like a breeder of racehorses a designer can use his experience and judgement to select a genetic variant for further experimental development. [Frazer 1995].

Illustration 5: potential cost saving [Love, Gunasekaran, Li 1998]

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Collaborative design The design task of the architect is relying on the input of various experts.

The communication and data exchange between these experts is vital for the efficiency of the design process. Instead of working sequentially the design team should operate parallel or simultaneously to increase the amount of knowledge shared between the participants. The more condensed collaborative design process will result in better insights in the impact of various expert input in a short time, so the actual design proposal is more optimal. Decision made in the early stage of the design have a large determining impact on the eventual construction cost. The better informed the decision can be made the better the budget is spent.

This also works the other way around in stating that a design change made early in the process is far less expensive compared to a design change later in the process (illustration 4). Every expert in the design team uses itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own knowledge and software, as long as there is fluent data exchange between the experts to analyse and evaluate (illustration 6).

Illustration 6: different ways of collaboration [Li et al, 2004] 476 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

Real time feedback The open platform for the design optimization is facilitated by a developed gaming tool. This tool developed by the author has the capability to reflect in real time decisions made within the design team. The effect of the decision is communicated visually as well as numerically. Since the programm runs on the basis of numerical input, these numbers can be easily retrieved. The visual feedback is the first response to the expertise input of the collaborating members. A statical engineer will be most interested in the slope of a roof and its total outer surface. While a cost-surveyor will be most interested in the total element length applied in the outer skin whereas the architect and the urbanist will be most concerned with the aesthetics and the visual coherence in relation to the built environment.

The open platform is an INput-OUTput device running in real time (illustration 7). The intuitive controls enable the architect to modify the design by affecting the geometry. By dragging vertices or increasing and decreasing the volume, the urban-architectural model can be modified.

The model is open to any adaptation within the constrains of aiming for an optimal geometrical model in coexistence with the necesary infrastructure.

Illustration 7: process based feedback loop modeled with gaming technologie and programming MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 477

2. Mobility 2.1 Time and place redefined Traffic flows and routes have been of great importance to the vitality of cities. Many cities have emerged alongside the intersection of roads and different kinds of mobility modes. Settlements were created on the deltaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s of rivers, at the position where land and sea fade and other strategic crossings. For the essential needs of life itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s prefered to be close to the resources. Roads connect areas where there is a need for supplies, enabling people to reside in the places where they are. With the invention of the steam engine by mister NewComen and later optimised by James Watt, the start of the industrial and parallel to that the transport revolution is a fact. The cole consuming steam engine was implemented in the cole mine areas around New Castle and functioned as the locomotive to transport cole from the mines to the rivers. The principle of carts on rails was already a common infrastructure, but the man and animal propulsion have become redundant. The extensions of the railway network developed at a rapid pace. The various trajectories got interconnected mainly for transport purposes. With the increase of transport facilities also the need for person and even public transport were integral part of the industrial developments. [Schivelbush 1980]

The effect on the notion of time and place The power of the steam engine with its inexhaustible energie and limitless acceleration did not match with peoples common relation with nature.

Motion is no longer associated with the sensible aspects of the landscape with its bumps and holes. Neither was the notion of time and distance

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associated to the fatigue of horses. This results in a dual effect; because of the expansion of space the amount of reachable space is increased while at the same time shrinking of space has caused it to be destoyed. According to our common senses time and space have shortened. Points have come closer to each other and loose their local identies which were detemined by the space in between. The isolation of the points determined their identities.

2.2 Mobility affecting society For nomadic tribes it is of vital importance to keep repositioning, it is embedded in their notion of life. Nowadays we could speak of ourselves as technological nomads, which have only slight difference in world-view. In our society mobility has become a social necessity. Mobility has become an omnipresent experience in a consumption society driving us form phase to phase. The ability to move has become an acquired right of freedom [Maas 2002]. Mobility enables people to organise and direct their lives. It has become a necessary precondition to acces other rights such as; education, work, healthcare and dwelling. The ease with which distances can be overcome has changed our perception. Landscapes, cultures, communities, each with their specificities have come closer and making differences fade.

The culture of mobility creates a certain detaching process. The meaning of being in a certain place in a certain time is loosing it’s strength, because chraracteristics of localities start overlapping. On the one had it’s the identity of the locus that’s weakening on the other hand it’s the identity of the person that’s changing.

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2.3 Psychological aspects for spatial definition of movement Passing the landscape has a cinematographic quality; it’s a linear sequence which vision is being filtered and oriented forward. Two-third of observed objects is in front of the viewer. The objects on close up attract more attention because they seem to be moving in relation to the horizon.

When the driver passes a visual barier, he will need to reorient (illustration 8). Depending on the speed the field of view can be determined. At high speeds objects viewed in a narrow angle will be most dominantly present.

At a lower speed objecst in a larger viewing angle will start playing more important roles. The fundamental sensation of the experience of the road is visual experience of movement and spatiallity, the appearance of moving objects nearby and the definition of the space that is being passed. These elements are inherently connected. The visual judgement of movement is made upon the perceptive movement of external objects and is interpreted as movement in relation to the enclosed space.

Illustration 8: relation between field of view and orientation [Appleyard D., Lynch K., 1964]

For example the misinterpretation of movement from a non-moving train when looking at a departing train. The driver is dependent on it’s vision in order to experience the sense of movement. In the perception of apparent moving objects of which we know they can’t, it’s the cognitive judgement 480 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

concluding itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oneself being in motion [Appleyard, Lynch 1964]. This motion awareness is determined by: the rotation of an object from close up to far, expression of detail and texture and the apparant growth of the object when approaching (illustration 9). In a simple linear movement the viewer can experience an opposite sensation of a landscape sliding by under the stationary vehicle. When traveling with high speed on a linear trajectory, the apparent notion of hardly any progress is being made, can be frustrating and tedious. The instalment of objects along the road should emphasize the drivers actual motion.

Illustration 9: apparent rotation of objects in a composition in the landscape being approached. [Appleyard D., Lynch K., 1964]

Sense of scale The way to and away from the city has a lot of influence on how the city is communicated. There is an optimal distance for observing objects, depending on the amount of detail one requires. Similar to theatres where the optimal viewing distance determines the price of a ticket. The car functions as the extension of the human body. One of the strongest visual sensations is the relation in scale between the viewer and a large scale environment. The car with its speed and personal directability can estbalish the sense of scale on a new level. It neutralises the scalar discrepancy between human and the city [Houben 2004]. You will still

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feel human when moving through the city, but making a jump in scale.

The opposite is true when a car breaks down on a fly over and one has to continue walking. This destoys the established scalar relationship. The sense of motion control is the largest on a motorbike or on ski’s, a situation where the vehicle is small and one has to make body movement for control and response to the landscape. The intimacy with the landscape is increased when the roads are smaller.

Orientation The road user’s orientation is a continous proces, the driver and its passengers constantly orient themselves in the surroundings without having the destination clear in sight. They localise most of the present objects and position themselves in relation to them. The highway and the city are two distinct worlds mysteriously interwoven. An artificial slope needs to be visually connected to where it leads. An exit needs mental preparation and can even be extended to make the transition between highway and urbanity and stitch them together. Besides the road’s property of facilitating efficient circulation, it also inhabits a purpose of meaning. When the highway is regarded as a linear exposition it incorporates an edcutional property. By marking hisrtorical landmarks, but also by emphasizing on ‘what is being produced here’, ‘ who live here’ and ‘who works here’. The meaning of a place is embedded in the position of an object, how the object communicates its presence and how the importance of its presence is emphasized. The most strong experiences are communicated when all three aspects are present. The rhythm and the continuity of an assembly is embedded in the sequence of spaces, the motion, the orientation and the meaning. Tempo and rhythm are the primitives of an integral assembly.

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The tempo by which the attention is attracted is a sensitive index for the quality of the road. Contrast and alteration are the premium ingredients for designing highways. No effect is as strong as the experience of a wide space emerging from compact space in which continuity is guaranteed. The authors design tool proposes a model to find the optimal balance between road design and spatial development in high densities. In the integration of infrastucture and building the connectivity is maximized. Illustration 10 shows the process steps of a typical elevated infrastructural development with the incorporation of urban development under and in between roads.

The images respresent the evolutionairy steps of the established coexistence between the two. From the perspective of the road user the landscape of urban â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;dunesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in between the road strip will be a unique experience, while the created office spaces provide excellent views on the daily varying traffic situations. The integration of infrastructure with buildings increases the value for both. Infrastucture is not seen anymore as a burden element, but as a dynamic component creating beauty in the landscape.

Illustration 10: road design as determining factor in spatial optimization [time frame images of automated process]

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2.4 Social impact of mobility Mobility in the sense of traffic has a de-socialising and thus isolating effect on society, despite its implementation to increase the interaction between humans as social beings. Every individual is placed in its individual steel cocoon incorporating all, but clearly restricted, spatial freedom. When looking at the commuters masses, held in traffic jams, the social interaction is minimal, even while people can make eyecontact and are physically close to each other. Even in metros and trains, where people are not being separated by steel cocoons, the interaction is minimal. In the car as well as in public transport the time spent travelling is converted into productive time spending. Sending text messages, making phone conversations, drinking a cup of coffee or even shaving. In public transport the time is being used to read the newspaper, to sleep or to have breakfast. The car is becoming an integral of one of the perceived living spaces. Considering the time spent in the vehicle it is worth considering this moving capsule as a room. Every individual inhabits the the moving capsule according to its own preferences (illustration 11).

Illustration 11: individual spatial accomodations [ J.Bell, 2001]

The journey has been given new meaning. Where is used to be an element of impression of the landscape, it is much more introverted.

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Car industry is already adapting to this notion. The meaning of driving in a car is being diffused by the possibility to create a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;meetingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; seating arrangement, internet connection and lcd screens. But also in the realm of comfortability, such as air treatment and ergonomic qualities of chairs contribute to redefinig the car to be a living space. The layered use of time has strong influence on how time and space are being experienced. Time is no longer solely used for traveling, but to be exploited in multiple fashions [Bell 2001]. Urban living and traveling are inherently connected. The network society enforces this linkage. The larger differentiation of peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s activities during the day will lead to more travelling. More traveling will be more important components of our daily lives, our urban activities and thus of the city as a whole. Urban living is above all dynamic and volatile, inherent to the movement of people and goods. When travelling will get a new meaning, the city will as well. We might develop towards a more and more nomadic existence, within which we believe to experience the highest level of freedom.

3. Wholeness 3.1 Colliding architecture & infrastructures Infrastructure is not valued for the effect it has had on our world perception and on society. Instead infrastructure is considered a burden and a desctruction of our landcapes. Taking into consideration the freedom it has given us and the relevance of infrastructure for our economies, it is important to investigate infrastructure from an integral design perpective and not as an independent element.

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Compactness In the past century the distribution principle has become the central theme in our current day society. Roads have become the artery of city structures and have determined city’s solid development. The importance of mobility for our economies and the effect on our cities had first been sketched by Wiley Corbett in 1923 for the city of New York. He sketched the vision that the increase in demand for infrastructure would need to overlap with the city’s architectural compactness (illustration 12). Instead high density cities develope the tendency to displace their central business district form city centres to the city radial infrastructure. Where the traffic flow is optimal and accessibility optimal while keeping historical city centres intact.

Illustration 12: overlap of increasing infrastructural demands in high density New York [sketch in 1923 by Wiley Corbett, from Delirious New York, Koolhaas R.]

For the urban and architectural design of the thesis location of Amsterdams business district South Axis, it’s important to define the elements which are localy present. For the redesign of the infrastructural hub in combination with additional urban development the author has developed the design approach fromt he perspective of dynamics, of currently running processes. The South Axis is characgterised by the intense flow of traffic and a high density of office buildings. The flow of traffic and the flow of people should be a dominant factor in the urban design since it’s dynamic 486 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

properties create additive value for the perception of space, either when it is described from the perpective of the driver in his car passing by or the person looking at the car passing by (illustration 13). The panorama and the view needs to be optmally organized for the dynamic (the car) as well as for the static user (the office worker). The unique qualities of the location are being optimized in an urban design proposal resluting in a synergy between architecture and infrastructure.

Illustration 13: integratable topics in infrastructure and architecture

3.2 The architecture-infrastructure synergy The authors programmed tool enables the architect to make adaptable sketch designs in de preliminary design phase. The entire design team is required to take part in the condensed collaborative design development of the urban and infrastructural node at the Amsterdam South axis. This sketch design tool explores the possibility to unite infrastructure with building structure to a coherent entity. Possibilities of layering transport systems is proposed. The elevated road design merges and bifurcates its trajectory in an elegent way. The space left under the road reestablishes the connection on ground floor facilitating the pavement to be reconnected.

Doning so the infrastructural barier is overcome and the two sides of the business district are reconnected. The space left under and in between the trajectory is inhabited by the new buildings footprint. The MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 487

structure will find its optimal way in between the space above, besides and under the infrastructure. Thus resulting in an optimal space use for building and infrastucture as an ensemble (illustration 14). This processrun development is all-round adaptable to needs and whishes and is fundamentally based on the optimal spatial configuration of the hanging chain model of Gaudi. The well balanced spatial configuration between infrastructure and architecture creates a value that is higher than the sum of its parts. The design establishes a synergy between the two aparant conflicting constituting elements.

Illustration 14: optimal geometrical organisation of infrastructure and architecture as a sketch alternative in the Game play

Evaluation The developed alternatives are evaluated and adapted on the basis of the experts input. The design interations run fluently and the created insight is increased in a condensed time. So sketching isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a slow process of iterating through changes and options anymore, but it has become an exiting exploring Game play. After the selection of the most valuable design alternative developed by the authors design tool, the architect will more detailedly develop the design.

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Illustration 15: the urban-architectural design with incoporation of infrastructure, benefitting both

Illustration 16: schematic section of synergetic integration of landscape, built volume and infrastructure

4. Conclusion The theory of emergence and evolution (as bottom up principles that are fed with data of experts, like an urban designer creating input in the coherence of an urban development, a road designer in the connectivity to the existing network) in design has a strong point in making the architecture connect to the existing structures and environments. The use of the computer to accelerate the generation of alternatives is a powerful application in the proposing of solutions, but the important part is still the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s evaluation on aesthetics, which is inherent in intuition, taste, estimation and experience. The importance of the architect lays in this skill, because the computer does not have these capabilities.

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The attention given to the psychological aspect of spatial perception form the road remains to be relevant since the time spent travelling on the road is still increasing and inherently with it the increase of the square meters of road constructed. The gradual absorption of mobility in society is remarkable. Most psychological responses of humans are subconscious and intuitive. As an architect it’s important to be aware of this aspect and to carefully create spatial design that is founded on this knowledge. Mobility has been and will be the topic of discussion and development of ideas and utopia’s. Since the industrial revolution and the subsequent modernity, mobility has become a central theme in society and it’s discussions. As the thesis design addresses new ways in developing a synergy between architecture and infrastructure.

5. References 1. ALEXANDER C., 1980, The process of creating life. The nature of order, An essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.

2. BENTLEY P.J., 1999, Evolutionary Design by computer, San Fransisco, CA, Morgan Kaufmann, int. p.1 3. Cambridge Dictionaries Online [http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp] 4. FRAZER JOHN H., 1995, The dynamic evolution of designs, School of design and communication, University of Ulster, Belfast, UK. 5. SALINGAROS, NIKOS A., 2004 September. Design methods, emergence, and collective intelligence. of Applied Mathematics, University of Texas at San Antonio. In: Katarxis no.3.

6. WOLFGANG SCHIVELBUSCH, 1980, The Railway Journey 7. APPLEYARD D., LYNCH K., 1964,The View from the Road 8. HOUBEN F., 2004, Mobility, A room with a view 9. MAAS W., 2002, Five minutes city 10. BELL J., 2001, Carchitecture, when the car and the city collide

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Lift@Weimar: Sustainable Interaction with Food, Technology, and the City Jaz Hee-jeong Choi Queensland University of Technology Brisbane QLD 4059, Australia h.choi@qut.edu.au Marcus Foth Queensland University of Technology Brisbane QLD 4059, Australia m.foth@qut.edu.au

Abstract This workshop explores innovative approaches to understanding and cultivating sustainable food culture in urban environments via humancomputer-interaction (HCI) design and ubiquitous technologies. We perceive the city as an intersecting network of people, place, and technology in constant transformation. Our 2009 OZCHI workshop, Hungry 24/7?

HCI Design for Sustainable Food Culture, opened a new space for discussion on this intersection amongst researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds including academia, government, industry, and nonfor-profit organisations. Building on the past success, this new instalment of the workshop series takes a more refined view on mobile human-food interaction and the role of interactive media in engaging citizens to cultivate more sustainable everyday human-food interactions on the go.

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Interactive media in this sense is distributed, pervasive, and embedded in the city as a network. The workshop addresses environmental, health, and social domains of sustainability by bringing together insights across disciplines to discuss conceptual and design approaches in orchestrating mobility and interaction of people and food in the city as a network of people, place, technology, and food.

Theme And Background Human existence fundamentally depends on food intake. Therefore food security based on the condition of having access to stable availability and use of quality food [1] is a crucial element of human sustainability.

However, our current state of food production and consumption does not ensure food security for the future. One of the key contributors to the problem is the acute urban-rural segregation and the subsequent lack of understanding of how food shapes the city by shaping the social, environmental, and health contexts of the individual and further, the community. Therefore, ‘a coherent and coordinated strategy is vital’ [2] not only amongst collective entities such as nations and regions but also individuals. Our first food workshop at OZCHI 2009 addressed issues of cultivating sustainable ‘eating, cooking, and growing food’ culture [3] through individual day-to-day practices. We build on the knowledge accrued from the OZCHI workshop to further explore the issue through the specific lens of ‘mobility.’

As evidenced in initiatives such as Slow Food International, a nonprofit group focusing on preservation of the cultural, culinary, and artistic local traditions [4], food industrialisation has been condemned

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for ‘contaminating’ the urban food ecology with unhealthy (and often unnatural) products; for social isolation; and detrimental environmental impact in many domains of business operation from product packaging to produce itself. However, convenience and economic advantage still attract many people around the world to taking the ‘on the go option’ of readymade packaged food. The growing urban population, which has already reached the 50% mark on the global scale [5], presents new challenges for us to reframe the culture and practices of consuming food in the city. In urban environments where one-person households are the dominant form of residence, there is limited access to fresh produce and/or facilities to prepare quality food particularly for people with the low socio-economic status [6], and access to mass-produced goods is an embedded feature, what kind of contributions can we make from the perspective of interactive media in order to cultivate a sustainable food culture? Further, how is the city as a physical and abstract entity situated in relation to the information that flows through it? Willis and Geelhaar argues that ‘the challenge is less a case of putting information back in its place, but of putting place back into information’ [7]. This workshop aims develop conceptual and design approaches at the intersection of people, place, and technology, by bringing together expertise from various related fields of study including HCI, information technology, urban informatics, sociology, cultural, environment, and health studies.

Goals And Outcomes To respond to the main question posed above, the workshop focuses on three domains of enquiry: Firstly, what are the key determinants of current mobile human-food interactions (for example, outdoor eating

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may have different connotations and implications in Reykjavik compared to the Sunshine Coast in Australia during winter)? Secondly, where are the gaps that can be filled by interactive media in order to improve the health, environmental, and social sustainability of mobile human-food interaction? Thirdly, what are conceptual and design approaches we can provide pragmatic solutions in an imminent future? By examining these three domains, we hope to generate new actionable knowledge that can be applied to developing usable technologies in specific urban environments.

The workshopâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contribution and outcomes will extend beyond the theme of food. The need to develop perspectives of designing interactive urban media is on the rise as we enter the era of ubiquitous computing. Thus it is necessary to build a common language that allows fluid communication amongst researchers and practitioners in relevant fields in order to discuss and expand knowledge that can be effectively used to deal with actual life challenges such as sustainability â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a term whose meaning varies amongst individuals, communities, and broader collective entities according to their value contexts.

Workshop Format and Participation The topic of the workshop is innately transdisciplinary. Thus the workshop functions as an open and active forum for forward-thinking practitioners, designers, and scholars to address and enhance the role of interactive technology and media in motivating sustainable human-food interactions in the city. We very much welcome contributions from those who are not currently in fields that are directly related to food research. As such, we keep the workshop open to anyone who registers to participate as audience.

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There are four speakers, namely: Mark Shepard (Assistant Professor, Departments of Architecture and Media Study at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York), Katharine S. Willis, (Researcher / Artist / Architect at University of Siegen), Denisa Kera (National University of Singapore), Marc Tuturs (University of Amsterdam), Marcus Foth (Associate Professor at Queensland University of Technology), and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi (ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow at Queensland University of Technology). Presentations will be followed by an interactive discussion with the audience.

The Organisers Jaz Hee-jeong Choi is an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow (Industry) at the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, QUT. Her research interests are in playful technology, particularly the ways in which various forms of playful interaction are designed, developed, and integrated in different cultural contexts. In her doctoral research, she developed a new conceptual approach to urban sustainability that recognises â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;playâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as the core of transformative interactions in cities as ubiquitous technosocial networks. Her current research explores designing and developing playful ubiquitous technologies to cultivate sustainable food culture in urban environments. She has collaborated with leading international researchers and published in books and journals across various disciplines. Her website is at www.nicemustard.com.

Marcus Foth is Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, QUT, and team leader of the Urban Informatics Research Group. He received a QUT

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Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellowship (2009-2011), and a Smart Futures Fellowship from the Queensland State Government (2009-2011), co-sponsored by National ICT Australia (NICTA). He was awarded the inaugural Australian Business Foundation Research Fellowship on Innovation and Cultural Industries 2010 sponsored by the Aurora Foundation. He was an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow (2006-2008), and a 2007 Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Dr Foth’s research explores human-computer interaction design and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on urban informatics, locative media and mobile applications.

The high quality of his research work has attracted over $1.7M in national competitive grants and industry funding since 2006. Dr Foth has published over 70 articles in journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. He is the editor of the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics (2009), and is currently co-editing the book “From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen” for MIT Press (2010). He is the conference chair of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies 2011 in Brisbane. More information at www.urbaninformatics.net

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Links http://liftconference.com/lift-at-home/events/2010/10/31/lift-workshop-weimar Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=154534607892420&ref=ts

References 1. Food and Agriculture Organizataion of the United Nations, “FAQ: What is Meant By Food Security,” 2010; http://www.fao. org/spfs/about-spfs/frequently-asked-questions-spfs/en/.

2. Food and Agriculture Organizataion of the United Nations, The State of Food Insecurity in the World: High Food Prices and Food Security - Threats and Opportunities, Food and Agriculture Organizataion of the United Nations, 2008.

3. J.H.-j. Choi, et al., “Hungry 24/7? HCI Design for Sustainable Food culture Workshop,” Book Hungry 24/7? HCI Design for Sustainable Food culture Workshop, Series Hungry 24/7? HCI Design for Sustainable Food culture Workshop, CHISIG, 2009, pp.

4. P. Jones, et al., “Return to traditional values? A case study of Slow Food,” British Food Journal, vol. 105, no. 4/5, 2003, pp. 297-304.

5. UNFPA, State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, U. N. P. Fund, United Nations Population Fund, 2007.

6. N. Wrigley, “‘Food Deserts’ in British Cities: Policy Context and Research Priorities,” Urban Studies, vol. 39, no. 11, 2002, pp. 2029 - 2040.

7. K.S. Willis and J. Geelhaar, “Information Places: Navigating Interfaces between Physical and Digital Space,” Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, M. Foth, ed., IGI Global, 2009, pp. 206-218.

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Mobile Applications in Urban Planning Karsten M. Drohsel www.temporarilyrepaired.net Peter Fey Dipl.-Ing., HCU Hamburg Stefan Hรถffken Dipl.-Ing., TU Kaiserslautern, http://cpe.arubi.uni-kl.de Stephan Landau Dipl.-Ing., HCU Hamburg Dr. Peter Zeile Dipl.-Ing., TU Kaiserslautern, http://cpe.arubi.uni-kl.de

Abstract Mobile phones changed the way we communicate in a fundamental way.

With the rise of smartphones and the mobile internet, these changes will be more profound and extensive than ever before. Location-based-services, augmented reality and the ubiquitous connectivity offer new ways for the perception of space and participation in the urban environment.

This paper begins with a theoretical overview about the changes in communication via the internet and the new technologies. In its second part, the paper presents two projects using mobile applications in an urban context. It discusses these new opportunities as well as the barriers they present and gives an outlook of possible uses and how urban planners can take advantage of these new tools.

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Theoretical overview The Social Web and communication Supported by technological development and its widespread diffusion the Internet has changed our communication patterns. With “the diffusion of the Internet a new form of communication has emerged, characterized by the capacity of sending messages from many to many, in real-time - or chosen time, and with the possibility of using point-topoint communication, narrowcasting or broadcasting, depending on the purpose and characteristics of the intended communication practice” (Castells 2009, p. 55).

The decentralized internet is “an architecture of participation” as O‘Reilly (2004) pointed out the advantages of the new communication infrastructure. Or said in other words: “We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations” (Shirky 2008, pp. 20). The Internet provides a low-threshold communication between nearly everybody, worldwide. Whereas real-world communication is limited by distance and time, online tools enable many forms of instant, global, and nearly permanent communication.

With the widespread diffusion of mobile phones and especially smartphones (like the iPhone) the internet is going mobile. Via mobile devices and wireless connections, citizens can surf in the web nearly everywhere – no “hot-spot” is needed anymore. Seen from a planner´s perspective: that means, that new services are emerging, which bring interactivity and social media directly into the public space and neighborhoods. The “mobile

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factor” reduces the limits of distance and time nearly totally – the internet is getting ubiquitous.

The reduction of temporal and spatial limits offers new chances for the urban planners, to use these tools to engage citizens for their cities. “Planners will be able to create their own games and provide engaging channels for citizens to get engaged. […] Location-aware games could provide a venue to get citizens involved early in the planning process. Armed with new social media tools and access to information, citizen planners will soon join professionals in our search for the liveable cities of tomorrow” (Haller and Höffken 2010).

Engaging the mobile citizens In Germany nearly everybody has a mobile phone and the numbers of smartphones will be more than 8 millions in the end of 2010 (Bitcom 2010). The growth of this mobile market will be one of the fastest growing markets in communication with nearly 33% (Bitcom 2010). The society will change into a mobile society and especially in urban areas the mobile citizens will be the common citizen. At this point the relevance and potential of mobile technology in urban planning and urban culture have to be researched and developed, as the technology and the tools are going to be ubiquitous and invisible and therefore change the social behavior, as Shirky points out: “The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It´s when a technology becomes normal, than ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and so for young people today, our social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming” (Shirky 2008, p. 105).

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Beside the anonymous data analysis of the background data of the mobile sector (flowing data, phone call connections, etc. as already done in urban research projects1) this offer the change for a higher envolvement of citizens and the integration to participation in the urban environment the mobile participation (mParticipation).

Referring to the 4 groups (experts, local experts, citizens as affected persons and the crowd ) which can be involved in participation processes (Müller 2010), the presented projects focus on the last three of them, to get the local knowledge of citizens, their opinions as affected persons and to use the crowd-sourcing-effect for a bigger data aggregation. This bottom-up-attempt tries to engage the mobile citizens, because “Mobile applications amplify participation in a spatial and temporal dimension and will widen the range of possible uses for urban planning and design” (Haller and Höffken 2010).

Technology Smartphones Smartphones bring us the vision of ubiquitous computing closer. Today, smart phones with intuitive touch screen spread quickly: Playing audio and video files is a standard as the access to mobile content on the internet.

Along with the increasingly low/flat rates for mobile internet, the changing in the handling of mobile phones progresses, so that more and more people have their “little digital companion”. The vision of “ubiquitous computing” (Weiser 1993) - the ubiquity of computerized Information 1 E.g. in the Project Real Time Rome (http://senseable.mit.edu/ realtimerome/) or Cellular Census: Explorations in Urban Data Collection (http://www.currentcity.org/pdf/IEEEPaper.pdf )

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processing – will come true. With the smartphone, the user can almost do all kind of things, even if they look for the first time as gimmicks (Streich 2005, p.190: “Homo ludens”, as a source of knowledge and of scientific work). With the distribution of netbooks or the iPad, the use of the mobile internet was extended. The “multimedia wizard of the future” (Althoff et al. 2010) allow unrestricted access to all information - anytime and anywhere. Rounding out the technical equipment through the integration of GPS, compass and some possibilities for sensor technology, such as the measurement of sound or the measurement of tilt angle. Smartphones provide a new platform for location-based-services and will be small augmented reality browsers.

Augmented Reality Augmented Reality (AR) is, in opposition to Virtual Reality (VR) with only virtualized environments, a method, which overlays digital information like points or three-dimensional structures over an existing camera picture or stream. Augmented Reality is often referred to as ”advanced“ or “enriched reality” and assigned to the so-called humanmachine interaction methods. Generally therefore the real-time storage of human senses with the help of computer models called (Milgram and Colquhoun, 1999). An AR system can overlap the reality with visual, auditory and tactile information in real (Höhl 2008, p. 10). Characteristic of Augmented Reality techniques are 1.) the combination of virtual and real objects in real environment, 2.) the direct interaction and presentation in real time and 3.) the display of all content in three dimensions (Azuma, 1997). That means, that AR fully integrates and overlays virtual content with the real world (Höhl, 2008, p. 10). Required hardware components for AR-systems are the computer unit with the appropriate renderer, a display unit, such as screen or head-mounted display, a tracking system MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 503

for recording the location and evaluation of the viewing direction and a receiving sensor technology, such as cameras and any input devices. Due to the immense hardware requirements for an AR system, there are different visualization methods (Höhl, 2008, p. 12).

Video See-through (VST) is a technique, where the user wears a completely closed projection goggle. Inside this goggle, a LCD-Screen projects a mixture between the real camera and the new, augmented object.

Optical See-through (OST) is a quiet different approach. The main difference is, that an an optical combiner produces the image on a semitransparent mirror, so that the user perceives the new environment over this kind of projection on the transparent mirror.

Projective AR (PAR) is a very easy to legalize method, because you only need a projector or a beamer to texturize an additive information to an object. The main problem is to adapt the picture information on the real geometry of the objectprojected by using a projector digital content to an object Monitor AR (MAR) is the technique which is realized on smarthphones.

With the help of a softwaremixer , camera and a monitor/screen, the digital information is displayed on this monitor of a desktop PC or smartphone screen.

If people want to use a smartphone for the so called “mobile augmented reality”, the mobile augmented reality browser like e.g. LayAR (http:// layar.com) uses a monitor AR system. For the correct representation of the “augmented content”, it is necessary to have a geotag, to reference the position of the model in the real world.

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Geotagging The geotag is a geographical coordinate – most common is the WGS 84 reference system by using GPS (Global Positioning System) – added to other (digital) content. Via the geographical identification metadata of every kind of media, like photographs, video, websites or RSS feeds can be placed on a map. Most smartphones and more and more compactcameras have an integrated GPS-Sensor, which allows the saving of the geocoordinate directly in the EXIF-header (which is a property field of the image).

But geotagging can be seen as a new paradigm in the use of internet.

Traditionally, information in the worldwideweb (www) was only a information, somewhere in the cyberspace, without any real location. The combination of all available data with geographic coordinates, and their constant availability and interchangeability with mobile devices is a great breakthrough in the use of the internet esp. in public space. Sometimes the “semantic web” is mentioned the so called “web 3.0”. Therefore the logical and important next step is the combination of geographic and virtual information – the “web 3.0” or simply the Geoweb (Zeile, 2010, p. 101).

This means that virtual data dispersed in the www get a footprint on the globe – they are again located.

We believe that the leading indicator and also a bridgehead of this development could be in the field of spatial planning. That means that the use of geoinformatics with its subsection, the “web mapping” services will be used as a unit to collect, publish and transform data about locations or single spatial or public topics. If you pursue this development, it is to state, that all the methods and technics of pure web mapping, Web 2.0 services, and even individual simulation tools now grow together [Zeile 2010: 101]

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and result in new services and could generate an additional benefit: the use of “location based services”.

Location-Based-Services Using GPS (Global Positioning System), the location of mobile phones can be determined. If there is a weak or no signal available, a localization is also possible with the “Cell-ID” method: A Software locates the masts of the mobile carrier network, and knows, in which cell you are located.

For a better measurement, there are algorithms, which combine the signal of three cells and triangulate the location between these cells. In addition, a built-in digital compass in the phone could detect the user’s viewing direction. With these reference points, it is possible to obtain information on a targeted object in real time on the mobile phone display. Here are some examples of good location-aware social media applications, built up in the surrounding of social communities.

Foursquare Foursquare is a combination between location-based service and a social networking website (http://foursquare.com) , the software/ the client is available for the most common mobile OS like iPhone OS, Android and Blackberry. You can also use a browser-based application in your favorite internet browser. The idea ist, that users can “check-in” at every venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a special app. For every check-in, the user earns points, and if somebody checked-in the most in one venue, he becomes the mayor of this location. Beside the classical social community features like adding a friend or post a comment, the most interesting thing beside the mayorships are the badges, you earn, if you have checked-in for example on 5 different location on one day. In Future, there will be the

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possibility to create and add a “custom badge” to foursquare. This could be an interesting issue for activities in the tourism sector or for example the mobile museum of typography which will be explained in 3.1. The visitor of a city or museum has to go to special venues, and if he visited for example 5 spots, he can earn the official badge of this event. The tool helps to form a urban game out of the application and add the fun-factor to the app.

Gowalla Gowalla ( is an other geosocial network with different focus. You can add spots only by visiting a place, but, and this application has the advantage over foursquare, you can additionally add “own created trips” and pictures of the places. This is a high potential for creating tours for tourism, adding crowdsourcing data by the users. A disadvantage is, that you can add only a spot, if you are really, in a physical way, in front of the venue. Today, it is not possible to do that over a standard web browser by checking-in.

But with the possibility of creating own tours without having any skills in programming a badge, this tool can be helpful in future.

Facebook Places A new concept is Facebook Places, which adapts functionality from foursquare and gowalla and connects, that is the main point, the user directly to their own facebook community. Facebook places is only available in the U.S. and on iPhone OS, but other countries and other mobile OSes should follow. Until now the use isn´t really clear for the two presented examples but shows the high potential that facebook – as the leading social network – attach to location-based-services. Maybe in combination with the “like-button” it will help to spread the information about the application and its content.

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The value of mobility The multiple advantages of mobile communication offer new possibilities for urban planners and urban artists. As the iPhone (and more and more other devices) reduced fundamentally the barrier of the use of these mobile technologies, the low-threshold usability offers a new joy of use. That means, that the technology offers a fun and a entertaining side. Now nearly everyone (and more people will be able in the future) can handle a mobile phone and use applications. Through this possibility the technology offers the chance of an in-sitio reaction, what for example enables the integration of more citizens in planning processes. In this way, a citizen, who is focusing a certain problem (e.g. a broken traffic-light) is able to react directly in place and time, which adds a component of spontaneity. The reduction of spatial and temporal limits also allows the gaining of information anytime and everywhere. That means, that citizens are – potentially – more independent to choose when and where they participate.

Another important advantage is, that the mobile internet is multimodal.

Users can communicate via all kinds of channels even if it is voice, text, an image or a video. In contrary to mobile phones, which are just offering voice and sms, smartphones are now connected to the whole internet. This amplifies the range from a one-to-one to a one-to-many communication, as the own content can be published in the internet even by using the content from other pages. And all these channels can be used in real-time, which offers short-time reactions. Concerning all these aspects it can be said, that participation is inherent to mobile phones (Castells, 2006) and especially to smartphones. That´s why the two following projects try to explore the values, restrictions and possibilities of the value of mobility.

And now it´s the time for it, as Shirky (2008, p. 105) pointed out: “the

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invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It´s when a technology becomes normal, than ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and so for young people today, our social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.”

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Two examples of mobile applications

Typospotting - Bringing back urban typography!

Introduction Augmented Reality Applications for smartphones – in combination with geolocation and mobile Internet – allow the replacement of removed signs and billboards in the urban space. By using a augmented reality tool a virtual rediscovery of disappeared typography in urban space can be made.

Typography in public space Letterings and typographically designed trademarks are one of the main elements that are found anywhere and everywhere in public space. House numbers consisting of two not very expressive numerals, more or less typographically arranged street signs, signages of private and common companies according to their own corporate design, the preservative trademarks of e.g. Coca Cola and McDonalds, or the multitudinous advertising media in public space – these typographical arrangements impact our habit of viewing and our visual sensation.

Expressive letterings and trademarks leave a mark in our memory. They stand effectively for definite places, for instance the neon writing of Berlin Café Kranzler. All the more one is bemused, if one of these typographical checkpoints in public space disappears such as the well known “Zierfische” lettering – trademark of a pet shop for several decades – disappeared with the shop at Berlin Frankfurter Tor.

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Letterings – symbols of the urban history Billboards and signs are important symbols in the urban environment, as they shape the cities atmosphere and are – especially in the backview – symbols of different epochs. The Broadway in New York is a famous example, as the billboards shape the character of this urban place. Also in Berlin – with his special historical background – billboards and letters are highly connected to the past and the actual chances in the whole city.

Berlin’s history – with its big changes – is connected and reflected in these elements. For example socialistic propaganda billboards were removed, the tourism industry produces new logos and billboards and the development of billboard production causes new varieties for small shops to design their logos. And the famous sign “You are leaving the American sector” is nowadays only quotation and a touristic symbol, discharged of its former meaning and its spatial context. The meaning of boards and signs is not only related to the written content (the “text”) but also its size, location and design – it´s urban context.

Fig. 1 - Example of The Mobile Museum of Typography MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 511

Bringing back urban typography Using Augmented Reality (AR) application offers the chance to bring the letterings back in urban space, which allows a higher contextual understanding. By adding digital elements, the live view of the real-world environment is replenished with virtual computer-generated imagery.

To make this context visible again, we create The Mobile Museum of Typography, which can be used in the streets to relocate and show the missing letterings. The Mobile museum functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality and enables a view in the past.

Example The use can be seen on following pictures. The old symbol of the former energy supplier of Berlin, the BEWAG (which now is part of the Swedish company Vattenfall) can be replaced via the AR-Tool in it´s former place.

Fig. 2 – Showing the old Sign of the former Electricity Company of Berlin “Bewag” 512 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

Technology Using the Augmented Reality Browser Layar, which was developed for smartphones, allows the implementation and geolocalization (via GPS) of 3D-typographic models. The models will be designed with the 3D-application SketchUp. The typographic 3D-models can be stored on a homepage and be downloaded via the internet with or without restrictions. Using the app of LayAR, all the models can be seen on the smartphone (iPhone and Androids).

Combining history, technology and design – Typographic City Walks To explore the removed in the urban space and give communicate urban history, it is possible to organize typographic city walks using the AR-application. Passing by the real locations – in addition to the ARvisualization – it will be given an overview about the history of the place and the lettering to gain consciousness about political, aesthetical and design topics. The technology allows the experience of the urban history and a higher visualization of the letterings either on photography or the letterings which where e.g. stored in the Buchstabenmuseum in Berlin.

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Participation on demand – Nexthamburg Mobile Every individual citizen has their own knowledge, experiences and opinions about the city or town they live in. They know the good and bad qualities of the area they reside in. This knowledge is an important source of information which urban planning can use for its advantage.

A citizen can use their mobile phone to communicate their experiences or knowledge along with their opinion by using the “on demand” option which is available 24 hours a day. So he can participate everywhere and anytime.

The technological key for the participation option is established by using the “location base service concept ”.This is accomplished by the use of contemporary smart phones which has the ability to locate a device by GPS. They have ubiquitous internet accessibility via UMTS and feature user-friendly input and output possibilities via high resolution touch screens.

The participation “on demand“ frames a vision, that in the near future every citizen will have the ability to follow the location-dependent planning discussions. Furthermore he can participate in them or create a discussion of his own. He can do this by using „on demand“ which would be available 24 hours a day from any smart mobile phone.

Nexthamburg – a project gains a participation “on demand“ In course of the diploma thesis “Participation On Demand”, a model of using smartphones for building a participation “on demand” for the project Nexthamburg was created. Nexthamburg is a private initiated project, which encourages citizens to share their thoughts and ideas concerning the areas they live in. The project pursues a crowdsourcing strategy.

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The Nexthamburg Project serves as a independent “think tank” for future development of the city of Hamburg. The projects goal is to establish a “Wiki” for urban planning, a collection of ideas , opinions, along with experiences and knowledge of local citizens. Nexthamburg desires to inspire all citizens to be active protagonist in urban planning issues. In course of the characteristic of initiating “bottom up” processes Julian Petrin, CEO of Nexthamburg says: “Not the city includes the municipality – the citizens include the municipality” (Petrin, 2010) The Nexthamburg Project allows citizens to be involved in many different methods. A citizen can bring their ideas or place a comment along with voting by using the Nexthamburg web site www.nexthamburg.de, or they can be part of a Nexthamburg Session which meets every six months. At these sessions citizens can discuss their experiences, knowledge and ideas face to face allowing the best ideas to come forth for the future growth of City of Hamburg. The project strives for innovative methods and uses a clear corporate identity. In this way Nexthamburg makes the citizen “more interested” for urban planning.

Nexthamburg mobile – a experimental approach For the Nexthamburg project a participation “on demand” method based on an iPhone app in cooperation with Nexthamburg and “cajaks.com mobile phone applications“, a iPhone application developer, was selected.

The application is named “Nexthamburg mobile”. Every iPhone user have the ability to use Nexthamburg mobile to express their opinions concerning what he likes and dislikes in his living environment. We conducted this experimental approach to gain practical experience for our diploma thesis.

In detail the app “Nexthamburg mobile” provides information about the user’s actual position. He chooses a category – maybe a favorite building MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 515

or something that bothers him. In addition he can take a photo and type a statement. This small report, consisting of location, picture and text, will be sent to the Nexthamburg webpage (see fig 4-9). An interactive map shows all reports made by the citizens – ready to be discussed (see fig.

10). In the course of the experiment we primary collect reports, trying to identify starting-points for a comprehensive concept. This concept draws a possible prospective participation “on demand” option for Nexthamburg.

Fig. 4-9 – Screenshots the app “Nexthamburg mobile”.

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Fig. 10 – Screenshot of the interactive map.

The concept - a participation „on demand“ Nexthamburg mobile for the future By using the experiences, made during the experiment, we elaborate a concept for a future, „bottom up“ initiated participation “on demand“.

We learned from the experiment that an active community, even when it’s small, can create a huge amount of knowledge. This requires adequate incentives, which motivates the citizens for a active participation.

We suppose that in the future there will be a small but active community who uses „Nexthamburg mobile“. Protagonist, acting in the field of urban planning, like administrations, stakeholders, investors, initiatives

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or projects can assign tasks to this community. By cooperating together the protagonist and Nexthamburg can benefit the city of Hamburg with new technology, a wealth of community knowledge and a practical look of how the city looks as a whole. The protagonist can define a task which need to be done for example after a hard winter the road construction office could let the community search for potholes or a tourism association could ask visitors about their opinions of the city. Private programs can be set up to allow citizens to express their concerns on how they see public funds being wasted in their community. Nexthamburg mobile is a flexible participation tool, which can responds to the complex and often changing urban planning discussion.

The Cityscanner To handle all these tasks it is planed a two-way visualization display. For easy access and comfortable usability, there are two different ways to view, to edit or to create new information being given by the “Nexhamburg mobile” application. At first there is the classical 2D-map, the second is a Augmented Reality visualization. This gives the user the ability to view the real environment through your iPhone display, attached with virtual visualized information or objects.

2D-Map Visualization To activate the classical 2D-map visualization the user needs to place the iPhone horizontally in the palm of his hand. As example in (fig. 11) a map will appear which will point out “Points of Interest (POI)“ like the locations of pot holes that have been reported.

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Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Augmented reality visualization If the user switches the position of his iPhone from horizontally to vertically in his hand, the 2d map will disappear and the augmented reality view will appear. Through the display of his iPhone he will view the real environment attached with virtual visualized information or objects (see fig. 9).

Due to the two types of visualization the user can follow the planning discussion of his position wherever he is located. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Nexthamburg mobileâ&#x20AC;? shows him reports and other planning information in form of POI. The user only has to click with a fingertip at one of these POI to view additional information. Afterwards he will be able to edit this POI or create a new one.

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First attempts of a critical examination However there are some shortcomings that need to be looked at and resolved. They result from the fact, that not every citizen possesses the necessary smart phone with GPS and mobile internet capabilities. For this reason participation “on demand“ will excluded many potential participants, but in time the use of these smart phones will increase in number as the cost of owning and using them will go down. There is another problem concerning the input possibilities. The user reports during his daily routine. Maybe he is in transit and does not have much time to write a comprehensive text. Beyond that typing by a small touch screen is still very troublesome and time-consuming action. Thus the mobile input contains only small, superficial text elements. According to this there are limits for the tasks which can be handled by the concept of participation “on demand” The main advantages of “on demand“ is that it is easy to use, inexpensive and very citizen friendly. It enables to gain a vast amount of community knowledge from people who live in working neighborhoods.

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Conclusion As the paper pointed out, the actual change in communication behavior to mobility open a lot new options for participation and citizen’s engagement.

Consequently the changes and restrictions have to be explored to improve the technology and understand the imbedded social uses in a better way.

The authors think that mobile participation (including participation “on demand”, urban games and new engaging tools) will play a major role for gaining information for planning processes, by using crowdsourcing, location based service methods and augmented reality via mobile phones.

Approaches like “Nexthamburg mobile” or “The Mobile Museum of Typography” are just the beginning of that development. In the future technological options of mobile devices will be more developed and the acceptance for using such technologies will be much higher than today.

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References Althoff, S. Landwehr, G., Kratz, N., Zeile, P., 2010. Mobile Stadtinformationssysteme und Location Based Services – Neue Potentiale für die Touristen und Bürgerinformation. In: Schrenk, M. Popovich, V. Zeile, P., RealCORP 2010 15th International Conference, Vienna, Austria 18-20 May 2010. Vienna: CORP – Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning.

Azuma, R. T. 1997, A Survey of Augmented Reality, Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 6, pp. 355 – 385 [online]. Available at: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/arpresence.pdf [27.09.2010] BITKOM, 2010. Smartphones erobern den Massenmarkt. [online] Available at: <http://www.bitkom.org/62432_62420.aspx> [Accessed 27 September 2010] Castells, M. Fernandez-Ardevol, M. Linchuan Qiu, J. Sey, A., 2006, Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Castells, M., 2001. The Internet Galaxy. Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haller, C.; Höffken, S.: New Communication Tools and eParticipation: Social Media in Urban Planning. In: Schrenk, M. Popovich, V. Zeile, P., RealCORP 2010 15th International Conference, Vienna, Austria 18-20 May 2010.

Vienna: CORP – Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning.

Milgram, P., Coloquhoun, H., 1999. A Taxonomy of Real and Virtual World Display Integration. In: Ohta, Y. Tamura, H., International Symposium on Mixed Reality, San Francisco, USA 20-21 October 1999, Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Müller, P., 2010. Interview on economyaustria Interview by Christian Stemberger. [online] Available at: <http://www.economyaustria.at/ technologie/buerger-machen-staat-20>[Accessed 23 September 2010].

Petrin, J., 2010. Interview on Nexthamburg Interviewed by Stephan Landau and Peter Fey, 11 June 2010.

Shirky, C., 2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, New York: Penguin Press.

Streich, B., 2005. Stadtplanung in der Wissensgesellschaft – Ein Handbuch, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag.

Weiser, M. 1993. Hot Topics: Ubiquitous Computing, Piscataway: IEEE Computer.

Zeile, P. 2010. Echtzeitplanung – Die Fortentwicklung der Simulationsund Visualisierungsmethoden für die städtebauliche Gestaltungsplanung.

Ph. D. (Dr.), Technische Universität Kaiserslautern.

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Adaptive Architecture â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Conceptual Framework Holger Schnädelbach DipArch MArch PhD Mixed Reality Laboratory, Computer Science, University of Nottingham www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/~hms hms@cs.nott.ac.uk Tel.: (+44) 0115 9514094

Abstract Adaptive Architecture is a multi-disciplinary field concerned with buildings that are designed to adapt to their environments, their inhabitants and objects as well as those buildings that are entirely driven by internal data. Because of its multi-disciplinary nature, developments across Architecture, Computer Science, the Social Sciences, Urban Planning and the Arts can appear disjointed. This paper aims to allow readers to take a step back advancing the exploration of thematic and historical links across this exciting, emerging field. To this aim, it presents a cross-disciplinary framework of Adaptive Architecture, discussing motivations for creating Adaptive Architecture, before introducing the key interlinked components that creators draw on to create adaptiveness in buildings. This is followed by a brief outline of overarching strategies that can be employed in this context.

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Introduction Adaptive Architecture is concerned with buildings that are designed to adapt to their environments, their inhabitants and objects as well as those buildings that are entirely driven by internal data. The term is an attempt to incorporate what people imply when they talk about flexible, interactive, responsive or indeed media architecture, the mounting interest in this emerging field being demonstrated by the large variety of recent publications, (Kronenburg, 2007) (Harper, 2003) (Streitz et al., 1999).

Overall, Adaptive Architecture is not a well defined field of architectural investigation. It ranges from designs for media facades to eco buildings, from responsive art installations to stage design and from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing, just to mention a few examples (Tscherteu, 2009, Roaf et al., 2007) (Bullivant, 2005) (Eng et al., 2003) (Rogers, 2006). As will be clear to anyone attending this conference, Adaptive Architecture brings together a number of different concerns stemming from a wide variety of disciplines, spanning Architecture, the Arts, Computer Science and Engineering among others. Whether buildings in this context are described as flexible, interactive or dynamic, they embrace the notion of Architecture being adaptive rather then being a static artefact, often with an emphasis on computer supported adaptation.

This multi-disciplinarity has great advantages when the latest developments in different areas converge to create exciting new designs, experiences and lived-in buildings. It can also make the emerging field of Adaptive Architecture appear overly complex and disjointed. This might lead to the same ideas being constantly recycled without reference to precedent because it â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;hidesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in a different discipline. This becomes a problem, when the same mistakes are repeated. This paper will not solve this problem,

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but it aims to contribute to a better understanding of developments in Adaptive Architecture across its component disciplines. For this, a more conceptual view of the field is required that demonstrates thematic and historical linkages across the entire area.

This conference contribution has the simple aim to explore the burgeoning field in a rigorously structured fashion categorising the key elements of adaptive buildings, regardless of where they are employed, from Plug in City to Eco Houses(Price, 2003) (Willmert, 2001). With this aim in mind, the paper does not revolve around case studies and a description of their properties. Instead it focuses on common properties of Adaptive Architecture, which are then illustrated with case studies. This is done by proposing a structure for discussion and categorisation, which will be introduced below. In what follows, the term ‘Adaptive Architecture’ will be defined, before introducing the framework itself. This will be followed by a brief discussion of common design strategies that architects have access to when designing for adaptiveness.

Definition of Adaptive Architecture All Architecture is adaptable on some level, as buildings can always be adapted ‘manually’ in some way. Brand’s ‘How Buildings learn’ provides an insight into the different levels of adaptation to be expected and how these apply over different time scales (Brand, 1994). The use of the term ‘Adaptive Architecture’ must therefore be seen in this overall context and the following delineates between adaptable and adaptive: Adaptive Architecture is concerned with buildings that are specifically designed to adapt (to their environment, to their inhabitants, to objects within them)

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whether this is automatically or through human intervention. This can occur on multiple levels and frequently involves digital technology (sensors, actuators, controllers, communication technologies). Taking the above context into account, this definition and associated framework is therefore an attempt to incorporate a variety of approaches, such as those labelled flexible, interactive, responsive, smart, intelligent, cooperative, media, hybrid and mixed reality architecture (Kronenburg, 2007, Bullivant, 2005, Harper, 2003, Streitz et al., 1999, Zellner, 1999, Schn채delbach et al., 2007). All the above come with their own connotations and particular areas of focus. Adaptive Architecture as it is presented here, is structured to be independent of any of these particular concerns.

Before continuing with the body of the paper it is worth to set out one additional delineation. Although the term Adaptive Architecture is often used there, design processes themselves that are computationally adaptive to data drawn from the environment, inhabitants or relevant objects are not included in the framework. Recent approaches in generative design methods and data driven architecture highlight such adaptiveness during the design process. However, these do not necessarily in themselves lead to buildings that are adaptive during their occupied life cycle. However, they certainly do present a fascinating research field in themselves.

The framework The framework itself is structured along the following categories. It begins with motivations and drivers, asking the fundamentally important question for the reasons of the construction of Adaptive Architecture.

This is followed by a series of more practice-related categories detailing

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components of adaptive buildings. The framework steps through what adaptive buildings react to, what elements in adaptive architecture are adapted, the method for adaptation and what effect adaptations have.

Figure 1 Top level framework categories

The framework concludes with a discussion of overall strategies which look to incorporate multiple tactics drawn from the various adaptation components in overall strategies. Please compare Figure 1. The above categories are carefully illustrated through built cases, design prototypes and the literature. However, this framework does not attempt to be exhaustive in the way it makes use of examples. The aim is not to list all possible examples but to list those which illustrate the particular category well. When appropriate, the same example can appear in multiple categories for this reason. The emphasis is on allowing the reader to step back, explore links, make connections and understand historical dimensions of Adaptive Architecture in a structured way.

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Motivations and Drivers Motivations and drivers for designing for adaptiveness are numerous and varied. They can lie in cultural, societal and organisational domains as well as being concerned with communication and social interaction.

Cultural Adaptive spaces for cultural production have clearly a extended design history. Theatre spaces and concert halls have long incorporated technologies that allow them to adapt to different events and there is a complex range or technologies available that allows this to happen. There are other culturally focussed spaces that adapt to various parameters.

For example, Adaptive spaces are being created with the sole aim to explore or demonstrate a particular scientific debate. The SPECS group at UPF Barcelona creates what they term â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;inside-out-robotsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, inhabitable experimental spaces that are designed to allow researchers an exploration of how the human mind works [SPECS, Synthetic Oracle, Barcelona, Spain, 2008] . In a similar vain, adaptive spaces are set up to demonstrate a particular issue through artistic and architectural exploration and investigation, examples of this process being exhibited at CITA Copenhagen. Here the intricate relationships between tangible physical materials and intangible digital data are exposed through room-sized robotic membranes [CITA, Vivisection, Charlottenberg Art Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2006]. A different direction is taken by cultural architecture that focuses on education. Recently, there has been a lot of attention on learning environments and the InQbate space at Sussex University is an interesting case in point. It combines rotatable partitions, curtains and flexible seating with a high-tech layer of digital technologies 528 MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena

to allow flexible projections and audio productions for example [Sussex University, InQbate, Brighton, UK, 2007].

Societal One of the most prominent societal reasons for the design for adaptiveness is life style. Traditional Japanese domestic architecture responds to spatial constraints by producing highly adaptive interiors, a strategy taken on board by early modernists. Rietveld’s Schröder house offers sliding and folding partitions to allow inhabitants to adapt the space to their needs [Rietveld, Schröder House, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1924]. Nomadic life-styles, whether traditional or modern, lead to buildings that are transportable but also often re-configurable. For example, Horden’s iconic Skihaus was a structure that could be airlifted to a mountain side to provide shelter [Richard Horden, Skihaus, Switzerland, 1990-2005]. Clearly, the drive for environmental sustainability is a key driver at present and buildings are designed to adapt with the aim to lower the resulting CO2 emissions in particular. There are many examples of such buildings, but the need for further research is demonstrated by the recent extension of a research programme making use of fully instrumented EcoHouses [Derek Trowell Architects, The BASF House, 2008, University of Nottingham, UK].

Another somewhat more mundane motivation is architectural fashion.

Architectural designs follow fashion but also technological trends to some extent and individuals and organisations are interested in being part of a particular trend, or at the very least not to appear entirely outdated.

Architecture can be designed to be responsive to such adaptations by providing a flexible framework that allows relatively rapid updates.

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Organisational The third category of motivations can be described as organisational.

Adaptive buildings are designed to deal with changing circumstances.

The occupation of buildings changes at different time scales: there is rapid change through different activities throughout a single day, medium term change as result of re-organisations and longer term changes that might impact not only the building itself but also its surroundings.

Some times the need to respond to different time scales finds a direct implementation as with the Pompidou Centre, where partitions have different levels of flexibility depending on their purpose [Rogers & Piano, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 1977]. The above applies to different occupant categories from family units to large corporations and finds expression in projects of the related scales from Steven Holl’s Fukuoka Housing project [Steven Holl, Fukuoka Housing, Fukuoka, Japan, 1991] to Grimshaw’s Igus factory [Nicholas Grimshaw, Igus factory, Cologne, Germany, 1999-2001]. In addition to changes in occupation, buildings are also designed to cope with changes in their environments. In the most extreme case a site becomes unsuitable and a portable building can then be re-located. It might also be that a design attempts to anticipate more subtle environmental changes, such as those caused by climate change. Certainly larger organisations have then also been motivated by a drive to operate buildings more efficiently, and this has given rise to the relatively early introduction of electronic building management systems into corporate architecture roughly in the 1970’s. More recently this has started to overlap with the societal motivation to operate buildings in a more environmentally sustainable way (see related section above). Modern office buildings frequently combine efficient design and operation with sustainability aims. The University of Nottingham’s Jubilee Campus developed is an

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interesting example combining relatively low-tech construction with a sophisticated set of building management tools [Michael Hopkins, Jubilee Campus, Nottingham, UK, 1999]. The final organisational motivation can be summarised as flow management. Buildings are designed to cope with varying flows of people triggered by for example time of day (different flows during rush hours), emergency situations (allowing supporters on to the football pitch in certain circumstances) and variations in activity. Such flexible management is routinely done at large traffic exchanges and Foreign Office Architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Yokohama ferry terminal provides a good example. Its large open plan areas can be re-configured to allow different streams of passengers, to separate national from international departures for example [Foreign Office Architects, Yokohama Ferry Terminal, Yokohama, Japan, 2002].

Communication The final motivation and driver identified here is concerned with communication. There are buildings that are designed to be adaptive so that they better support different episodes of social interaction. In physical space, this can be achieved through changing layouts to manage the location of individuals in physical space, for example by re-arranging seating layouts as seen at the Toronto Skydome [Robie & Allan, Toronto Skydome, Toronto, Canada, 1988]. It is also related to flow management, highlighted when the interaction between certain streams of people is prevented for example in airport or court house design. There are also digital ways to adapt buildings with the aim to enhance social communication. Conferencing technologies, embedded into physical architectural design is designed to bridge between multiple physical sites, in particular with a view to reduce the need for travel [HP, Halo Telepresence System, Multiple Sites, 2007MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 531

2010]. With the aim to support informal and spontaneous communication between multiple office locations, hybrid spatial topologies introduce virtually dynamic spatial relationships into the built environment [Schnädelbach, Mixed Reality Architecture, Multiple Sites, 2003-2010].

Less focussed on social interaction but instead concentrating on getting across a message are those buildings that quite literally carry the corporate image of an organisation. The rapidly developing area of media-façades is the most direct example of this and the new Munich football arena a good case in point. Its façade changes colour depending on which team plays the stadium [Herzog & de Meuron, Allianz Arena, Munich-Germany, 2005].

Beyond displaying a message, those approaches can also be used to engage with a potential customer basis. Dytham’s iFly Virgin Wonderwall is an early example of such a strategy, allowing passers-by to interact with the façade via their mobile phones. [Klein Dytham Architecture, iFly Virgin Wonderwall, Tokyo, Japan, 2000].

The Adaptive Building and it Components For whatever reasons adaptive buildings are designed, constructed and occupied, they have a number of fundamental elements that re-occur across the design space that makes up Adaptive Architecture. These elements will be discussed in what follows. The first category is concerned with in reaction to what building are designed to be adaptive, which is followed by a discussion of the elements that can be made to adapt. The methods of adaptations will be introduced before outlining some of the possible effects. Where possible, each of the categories will be illustrated through a relevant example.

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In reaction to what? Logical data source driving adaptations In reaction to what is Architecture designed to be adaptive? Three main categories can be identified. Adaptive Architecture responds to inhabitants, the environment and objects, and those will be considered in turn.

Inhabitants Architects might focus their design efforts on individual inhabitants of an adaptive building. Individuals might then be empowered to change architectural layout manually or the building might respond to them in a particular way automatically, for example drawing on personal data that might be available to the building about them. Bill Gates residence is a well known exemplar case in this context, where a body worn personal tag is able to identify individuals and adjust temperature, music and lighting accordingly [James Cutler Architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s & Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Bill Gatesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; House, Medina, Washington, USA]. Most buildings are not just occupied by a single individual however. Designing for adaptiveness for groups of individuals can be a real challenge in turn. Once again an architect might concentrate on providing the possibilities for manual adaptations. Those will then be negotiated amongst inhabitants. The automatic adaptation of buildings towards groups of individuals entails knowing something about their group behaviour, probably learning over time and building up the necessary profiles.

Technically, the complexity lies in aggregating from multiple streams of personal data and finding a way to aggregate those streams in a way that is meaningful and useful. The Adaptive House at the University of Colorado explored that space by taking in data from multiple inhabitants to allow the house to adapt a variety of parameters [Mozer, The Adaptive House, Boulder, MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 533

USA, 1997]. Finally, organisations with organisation-wide motivations and strategies are a group of inhabitants that design for adaptiveness has to address.

Organisational structures include those parts that manage the building facility overall, those parts that operate facilities on a daily basis (frequently 3rd party organisations) and the actual occupying organisation, which might well be different from both the above. Adaptiveness needs to address their concerns with regards to keeping facilities responsive to organisational changes but also manageable on a day-to-day basis.

Environment Adaptive Architecture can be designed to react to its exterior environment.

As already highlighted, it is the societal motivation to live more sustainably that is a key driver in Adaptive Architecture at present. Adaptive elements are also designed to react to the interior environment, for example to ensure that temperatures inside are comfortable for inhabitants, but also to control the energy expenditure in achieving a particular comfort level. The previously introduced University of Nottingham research building does both as many technologically driven eco-projects would [Derek Trowell Architects, The BASF House, 2008, University of Nottingham, UK].

Objects Adaptiveness in reaction to objects is comparatively much less common or at least less discussed. Buildings can be thought of that react to objects passing through. For example, a building might automatically restrict access to specific category of people when a specific, may be a

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particularly valuable, object is present. In a similar way, a warehouse might prepare the correct loading bay in anticipation of a particular delivery coming in. Objects within buildings can also play a more direct role in the process of adaptiveness in buildings. For example at the InQbate learning environment, a tangible interface object based on a colour-coded cube allows the mixing of ambient colour in the overall space [Sussex University, InQbate, Sussex University, UK, 2007]. Finally, one might also think about adaptive architecture that adapts to objects passing by or overhead. Work within the Curious Home project at Goldsmithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s college has explored a domestic device that visualises the passing air traffic to give people living in the flight path near busy airport a handle on what goes on over their heads [Interaction Research Studio, Goldsmiths College, The Plane Tracker (The Curious Home), 2007]. Extending this idea, taking similar data streams, one could think of buildings that for example change their acoustic properties, when objects are passing that produce unwanted noise.

Elements of adaptation Within each adaptive building there are a number of elements that can be adapted. Elements of adaptation take a central role in Adaptive Architecture. Their selection is driven by the original motivations and by what adaptive buildings react to. They directly impact on the effect that is generated within an Adaptive Building (see below). The following steps through descriptions of the following elements of adaptations: surfaces, components and modules, spatial features and technical systems.

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Surfaces External and internal surfaces can be made to adapt. External adaptive surfaces are typically facades. Fundamentally there are two forms of adaptations. Mechanical adaptations change the appearance and overall properties of an architectural surface by mechanically altering its components. The Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris has demonstrated the maintenance difficulties that such technical complexity brings to the fore [ Jean Nouvel, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France, 1989]. Lighting and display technologies offer the second technical way for adapting surface elements. Such technologies are the original core of media façade work and there are many existing examples. Cook and Fourier’s Kunsthaus embeds individually addressable lights into its façade that can be combined for graphical effects and to display text [Peter Cook and Colin Fourier, Kunsthaus Graz (BIX), Graz, Austria, 2005]. Internal surfaces are also frequently adapted to different needs. Often this is for information visualisation. Very commonly, digital image projection transforms architectural surfaces into information displays. There are also dedicated efforts to make more surfaces ‘writeable-on’. InQbate, the learning space at Sussex University already mentioned combines both of these strategies [Sussex University, InQbate, Sussex University, UK, 2007]. Another type of surface adaptation is concerned with making decorative changes and through that influencing the ambiance of a room. Winfield’s Blumen Wallpaper is an interesting example as it adapts its lighting patterns and through those changes the appearance of the wall surface [Rachel Wingfield, Blumen Wallpaper, 2004].

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Components and modules The next sub-catebory is focussing on components and modules.

Components can be re-used, i.e. building construction that is focussed on re-using existing components such as the work by Santiago Cirugeda [Santiago Cirugeda, Urban Prescriptions, Barcelona, Spain 2005].

Components can clearly also be specifically designed to increase adaptiveness. Weatherheavens Series 4 portable shelter is designed around such a strategy for example [Weatherheaven Resources Ltd., Series 4, (Product), 2010]. There are also internal adaptive elements that do not require the replacement of any one component. Adaptive internal partitions are possibly one of the most common adaptive features in architecture. Koolhaas Floriac House incorporates partitions that fold down and disappear into the floor for example [Rem Koolhas, Floriac House, Bordeaux, France, 1995]. Going one step up in scale, the re-use of modules is another possibility and has a long history in architectural design. Archigramâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s archetypal plug-in city is the pre-cursor of many of the schemes that can be placed in this space. Kurukawaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nakagin Capsule Tower is a constructed example, in which standardized cubicle units are fixed to a central tower containing services and circulation [Kisho Kurukawa, Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, Japan, 1972]. At least in principle they are designed to be removed and re-located. Projects by Wes Jones, especially the project Pro/Con then appear to include the various uses of components and modules in the same scheme [Wes Jones, Pro/ Con, Los Angeles, USA, 2004].

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Spatial features Spatial features can be transformed, ranging from location, topology, and orientation, to form, the link between inside and out and internal partitioning. The location of buildings can change during the occupation life-cycle. One particularly interesting example is Böhtlingk’s Markies, an extendable camper trailer that is able to fold out its sides to create a larger enclosure [Eduard Böhtlingk, Markies, the Netherlands, 1985-95]. Actual buildings that draw on such principles are more transportable rather than mobile necessarily and frequently combine the re-configurability of different units to establish different architectural topologies. Lot-ek’s Mobile Dwelling Units are based on standard shipping containers and designed to follow people to wherever they live [Lot-ek, MDU (Mobile Dwelling Unit, Transportable, 2002]. Even when the site location of a building remains fixed, some radical changes can be achieved through changing the orientation of parts of an adaptive building. Sturm and Wartzech explore the impact on the relationship to the building’s relationship to its environment [Sturm und Wartzech, Kubus, Dipperz, Germany, 1996]. And beyond rotation, there are also a number of design projects that play with adapting the form of buildings. Changeable roof covers are probably the most common type of building in this category.

There are various sports stadia the roofs of which can be opened and closed, depending on the weather conditions. Studio Gang O’Donnell’s Theatre takes a similar strategy to a cultural performance space, allowing directors to open the roof, reflecting what is currently being played [Studio Gang O’Donnell, Bengt Sjostrom Starlight Theater, Rockford Illinois, 2003]. May be a slightly less common way to adapt forms are buildings that adapt in size, but relatively recently there have been a number of projects that are based on what might be called ‘drawer’ designs, allowing

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inhabitants to pull out parts of the building to adapt the interior space.

One interesting example in this context is Seifert & Stöckmann’s Living Room project that incorporated an extendable room cantilevered over an external void when drawn out [Seifert & Stöckmann, Living Room, Gelnhausen, Germany, 2005]. Taking the adaptation of form to its extreme, are those examples that change the actual shape of buildings in a more fluid and less prescribed fashion. Hyperbody’s Muscle Re-configured highlight interesting possibilities combining fabric architecture and flexible hydraulics [Hyperbody, Muscle Re-configured, Delft, The Netherlands, 2004]. Buildings can also be designed to be adaptive in their spatial topology. This concerns designs where the relationship between individual architectural units (modules or rooms) is not fixed during the occupancy of a building. This can be achieved through physical re-configurations.

Price’s seminal Generator Project provides some of the key inspiration in this area [Cedric Price, Generator Project, Project, 1978]. Achieving the above is technically very challenging, certainly when exterior surfaces are involved. However, there have been a number of interesting projects that focussed on physically adaptive topologies in the interior space. Shigeru Ban’s Naked House plays with this idea by enclosing a number of rooms on wheel bases in the larger open-plan volume of a residential propterty.

Only service areas are fixed, while living quarter can be re-arranged at will for different purposes [Shigeru Ban, The Naked House, Hadano, Japan, 1997]. There are also efforts to increase topological flexibility through communication technologies. Such hybrid spatial topologies consist of multiple physical spaces, typically remote to each other that are linked through audio and video. These technological links, especially when persistent link other locations as if they were close by and part of the same architectural configuration. Some times this is direct and predominantly designed for domestic environments as in the ComHome project [Stefan MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 539

Junestrand, ComHome proejct, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden, 1999]. Other projects have explored the use of a mediating 3D virtual space for an inhabitant driven hybrid spatial topology in a work setting such as the Mixed Reality Architecture prototype [Holger Schnädelbach, Mixed Reality Architecture, Multiple Sites, UK, 2003-2010]. A very prominent adaptive feature in building architecture is configuration of the inside/ outside link. All occupied buildings have doors and windows but there are some projects that highlight particularly interesting possibilities in this area. Early modernist seemed to have a particularly strong interest in this form of adaptation. Gaudi’s Casa Batla includes an ornamental exterior window panel that can be retracted up into the ceiling to create a balcony [Gaudi, Casa Batlo, Barcelona, Spain, 1904-106]. A similar strategy was followed by van der Rohe in his Tugendhat House that included a glass partition that slide into the floor to open the building up to outside [Mies van der Rohe, Tugendhat House, 1929-30, Brno, Czech Republic]. On a larger scale, and using an entirely different and more ambitious engineering solution, Hoberman’s Arch project translates this idea to stage design, connecting back to the principle of stage curtains [Chuck Hoberman, Hoberman Arch, Salt Lake City, USA, 2002].

Technical Systems The final element of adaptation concerns technical systems. In Adaptive Architecture, they are those systems, consisting of sensors, systems (software) and actuators, which actually produce adaptations when they are not entirely based on human intervention. Technical systems are at once elements of adaptation (they are being adapted) and a method of adaptation. Technical systems will be discussed in detail in the Method section.

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Method On a practical level, how is adaptation done in Adaptive Architecture?

This section discusses the following categories: human intervention, sensor based, systems and processing and finally actuation.

Human Intervention Conscious and intentional adaptations require a person to deliberately trigger an adaptation in a building, i.e. through human intervention. This can be direct and inhabitants will be able to move, rotate and re-position architectural elements that are designed for this purpose. Sometimes this is simply through manual adaptations as for example in Steven Hollâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fukuoka Housing project, where inhabitants are able to re-orient partitions to their requirement [Steven Holl, Fukuoka Housing, Fukuoka, Japan, 1991]. This same strategy is the basis for work in hybrid spatial topologies, creating architectural spaces that are linked through audiovisual connections. The previously introduced Mixed Reality Architecture allows its inhabitants full manual control over its hybrid spatial topology to support their current needs [Schnädelbach, Mixed Reality Architecture, Multiple Sites, 2003-2010]. There are also examples where this intentional control is mediated through technology and one of the earliest examples of remote control operation in a building context is Van der Leeuw House that allowed a glass partition be moved in this way [ Jan Brinkman and Cornelis van der Vlugt, Van der Leeuw House, Rotterdam, 1928-29].

Finally, there is also indirect control, but fully intentionally activated through technical systems. For example, this typically occurs when an inhabitant sets a specific temperature for the interior of their building via a HVAC system.

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Sensor Based (technical data source) Sensors find widespread application in Adaptive Architecture and provide the data that automatic adaptations are based upon. These can detect data such as inhabitant activities, environmental information and information about objects, previously introduced in ‘Reaction to what? - Logical sources driving adaptation’. This section discusses in more detail with what technical methods this can actually be achieved; how this is technically done.

There is a multitude of sensors that can provide personal data in a building context and this has been steadily growing over the last few decades.

There are a number of different types of personal data that can be made relevant in a building context. Only relatively recently physiological data, such as heart rate or skin conductance, has become practical to record and make available within Adaptive Architecture. Schnädelbach’s ExoBuilding prototype, a piece of Adaptive Architecture that breathes with its inhabitants and sonifies their heart beat explores the design space when such data and the building fabric are linked [Holger Schnädelbach, ExoBuilding, University of Nottingham, UK, 2009]. Sensors embedded into buildings can detect the location of its inhabitants to varying degrees of accuracy. These can involve an infrastructure where sensors are worn by participants that are then detected by receivers placed in the building infrastructure, as for example in the Active Badges set of technologies [Roy Want, Active Badges, Olivetti, Cambridge, UK, 1992]. Detecting the location of inhabitants can also rely on sensors embedded into the building fabric, for example those that detect the motion of inhabitants similar to an intruder alarm. Mozer’s Adaptive house experimented with such sensors to explore building infrastructures that ‘programme themselves’ rather than

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having to rely on manual configuration [Michael Mozer, The Adaptive House, Boulder, Colorado USA, 1997]. Sensors can be used to identify individuals and a number of technologies are available, such as smart cards for example. Sobeks R128 House provides an interesting example in this space with its voice operated entrance door, opening only when one of a number of pre-recorded voice samples is recognised [Werner Sobek, R128 House, Stuttgart, Germany, 1999-2000]. Finally, the activities of people (e.g watching TV, preparing food) might be detected as a driver for adaptations and it is also possible to combine the above data streams to learn about group behaviours over time. As previously highlighted, sensors can also detect environmental conditions inside and outside of a particular Adaptive Building. There are sensors for wind speed, temperature, light levels, air pressure, air quality and noise levels among others. Returning to the previously mentioned research Eco House, many projects in sustainable architecture will combine a number of those sensors [Derek Trowell Architects, The BASF House, 2008, University of Nottingham, UK]. The final sensor category is concerned with detecting objects. In supply management, RFID tags are regularly embedded into product packaging and in the construction industry also into building components and elements. Bar codes are ubiquitous in retail. Both can help identify the route of a product and estimate its arrival time on site for example. The resulting information about an object’s identity and location and possible information that can be drawn from analysing the relationships between multiple objects can then be made available for building adaptation, as already highlighted in ‘In reaction to’. Another interesting category of object sensors is concerned with the object’s condition. Sensors in this category currently allow the deviation from pre-specified parameters, for example to detect whether a product has been kept cool during transit.

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Systems and processing Data from sensors in isolation is rarely very powerful. It is the combination of multiple data streams that allows more complex analysis and reasoning.

Frequently, a piece of middleware software is responsible for reading data, both directly triggered by human intervention and caused by sensor output, processing that data and then pass it on to the relevant actuators (see for actuation in the following section). Such software reads in data from sensors and needs to have ways to deal with erroneous data and erroneous interpretations of data. Frequently such software provides some data visualisation to allow people to be more aware of the underlying data flow. This then gives rise to providing the appropriate level of control to inhabitants to adjust their building system accordingly. Both research labs and commercial organisations have developed software that fulfils this role. Greenhalghâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Equator Component Toolkit developed at Nottingham [Chris Greenhalgh, ECT, Nottingham, UK, 2005] and Bernardetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s IQR [Bernardet, IQR, Barcelona, Spain, 2002] were developed for very different purposes but show clear overlaps in the way that data connections are structured and exposed to the developers. Very much related to these, Processing is a very popular set of tools for prototyping interactive and adaptive demonstrators, even though it lacks the ease of use of visual programming [Ben Fry & Casey Reas, Processing programming environment, MIT, Cambridge Massacusetts, 2005]. In the construction industry, the area of building management systems covers that ground.

A building management system will draw on sensor data, configurations and data learnt over time to adapt buildings to the current circumstances.

Frequently, more complex buildings will draw on more than one building management system. The University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus is a good example, where there different systems for environmental controls,

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lighting and access [Michael Hopkins, Jubilee Campus, Nottingham, UK, 1999]. The above middleware platforms tend to run on centralised standard computers. More recently, there has been a push to distribute the processing of data out and the emergence of sensor networks is a direct result from this. Instead of being controlled and powered centrally, sensors and actuators become embedded with some processing and communication capabilities that allow for more rapid adaptations to changing stimuli.

Actuation (technical data sync) Non-manual adaptations in buildings depend on a variety of actuators to execute the intended effects. These range from lighting, vents, climate control, motors, hydraulics and pneumatics, phase change materials, communication links, to media displays of varying types. Actuators are driven by systems and processing technologies (described above) and are principally responsible for creating the desired effects in Adaptive Architecture (discussed below).

In adaptive buildings, lighting can frequently be influenced to create certain effects. Whether it is to create a certain ambiance or to save energy, lights can be switched, dimmed and the colour spectrum changed. Toyo Itoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Tower of Winds is an early example of a media façade that plays with lighting to represent local information [Toyo Ito, Tower of Winds, Yokohama, Japan, 1986]. There is then a whole series of technologies that are implemented to move architectural components or elements. Motors are employed to move parts of architectural structures into different positions. In certain circumstances, this strategy can totally transform building as is the case DRMMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sliding house that incorporates a moveable

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structure that can slide over the main residence to variably enclose spaces and open up the surrounding landscape to differing views [DRMM, Sliding House, Suffolk, UK, 2009]. Hyraulics are another technology very frequently employed, particularly for adapting spatial features in adaptive buildings. Koolhaas’ Floriac House includes a central room or platform that can be raised to allow the wheel-chair bound owner full access to all levels [Koolhaas, Floriac House, Bordeaux, France, 1995]. Very much related to this, pneumatic technology is based on the same principle, but achieves the effect with air pressure. Osterhuis’ Adaptive Façade project envisaged using pneumatic actuators to create variable openings in a dynamic building façade [Kas Osterhuis, Adaptive Façade, un-realised project, 2003]. Still concerned with movement, another technology to mention is that of phase change materials. These are based on the principle that material expands with increases in temperature and the engineered pistons are already frequently used in green houses. The same technology has recently been applied to a building prototype exploring deployable external insulation, façade insulation that gets moved in placed when required by external conditions [Deployable.Org, D.E.I. Pavilion, London, UK, 2008]. Technologies to trigger movement are then used for more mundane things, like the automatic opening of vents, smoke outlets in fire safety and in running ventilation systems. Another interesting area of actuation is data flow and communication. It is conceivable that Adaptive Architecture might take control of digital communication and the networking infrastructure. The ongoing Homework research project is already looking at the technical and interactional challenges of making those networking decisions better readable by inhabitants [Tom Rodden, Homework Research project, Nottingham, UK, 2009-2012]. It is clerly conceivable how this could be extended to actuating resource supply of

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water and electricity, especially in the light of micro-generation projects and their relationship to the relevant national grid.

Finally, media displays in various forms can be seen as specific forms of actuation. A number of smart home projects have been playing with adapting music and other media to different contextual circumstances.

Spubroek NOXâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Son-O-House creates an interactive sound architecture that uses data from sensors to generate a live soundscape which depends on the presence and behaviour of inhabitants [van der Heide, Spubroek (NOX), Son-O-House, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2004]. Videos can be displayed on many media façade projects that have been developed.

Beyond those there might also be real potential in technologies to generate smells [Strong & Gaver, Feather, Scent and Shaker: Supporting Simple Intimacy (Research project and demonstrator), 1996].

Effect Effect can be described as the category that are work in all other categories is aimed at. It is the effect of adaptations described here that creators ultimately aim for. The following presents effects on the environment enclosed by Architecture, the permeability of configuraitons and the resulting effect on inhabitants.

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Environment enclosed by Architecture Adaptations have impact on the environment that the architecture encloses. Light levels inside a building are affected by artificial lighting, blinds, shutters and reflectors in the building concerned but also in buildings nearby. Returning to InQbate, introduced earlier, this learning and teaching environment includes 3000 controllable LED lights embedded into the ceiling that allow for complete changes to the colour temperature of the overall space and/or regions of the space [Sussex University, InQbate, Sussex University, UK, 2007]. The air quality can be affected by through changes in airflow that might be in turn a reaction to the detection of certain environmental parameters such as raised C02 levels. The temperature in buildings is adapted whether that might be through natural cooling, assisted natural ventilation or indeed full climate control. There are projects that specifically target a specific sound landscape, sound volume and composition. Some times sound processing is used to simulate the effects of another physical environment as is evident in FTLâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Music Pavillion, attempting to replicate concert-hall quality sound outdoors [FTL Design Engineering Studio, Carlos Moseley Music Pavillion, 1991, USA]. Another way of having impact on the environment enclosed by architecture is through adaptations of density of information that is presented. In this context, surfaces might rapidly change from being background and ambient to full information displays, for example displaying text instead of ornamental patterns.

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Permeability There is also the related environmental effect of permeability of architectural configuration. Permeability can be increased through the opening of doors and gateways, making particular routes available to inhabitants for particular circumstances. The inverse is achieved through closing links and/or through selected permeability where only certain parts of a given population might traverse through certain parts of the space. In addition, the permeability of architectural configurations can be manipulated on a physical as well as on a virtual level and this aspect has already been discussed in ‘Spatial Features’ in ‘Elements of Adaptation’.

Effect on inhabitants In most cases, it is the effect on inhabitants that designers of Adaptive Architecture work towards. The most fundamental concern is centred on how it impacts inhabitants, where inhabitants are individuals, groups of individuals and organisations. This can be concerned with inhabitant levels of comfort, for example via regulating the indoor climate and levels of convenience, through taking away repetitive chores in automation.

Inhabitant safety and security is a key concern and results in places being locked down automatically to stop intruders and opened up automatically to avoid harm, for example in a fire. Certainly in the context of this framework, if not in the entire field of Adaptive Architecture, the effects on inhabitants feel currently underexplored and this is an area that would warrant some further investigation.

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Design strategies in Adaptive Architecture To take the discussion away from the perspective of the very detailed and more fine-grained categories introduced above, it is now worth highlighting a number of overall strategies that are employed in the design for adaptiveness to conclude the presentation of the framework. Strategies draw on the previously introduced categories but are abstracted from them.

They are designed to describe important aspects of the design palette that creators have access to. The following strategies will be discussed: mobility, levels of prescription, reusability and standardisation, automation and design for human intervention and building independence.

Mobility Architects have frequently explored mobility as a design strategy to allow buildings to better respond to changes around them. Most architecture is fixed to one location. In adaptive Architecture, inspiration is frequently taken from related mobile infrastructure such as caravans, trailers, boats and even space ship design to develop building the respond to inhabitants’ needs. This results in transportable and then also truly mobile architecture.

Relevant example have mostly been covered in ‘Spatial features’ and ‘Elements and Modules’ subsections of ‘Elements of Adaptation.

Levels of prescription One might also distinguish two overall strategies when it comes to the levels of prescription of the potential adaptations in a building. One end of the spectrum, things are left open, the building framework being designed

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to cope with the largest amount of conceivable interior adaptations which has been proposed by Habraken as a formal design philosophy (Habraken, 1972). At the other end of the spectrum sits a strategy to heavily prescribe all possible adaptations, in an attempt to anticipate what occupants of such a building might require over the life-time of the building. Examples for both ends of this design principle spectrum are to be found across the entire framework.

Re-use The third strategy identified here revolves around re-useability and standardisation. Building can be designed in a bespoke way, where each and every component is made to fit that particular building project. In most buildings some form of standardisation is present, all the way to prefabricated buildings where nearly all components are standardised. In this case, components should be interchangeable which should lead to a more adaptive design.

Automation - Human intervention The chosen level of automation is another critical strategy in this context. Adaptive buildings can be designed specifically for inhabitant intervention. In those cases, inhabitants will be able to move, rotate and re-position architectural elements that are designed for this purpose, whether this is manually or through assisted power systems. Frequently adaptive architecture relies on some level of automation. Sometimes this automation is based on non-reactive scripting, i.e. making things adapt according to a pre-configured time frame and programme. Automation MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 551

is then introduced so that a building becomes responsive to a number of various stimuli. The discussion of the detailed aspects on automation can be found in the method section with a number of relevant examples. The tension between manual and automatic adaptations is a central concern in the design for adaptiveness, frequently manual and automatic adaptations are combined and the choice is fundamentally tied to the original motivations of the creator.

Time Scales Design for adaptiveness must consider the time scale in which adaptations can reasonably be expected. There are very short time scales to be designed for in Adaptive Architecture, where responses to stimuli are rapidly reflected through adaptations, very similar to the interaction with a computer interface. There slower time scales to consider that are may be relevant during the course of a particular day, where inhabitants and their usage patterns drive building adaptations. There are then also much longer timescales. Over decades or even centuries, designing for Adaptiveness is probably much more concerned with leaving room for adaptations and for the un-anticipated. Interestingly, it is the technology systems that allow for rapid adaptations or immediate interactions with a building that are the most difficult to adapt over the longer term.

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Inhabitant focussed â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Independence Finally, the design space also incorporates a dimension or strategy that addresses the level of independence of a building from its inhabitants.

Adaptations in most Adaptive Architecture are in some way related to inhabitants, adapting to their requirements, even if this is indirectly by for example adapting to the environment or objects. It is also clearly conceivable for building to adapt with their own purpose, i.e. not reactive architecture. Here building might â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;listenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in to their own emerging data stream and pattern and evolve adaptive behaviours over time without recourse to external stimuli or any reference to what types of conditions are created.

Conclusion This paper has presented a conceptual framework of Adaptive Architecture, with the aim to give readers a broad overview of motivations and drivers before introducing the key components of adaptive architecture as logical data source, elements of adaptation, methods and effects. This was concluded with a discussion of the various strategies that architects have at their disposal. Categorisations like the one proposed in this paper always have similar issues. They suggest that the categorisation is itself clear-cut, while in many cases there are potential overlaps and examples easily fit into multiple categories. There is also a danger that differences are emphasised over connections, especially when a framework like this is presented in a sequential order as expected in academic writing. However, this framework is work in progress and does benefit from a more interactive digital presentation in which it was developed and is currently being refined in.

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This lets readers explore the relationships between categories in a more dynamic way. Both in its paper form and in its more interactive form, it arguably presents a useful resource for new and emerging projects to be related to historical and existing work, with a view to provide an integrated overview of the field of Adaptive Architecture.

In future work, it is the area of ‘effects on inhabitants’ that is now of most interest to us in terms of further research, as this seems currently underexplored. In our lab we have recently started to focus on the effects on inhabitants of buildings that are driven by physiological data (Schnädelbach et al., 2010). A currently being analysed controlled study of our prototype points to the possibility that such environments have a measurable effect on the physiology of inhabitants and we are aiming to explore this further in detail.

Acknowledgements This is to acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust and discussions and contributions from Ava Fatah, Mike Twidale and Susanne Seitinger.

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References BRAND, S. (1994) How buildings learn : what happens after they’re built, London, UK; New York, USA, Viking.

BULLIVANT, L. (Ed.) (2005) 4dspace: Interactive Architecture, Wiley-Academy.

ENG, K., BAEBLER, A., BERNARDET, U., BLANCHARD, M., COSTA, M., DELBRÜCK, T., DOUGLAS, R., HEPP, K., KLEIN, D., MANZOLLI, J., MINTZ, M., ROTH, F., RUTISHAUSER, U., WASSERMANN, K., WHATLEY, A. M., WITTMANN, A., WYSS, R. & VERSCHURE, P. F. M. J. (2003) Ada Intelligent Space: An artificial creature for the Swiss Expo.02. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA 2003. Taipei, Taiwan.

HABRAKEN, N. J. (1972) Supports: An Alternative To Mass Housing, London, Architectural Press.

HARPER, R. (2003) Inside the smart home, London ; New York, Springer.

KRONENBURG, R. (2007) Flexible : architecture that responds to change, London, Laurence King.

PRICE, C. (2003) The Square Book, Chichester, UK, Wiley&Sons.

ROAF, S., FUENTES, M. & THOMAS, S. (2007) EcoHouse: A Design Guide, Oxford, Architectural Press.

ROGERS, Y. (2006) Moving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing: Engaging UbiComp Experiences. IN DOURISH, P. & FRIDAY, A. (Eds.) UbiComp. Orange County, USA, Springer.

SCHNÄDELBACH, H., GLOVER, K. & IRUNE, A. (2010) ExoBuilding - Breathing Life into Architecture. NordiCHI. Reykjavik, ACM Press.

SCHNÄDELBACH, H., PENN, A. & STEADMAN, P. (2007) Mixed Reality Architecture: A Dynamic Architectural Topology. Space Syntax Symposium. Istanbul, Turkey, Technical University Istanbul.

STREITZ, N. A., SIEGEL, J., HARTKOPF, V. & KONOMI, S. I. (Eds.) (1999) Cooperative Buildings, Berlin, Germany, Springer.

TSCHERTEU, G. (2009) Mediaarchitecture. Vienna, Austria, Media Architecture Group.

WILLMERT, T. (2001) The Return of Natural Ventilation. Architectural Record, 189, 137.

ZELLNER, P. (1999) Hybrid space : new forms in digital architecture, London, Thames & Hudson.

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Mobile Node: Open Portable Infrastructure Overlapping Digital Paths EfraĂ­n Foglia GRID Digital Interaction Research Group.

Universitat de Vic, Barcelona. http://www.efrainfoglia.net efrain.foglia@uvic.cat

Abstract ÂŤJust as the kingdoms and empires of old struggled for control of terrestrial territory, those who seek power today increasingly contend control of the airwavesÂť. (J. Mitchel, 2003) Ad-hoc wireless networks (mesh networks) are spreading rapidly across the urban space. They are normally installed on traffic lights, buildings and street furniture, and they are used to mesh small areas which are linked to major telecommunications infrastructures or monitoring centers. They are highly practical, multipurpose and inexpensive; also, their performance is constantly improving. A key aspect of this paper is the dynamic nature of these networks when it comes to introducing new uses and research focuses.

This way of meshing the territory is becoming more and more common, and the technology thereof will be progressively getting mixed with different technological approaches, such as geolocation, any type of sensor systems, etc. Despite being located within the digital urban space, most of

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these networks can only be used by the authorities and private companies.

In fact, they tend to be difficult to access for an average citizen.

Image_01: Private mesh network in Barcelona public space.

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This text embraces the Mobile Node project, a prototype capable of building this type of mesh networks so as to allow citizens, groups, artists or interaction designers to manage them considering the low production costs involved and the wide range of possibilities for experimenting across the urban grid.

The project aims at ensuring that the different social layers take advantage of the potential offered by the contemporary city, where digital wireless networks are constantly being utilized. The Mobile Node has been conceived as a portable station, which allows its easy activation (special permissions from the authorities, administrative protocols, etc.) and use.

Demonstrations, artistic and educational events, streaming transmission from inaccessible areas, first aid, etc. are just some of the actions which may indeed take advantage of mobile mesh networks.

Framework of analysis «The cross-border network of global cities emerges as one of the key components in the architecture of “international relations”». (Sassen, 2007) Connectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-firstcentury urban condition. ( J. Mitchel, 2003). If so, we should point out that the management of digital networks raises important questions with respect to the communication among citizens in contemporary cities. In this sense, present housing developments prove to be rather hybrid, since they are constantly mixing, exchanging and overlapping digital technology with physical space, where telecommunications infrastructure is the linking element.

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In fact, telecommunications infrastructures have historically been installed—and kept for life—in specific places. They are also owned by certain telecommunications enterprises—consortia or state companies— the implications being obvious within the global market. It is absolutely necessary to develop open networks run by the citizens and counting on a high scalability potential. This will allow for proposals of smooth, nonrestricted social and artistic interaction. In the end, the action consists in the articulation of the general intellect together with the non-state public sphere. (Virno, 2003).

In this respect, it is fundamental to develop self-managed, self-configurable networks able to operate in highly changeable environments. The dynamic nature of these networks will encourage the absolutely necessary research in this field so as to overcome the urban space impositions. Only so will it be possible to generate a critical mass capable of carrying out a sensible social participation. In this sense, the design of interaction devices plays a key role. A competing strategy, which draws upon the lessons of the Internet, is to think of spectrum as a communal resource, like the old village commons, or the land available to a squatter community. Anyone can use it, as long as they follow a few rules. ( J. Mitchel, 2003).

Digital networks and public space Nowadays, the public space is a scenario for both physical and virtual debate consisting of different layers of social interaction, where state, social and corporate powers collide and attempt to establish connections with the citizens. Asymmetric negotiations take place in this scenario, in which the citizens’ behavior is the result of the directives implemented by the state.

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In our collective imaginary world, the public space is considered to be the community/coexistence space par excellence, and it is allegedly ruled by the state for the citizensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; benefit. However, in reality, this space consists of a sequence of government, architecture and corporate impositions, which restricts the citizens and their day-to-day activities.

With reference to the public space dimension, Neil Smith defines it as the range of social locations offered by the street, the park, the media, the Internet, the shopping mall, the United Nations, national governments, and local neighborhoods. Public space envelops the palpable tension between place, experience at all scales in daily life and the seeming spacelessness of the Internet, popular opinion, and Global institutions and economy.

(Smith, 2005). Based on this definition, we may state that public space is a homogenous scenario, not only in relation to the physical space, but also to the electronic one. We should visualize public space as something which goes beyond urban space. It is important to discuss what is public and the extension of this quality within the local, regional and global fields, as well as the interaction between them, since all these spaces are connected to each other at a distance and their intersections lead to new practices.

Mobile communication extends and reinforces the technological platform of the network society, a society whose social structure and social practices are organized around microelectronics-based networks of information and communication. (Castells, 2006). For this reason, it is important for the citizens to manage projects related to the public space and its articulation, which depart fully from the corporate world.

Since technological possibilities are progressively increasing, it is absolutely fundamental to design local systems focused on open participation, so that advances in the construction of more plural networks can be achieved.

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Simultaneous decentralized access can help local actors have a sense of participation in struggles that are not necessarily global but are, rather, globally distributed in that they recur across localities. (Sassen, 2006).

Mobile Node: Mobility and Transmission Portable Infrastructure for Citizensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Practices in Urban Space The philosophy behind this project focuses on the use of open protocols, which are viral and scalable, just like free software. This project has been developed under the influence of the guifi.net community, an open and neutral telecommunications network initiated in Catalonia (Spain) 6 years ago, which has managed to spread across most of the Catalan territory a wireless network run by the citizens.

Having a background in this network, the Mobile Node has been devised so as to provide the mobility and immediacy components. The infrastructure is, thus, thought of as a small and portable transmission center, in contrast to a fixed element installed at the top of a building. It is a high-performance unit, capable of both keeping a stable transmission and interconnecting several similar nodes.

Basically, the Mobile Node is a mobile station, a wireless ad-hoc telecommunications infrastructure which can be employed in the urban space and may as well be connected with other digital networks. The Mobile Node can be self-configured and it is a totally autonomous device.

Moreover, it can be duplicated, i.e. its know how is available to anybody.

To function it needs to be within the direct sight of any given node of

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open technology in order to get connected. Furthermore, this device can be linked to nodes of open infrastructures, which may be already installed in the cities or regions, as it is the case of guifi.net in Catalonia, where there are more than 10,500 self-managed nodes operating at the moment.

Another possibility the Mobile Node is to create a LAN in irregular areas through different mobile nodes connected to each other, not using any telecommunications company.

The Mobile Node project focuses on the perception, construction and questioning of the digital paths in the MediaCity. It collides with the generalizing, advertising speeches and it tries to provide alternatives to the extension of this physical-virtual structure based on the citizenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s participation away from any state intervention.

We cannot ignore the fact that both the control of the telecommunications infrastructures and their privatization are part of those policies which have historically dismissed citizensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; opinion by turning them into mere consumers. The management of these communication systems is of vital importance to the control of territories at all levels. Eyal Weizman, architect and expert in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has analyzed the impacts of the installation of a cellular transmission antenna carried out by the Israeli government in the West Bank. The logic of cellular communication seems oddly compatible with that of the civilian occupation of the West Bank: both expand into territories by establishing networks that triangulate base stations located on high ground along radiation- or site-lines -. Moreover, the cellular networks serve a military function. Using them for its own field communications, the military was able to replace its bulky military radios with smaller devices capable of transmitting field imagery and GPS locations between soldiers and units. (Weizman, 2007).

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Image_02: Mobile Nodo prototype.

Protocols in closed cities Projectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inspiration The Mobile Node emerges as a reaction to the constant refusals coming from the authorities and cultural institutions to allow public use of their infrastructures. It is impossible to install open technology in their buildings or use the technology that is already available, which, for one thing, has been financed by the state. Protocols for collective participation using official infrastructure tend to be extremely difficult to develop. Official

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regulations are constantly trying to restrict the use of digital networks within the public space, unless you represent a corporation and you are making a profit from these networks.

Urbanism restrictions constitute another reason for putting forward this project. Wireless interconnection among cities appears to be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. Point-to-point connections must be direct, visible and obstacle-free. This is complicated, since antennas on top of the highest buildings are needed in order to get visibility, and these buildings just so happen to be the preferred location for the most powerful telecommunications companies to install their antennas. At the core of the Internet are a series of components that are infrastructural: Internet exchanges, national backbone networks, regional networks, and local networks. These infrastructures are often privately owned. (Sassen, 2006).

This is precisely why the Mobile Node has been proposed, a type of transmission center which can be used ephemerally for cultural festivals, social actions or creative practices. For instance, it could be used for one day and be removed on the following day, once the event is over. This way any major conflict would be avoided and open infrastructures would be taken advantage of. Basically, an ephemeral and versatile mesh is being created, a net that is highly adaptable to any given urban context.

This is a matter of great importance when it comes to generate more horizontal layers of participation. As even small, resources-poor organizations and individuals can become participants in electronic networks, it signals the possibility of a sharp growth in cross-border politics by actors other than states. This produces a specific kind of activism, one centered on multiple localities yet connected digitally at scales larger than the local, often reaching a global scale. (Sassen, 2006).

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Image_03: Mobile Nodo in urban space.

Typology and components of the Mobile Node The most common type of connection for wireless telecommunications infrastructures is that of a great infrastructure (antennas at the top of towers installed on the highest locations of the cities) with mobile devices which function as clients. This project proposes connecting mobile infrastructures with other similar ones within the public space. This mesh will then be able to connect to your mobile device and, simultaneously, to big open infrastructures.

The node proposed shares some aspects with the already existing infrastructures; it is very similar to the transmission stations used by TV channels, which work via satellite.

These spaces become even more effective when they superimpose nodes of different networks. (Mitchel, 2003).

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Variables of Mobile Node technology 1. Mobile infrastructure node: More powerful links, although needing manual configuration.

2. Ad-hoc mobile node: Self-configurable and more independent links, although having a reduced transmission capacity.

The physical part of the Mobile Node consists of: - Cart which functions as the base of the Node. 4 or 2 wheels.

- Pole. The antenna is hung on it. Directional arms may be embedded.

- Base/cart basket: cables and electricity supply will be placed inside. This basket must be impermeable and must be sealed in order to avoid any water leakage.

- Mesh node It is the hardware containing the radioelectrical transmission system.

The virtual part consists of: - Firmware: OpenWrt is described as a Linux distribution for embedded devices.

Some modifications made by the Barcelona community GrĂ ciaSensefils. net have been incorporated.

Similar cases and differences (Backpacks that detect nuclear material form a wireless mesh network) An interesting case would be the US company called Rajant, specialist in network development. According to the Technology Review publication dated March 2009, this company has combined mesh radio transmitters with radiation-sensing backpacks to create a system that automatically sets up a communications mesh and displays a map of radiation across a region.

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Rajantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s communication nodes are connected to backpack sensors that detect radioactive material including plutonium and enriched uranium; the sensors are made by a company called Nucsafe. Data from each node hops back to a main computer, which builds a map showing the position of each node and its radiation data while individual users can see a map of their packâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s results on a wrist-worn display or a laptop, the company already sells the wireless technology to mining companies and the military, and a single BreadCrumb device costs up to about $5,000.

The differences are obvious; based on a specific business model, companies design for the army. Related costs are at least seven times higher than the Mobile Node. A backpack might be an interesting solution, although possible associated health risks have not yet been analyzed nor evaluated, and it should be kept in mind that the transmission antennas are very close to the body.

The Mobile Node has been designed so as to allow its users to scale, modify and improve it. All the documentation related to the project is being produced and will be available for public use.

terrace

tunnel

park

Image_04: Possibilities in the Open City.

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Current uses and future development of the “Mobile Node” 1. Creation of a high-performance wireless LAN to be used in the public space. This LAN can mesh tens of Mobile Nodes avoiding the physical restrictions coming from the urbanism of any given city.

2. An Internet connection can be shared through this mesh.

3. Ideal for audio/video streaming.

4. IP telephony.

5. Connectivity of other equipment through AP’s.

6. Sensors, microcontrollers, i.e. Arduino, etc.

Conclusions and current status of the issue In general terms, the prototype presented is already working. Last June, it was successfully tested in Barcelona’s public space. The design used was just an experiment, since the key point was to measure the transmission capacity of the device in motion, considering the territory extension it would manage to cover and whether or not it would be able to broadcast high-quality streaming video. For this event, a cart made of extremely inexpensive materials was used. The objective was to check the extent to which productions costs may be reduced, since the project’s underlying significance is to ensure economic accessibility.

Different versions of the design are currently been assessed and developed so as to come up with a more practical and stronger prototype. Another aim is to amplify the current connectivity possibilities with other portable devices, such as mobile phones, to try and use IP telephony. This way, the resulting mesh may offer greater possibilities. The Mobile Node ultimately

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shares objectives with other projects existing worldwide. Concepts like mobility, transmission, autonomy, are the cornerstone of the experiment, which aims at spreading transmission capacity among different social layers, so that diverse sectors can consider it as a possibility for reinvent their everyday practices, e.g. the education sector.

Bibliography Castells, M.; Fernández-Ardèvol, M.; Linchuan qiu, J. & sey, a.

(2006). Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective, Information Revolution and Global Politics, The MIT Press.

J. Mitchel. W. (2003). Me ++, The Cyborg Self, and the Networked City. The Mit press.

Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton University Press.

Smith, N.; Low, S. (2005). The Politics of Public Space. Routledge.

Virno, P. (2003). Virtuosismo y revolución. La acción política en la era del desencanto, Traficantes de sueños.

Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Verso.

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Cyberspace as a Locus for the Sustainability of Urban Collective Memory Segah Sak Bilkent University, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, 06800, Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey. segah@bilkent.edu.tr Burcu Şenyapılı Bilkent University, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, 06800, Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey. burcu@bilkent.edu.tr

1. Introduction The city of our era is affected by the dense stimuli of media in various ways.

First, the urban space itself accommodates mainly consumption oriented media excessively. Also, the city is now planned and represented to be promoted in the media well enough to attract the potential prospective residents, the investors and the tourists. Furthermore, it has an indirect effect on the urban space depending on its influence on wo/man who both produces and experiences the urban space. On one hand, the relationship of wo/man with the media that s/he is surrounded with alters her/his daily experience and perception of the environment (for example, see Benjamin, 1968; Boyer, 1995; Putnam, 1995; Nie and Erbring, 2000).

On the other hand, her/his engagement with the media changes her/his relationship with the urban space (for example, see Young, 1996; Wellman, Haase, Witte and Hampton, 2001; Papacharissi, 2002). Nevertheless, MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 571

contemporary wo/man does not escape or give up on the contemporary interactive media, thus, the contemporary urban space can not escape encounter with it. Consequently, a mutual internalization appears to be essential for the urban space and the media.

With respect to the effects of media on the urban public space, two ways can be stated for the realization of such internalization: either interactive media can be integrated into the urban public space, or the contemporary media that is physically separate from the urban public space can be designed to support and sustain the urban space and the experience of urban space. This study concentrates on the latter, and handles media and public space encounter in means of conceptual integration of public space into specifically designed contemporary media. Here, it is argued that there is a possibility of cultivation in the Internet for the enrichment of the experience and development of the urban public space. In this context, theories on cyberspace, memory and urban collective memory are combined to question the potential of cyberspace in the sustainability of urban collective memory, and a model is proposed to explore the ways in which such potential can be realized.

2. Memory and Collective Memory The initial step to construct the rationale of the discussion is to have an understanding of the concept of “memory”. Bergson (1912, p. 80) brings past and present to the ground of discussion of memory claiming that memory “imports the past into the present”. For wo/man, perception takes place in every act but the degree of the tension of the mind varies.

The result is the formation of a memory selecting images among various

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perceptions. According to Bergson (1912, p. 303), memory’s fundamental function is “to evoke all those past perceptions which are analogous to the present perception, to recall to us what preceded and followed them, and so to suggest to us that decision which is the most useful”.

Later than Bergson, Halbwachs attempted to construct a theory of collective memory. Halbwachs (1952) does not handle memory as something intrinsic, rather, believes that memories are reconstructed under the influence of the society. He explains that “what makes recent memories hang together is (…) that they are part of a totality of thoughts common to a group, the group of people with whom we have a relation at this moment, or with whom we have had a relation on the preceding day or days” (p. 52). According to him, memory is a recollection of images which are arranged either by chronological order, or “by the names we give them and the meaning that is attributed to them within our group” (p. 175).

Zelizer (1995, p. 218) explains that “at its most fundamental level, collective memory suggests a deepening of the historical consciousness” which establishes the differentiation and relation “of the markings of the past and ourselves in the present”. In line with Zelizer’s arguments, Bill Viola (1982, p. 317) suggests that “memory can be regarded as a filter (as are the five senses) - it is a device implanted for our survival”. Thus, memory and accordingly history are seen as necessities for the existence of the present and the future.

As the contemporary world exposes people to innumerous images, the memory requires a special practice for its survival. Bush (1945) sees mechanization of the records as a requirement for the modern wo/man, because he believes that the civilization that s/he created is so complex to be kept in people’s limited memories. Luckily, information and

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communication technologies that are a part of this complex civilization enable recording, alleviating the chaos that the civilization itself resulted in and that is likely to have a destructive influence on the memory of the people. In this respect, cyberspace, as a memory space, can be considered as having the biggest potential for supporting both personal and collective memory in the contemporary era.

3. Cyberspace as a Memory Space The density and content of activities on the Internet engendered the consideration of virtual world as cyberspace, where “data is configured in such a way as to give the operator the illusion of control, movement and access to information, in which he/she can be linked together with a large number of users” (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995, p.3). This approach was even reinforced with the establishment of digital cites “the aim of making information and services available concerning urban activities in cities” (Leite and Zancheti, 2007, p. 112). People now had the chance to compose new communities to create new spaces themselves according to their contemporary needs. As a result, the concept of “public cyberspace” was formed. Public cyberspace, just as any public space, accommodates movement, interaction and civic participation of a group of people and their involvement in policy formation and cultural expression (Leite and Zancheti, 2007). Mitchell (1995, p. 7), with reference to history, defines public cyberspaces as “electronic agoras”. Public cyberspace acts indeed as the physical public urban spaces in history in which collective productions and experiences were realized. Distinctively, it provides opportunity for the individuals to be able to express themselves freely and to reach out for

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anything and anyone across the globe contributing collaborative creation of social capital (Durrant, 2008, p. 1).

Moreover, and more importantly in the context of this study, cyberspace is itself a memory space. Within this space, there are representations of individuals and of their thoughts, their speech and cultural texts, and their communication and experiences as well as a wide range of information. The data uploaded to the cyberspace is stored and accumulated. Bush (1945, p.

143) sees storage and accumulation of data as a blessing of science which provides “the swiftest communication between individuals” and “a record of ideas”, and enables “man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record”. The “unregulated ‘from many to many’ broadcasting paradigm” is what differentiates the Internet from the previous communication tools (King and Moreggi, 2007, p. 221). And what makes cyberspace different from personal and collective memory is that the data that this memory holds is accessible.

Because of global access to the Internet, the cyberspace is a global memory which enables consumption of data independent of the physical and chronic limitations and global sharing of specific and distinct cultural values (Leite and Zancheti, 2007, p. 123). As a result, this space stores every data that is uploaded, rendering the selective processes of the individual and collective memory invalid. Therefore, its potential and quality as a memory is related not only to the uploaded and kept data, but also to the quality of the data that is being filtered and perceived. In this respect, the model proposed in this study aims at the selective collection and storage of individual urban memories to enable the constitution and reinforcement of urban collective memory.

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4. Digital Storytelling and Collective Memory Representation of personal memories and opinions in the cyberspace is widely provided by blogs, which are defined as journal based web sites, where entries are uploaded using content management tools (De Laat, 2008; , Sheng and Hall, 2008). In fact, blogs have gone beyond being always personal, and started to constitute stages for serious political and cultural debates, scientific opinions, and social commentary (Shayo, Olfman, Iriberri and Igbaria, 2007). There are also v-logs that use videos instead of texts to convey messages providing the bloggers with more freedom for expression and interaction and the audience with more personal, realistic and empathetic experience (Warmbrodth, Sheng and Hall, 2008).

In the context of projection of personal memory into the cyberspace, digital storytelling can be perceived as an advanced form of blogs. Digital storytelling, in fact, refers not only to blogs and v-logs, but also to â&#x20AC;&#x153;hypertext fiction, computer game narratives, and various artist-led forms of narrative presentation using multimedia and the Internetâ&#x20AC;? (Klaebe, Foth, Burgess and Bilandzic, 2007, p. 4). Thus, digital storytelling enables the projection of personal memory as a media text into the cyberspace.

This way, personal memory takes its place in the cyberspace as a text that requires to be consumed to be carried to the upper levels of the memory.

Depending on the opportunity of sharing that cyberspace provides it with, it has the potential to contribute to the formation, strengthening or transmission of a collective memory.

The database that is proposed in this study will filter the data, eliminate irrelevant or insignificant texts of individual memories, and thus, provide selection of useful images for the formation of a collective memory.

Moreover, digital storytelling does not only allow for storing and

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sharing texts of individual memories, but also enables the formation of networks of individual memories by connecting people with similar or related memories using the networking and interaction opportunities of cyberspace. Therefore, recollection of images will be common to the group of intended users, and in parallel with the theory of Halbwachs, the collectivity that is required for the formation of collective memory will be realized.

5. Urban Collective Memory and Transitional Cities The built environment is transformed by and for the changing actors with respect to the changing activities; everything significant that drops chronologically behind deserves a place in the “urban collective memory”.

Shared experiences lead to the formation of an urban collective memory, and attribution of meanings to the lived space is highly influenced by this collective memory. Thus, there is a reciprocal relationship between the formation of collective memory and urban experience.

The narratives representing heritage in the cyberspace can play an important role in the reproduction of local customs, values and knowledge as well as improving the means of reproduction and transmission of the heritage (Leite and Zancheti, 2007, p. 123). Moreover, just as CatovicHughes (2006, p. 340) explains, digital storytelling enables representation of space in duration, “merging the current conditions with the facts from the past”. Eventually, a database constructed by digital storytelling has the potential to act as an extension of physical public space providing us with the opportunity to enrich the experience of the transitional urban space.

Furthermore, the database as an external urban collective memory can

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constitute a strong base for the collective production of social space and architectural production of urban space. Just as, Foth, Hearn and Klaebe (2007) mention that the recognition of the personal narratives may establish a way of community engagement in urban development.

The urban space that corresponds to post-modern era is physically versatile and consequently transitory in means of function, perception and experience. The information about and the artifacts of the history of the city may not be existing or legible in the current entity of the city due to its transition, transformation or even due to destruction just as in the case of Sarajevo that is expressed by Catovic-Hughes (2006). In these cases, if not preserved, urban collective memory and thus history tends to be lost with the loss of the creators and owners of that memory resulting in a superficial experience of the city. Storage and transmission of this historical knowledge is crucial for conscious attribution of meanings to the city and for rich experiences of the space related to those meanings. Then, urban collective memory becomes specifically important for cities which are in transition for some reason.

6. Ankara as a Case of Transitional Cities Ankara might be considered as a city which is in transition and therefore as having frailty in means of formation of urban collective memory. Not only the social history but also the political and architectural history of this city has a significant importance in the urban and national level. For a better understanding of the importance of the preservation of urban collective memory of the city, having an overview of its history might be useful.

Ankara has a long history reaching back to the ancient times. At the

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beginning of the 15th Century, it became part of the Ottoman Empire and was considered to be the most important city of production (Erendil and Ulusoy, 2002). At the end of the 19th Century, Ankara, as a trade center, started to loose its importance (Altın, 2003). Furthermore, it was being influenced by the regression of the Empire. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Ankara could only be distinguished from a village by its scale and the leftovers of its citadel.

On the 23rd of April in 1920, Turkish National Assembly (TBMM) was founded in Ankara, and the city unofficially became the center of the state.

After the War of Independence came to a successful end, and on the 13th of October in 1923, just a few weeks before the foundation of the new Republic, Ankara was announced to be the capital. Now, it was time to build the new Republic established on the secular nationalist doctrine as the cultural foundation and overall ideology of Turkish policy (Özbudun and Kazancıgil, 1981). Constructing a new culture and ideology meant reforming the whole way of living in the city. By doing so, the regime was going to secure its own existence and build a ‘modern image’ for its reputation and acceptance along the other modern countries. Ankara, as the Capital, became the fundamental stage of the country at which the desired modernity would be actualized and exhibited. Furthermore, it was going to constitute a model for the other Anatolian cities (Yeşilkaya, 2005), with its urban and spatial features as well as with its social and cultural structure (Uludağ, 2005).

Until 1950s, the city witnessed a dense construction of modern buildings which were designed by mostly German architects. After this period, construction of public spaces almost ceased, and construction of residential buildings increased. With the growing immigration to the city and the need for more newer and larger public and residential buildings, in the 1980s, MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 579

the spatial syntax of the city started to change radically, undervaluing the existing architectural heritage.

The ongoing rapid transformation of the city has resulted in the illegibility, and even loss of the traces of its history. For instance, Ulus region, accommodating the most important artifacts of the eras before and after establishment of the republic, has encountered the threat of becoming an idle region. In spite of the dense tenancy of the artifacts and the urban public space, the region is far from being a welcoming and an embracing space for the residents.

Depending on these circumstances, preservation and transmission of urban collective memory of Ankara both to its residents and to the people who are in charge of and involved in the transformation of the urban space has a special importance. Although, in contrast to cities that are destroyedlike Sarajevo-, the historical artifacts of Ankara are still standing, their meanings can not be understood properly without the knowledge of the social and political aspects of their construction processes. There are written sources and many studies about the city which handle the issue from sociopolitical and architectural viewpoints, however, what is missing is the information about the personal experiences of the residents of Ankara who have witnessed the construction of city and took a part in the transforming social structure. In fact, such missing information is not specific to Ankara, as most of the written sources about the individual experiences of cities are of travelers, who usually lack emic perspective to reflect the lived spatiality of the cities. However, formation of urban collective memory requires information more about the lived spatiality than about the mental images of visitors of the city. Consequently, digital storytelling seems to have the largest potential to represent and re-digest the past of Ankara, and of any other city, for the formation and sustainability of urban collective memory.

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7. Cyberspace and the Sustainability of Urban Collective Memory: the Model Depending on the argument that cyberspace has a potential in the sustainability of urban collective memory, here, a model is proposed for the realization of such potential (see Figure 1). In the proposed model, individual memories of citizens of the cities are projected into the cyberspace by digital storytelling. Digital storytelling will enable documentation of the information about the city without the selective processes of traditional historical documentation and free from the superficial representations of cities by the travelers or for marketing purposes. As such, the information about the lived spatiality of urban space will be documented by the citizens of the city themselves.

The urban digital stories will involve various media to represent the history of the city and the residentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; memories of that city. In the data gathering process, voluntary residents from different age groups will be asked to represent their memories which they consider significant about the city. The memories are not expected to comprise the whole city: rather, the residents may choose to represent their memories in or about a neighborhood, a street, a building, or any space that they consider to be reflecting their experiences of the city. Those representations will involve: - texts written by the residents, by the historians, or by the authors, - photographs taken by residents or photographers, or existing in personal or official archives, - maps gathered from official archives or generated to show the selected significant routes by the residents, - videos of interviews with the residents which will be preferably recorded within the space that the interview is about, - combinations of the mentioned media.

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The data gathered will be collected, stored and published on a web page that will be designed to constitute an external urban collective memory (see Figure 2 for a preliminary sketch for the web-page).

Figure 1 - The proposed model for the formation of a collective memory in the cyberspace

Cyberspace, as a memory space, in parallel with the argument of Bush (1945), will enable storage of dense information about the transitional cities of our era. Certainly, such an attempt would aim at documentation not only of the past for the present, but also of the present for the future.

Furthermore, cyberspace as a public space will mediate formation and sustainability of urban collective memory ensuring the accessibility and sharing of the information about the cities. Not only accessibility

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and sharing possibilities, but also the interactivity will contribute to the collectivity of memory formation. Within these conceptions, it is expected that, this model will contribute to the enrichment of urban experience and will guide the development of urban space using the potential in the contemporary media.

Figure 2 - A preliminary sketch for the web page

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8. Conclusion Information and communication technologies offered contemporary society cyberspace which can be considered as a memory space. The data uploaded to the cyberspace is stored, accumulated and accessed globally.

Individual memories of people are projected into the cyberspace as media texts by blogs, v-logs, and newly digital storytelling. As cyberspace accommodates all those projections providing networks, individual memories gain the opportunity to contribute to the formation and transmission of collective memory.

In this study, a model is proposed to realize the potential of cyberspace to act as a locus and contribute to the formation and sustainability urban collective memory. Formation of this model is based on the two fundamental theories on memory. Firstly, based on Bergson’s (1912) explanation of memory, this database will be designed so that it will function to provide the selection of useful images among the countless images that are already involved in cyberspace. For the urban collective memory, useful images are considered to be related to the lived spatiality of the cities in question. Secondly, depending on Halbwachs’ (1952) argument that memory needs collectivity, the sharing of the individual memories with other people and grouping of those memories by tags- “the names we give to them”-will be provided by the database to enable the formation and sustainability of a collective memory.

Urban collective memory fundamentally involves historical information about the lived spatiality of cities, and this information is crucial for the sustainability and enrichment of cities and of their experience. Therefore, encouragement of individuals for projecting their personal memories into the cyberspace by digital storytelling, especially for cities like Ankara

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which are in transition, will help to “[re]present” and “[re]digest” (CatovicHughes, 2006, p. 337) the past and to improve the spatial experiences and to guide urban development. Certainly, this attempt aims at, and hopefully will realize documentation not only of the past for the present, but also of the present for the future.

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Featherstone, M. and Burrows, R., 1995. Cultures of Technological Embodiment: An Introduction. In: M. Featherstone and R. Burrows, R., eds., 1995. Cyber Space/ Cyber Bodies/ Cyber Punk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment.

London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, pp. 1-20.

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ed. 2007. Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications., Boston: Elsevier/Academic Press, pp.187-219.

Uludağ, Z., 2005. Geçen Modern Zamanların Ardından Kaybolan Anlamlar [Lost meanings after former modern times]. TMMOB Mimarlar Odası Ankara Şubesi Bülteni.31, pp.30-32.

Viola, B., 1982. Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space? In: R. Packer and K. Jordan, eds. 2002. From Wagner to Virtual Reality. New York & London: W. W. Norton.

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Interactive Spaces Reactivating Architectural and Urban Space by Tracing the Non-Visual Katja Knecht Bauhaus-Universität Weimar http://www.xoqe.net

Abstract We interact with and move in architectural and urban spaces on a daily basis but most of our movement and actions have become habitual and, as a result, have been relegated to the subconscious. My graduate work focuses on the creation of environments that react and interact with the passer-by, and aims to reactivate spaces as well as to create awareness for our movements in public space. This paper presents two installations; Traces and Leuchtenschwarm, which I developed in the MediaArchitecture program at the Bauhaus-University Weimar and at the University at Buffalo.

Introduction In the pursuit of our everyday lives our interaction with and our movement in architectural and urban space is very often reduced to transit from A to B. We do not very consciously take in so-called non-places (AugĂŠ, MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 589

1995) of the contemporary city we are passing through, and often walk on what Brian Massumi calls the “habitual auto-pilot”(Massumi 2002, p. 179), sometimes without even being able to recall a visual memory of the paths taken. Space is not something we actively experience and claim anymore, rather, as Jatsch (2004, p. 15) argues, it has been transformed into something we visit in passing by and with whose screens and manifold messages we participate solely in the “simple act of viewing.”

After a disassociation from the built environment and the passive consumption of space, there have been several approaches in art and architecture to reactivate spaces and re-establish socially meaningful spatial participation by media-enhanced interaction. This paper presents these approaches in terms of interactive spaces, although denotation varies in related literature.

As a starting point, this paper will discuss the contextual background of interactive spaces and of related projects in art and architecture. There will be a special focus on projects that have influenced my own graduate work on interactive spaces, and which not only activate space but also incorporate the idea of creating an awareness of our movements and of our interaction in public spaces. Subsequently I will present two installations; Traces and Leuchtenschwarm, which originated from an interdisciplinary program in media and architecture. Both installations are concerned with the users’ bodily movement through space and aim to create environments that not only respond to the users, but also allow them to interact and to create spatial awareness.

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Background and Related Work Interactive spaces transcend the borders between art and architecture and have been ideologically influenced by both fields. In architectural discourse interactive space is very often used synonymously with interactive architecture and has thus been researched with regard to its social engagement through media enhanced spaces (Garcia, 2007). Frequently cited examples for interactive architecture are the Fresh Water Pavilion

by NOX Architects (Bongers, 2002) or the Braincoat project by Diller + Scofidio (Garcia, 2007). While the first project worked with architecturally built-in media installations as a means of interaction, the second sought to overlay non-visual information on space by using wearable devices in the form of media enhanced raincoats and thus to facilitate social interaction in space.

Interactive spaces and architectures can also be found in Manovich (2006) and his notion of augmented space which focuses on the architectural value and the challenge of digital and media augmentation to architecture.

The digitally enhanced physical space is further discussed in Bullivant (2005b), who describes digital technologies as the fourth dimension of contemporary architecture and, as such, as the spatialisation of time.

Approaching the subject from another perspective, Hornecker and Buur (2006) have, for example, classified interactive spaces as the space-centered view of tangible interaction in a broad definition of the term. Interactive spaces in this sense are the combination of objects or installations with physical space in which the body can act as the interaction device.

Hornecker and Buurâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s definition of interactive spaces includes bodily movement as well as tangible interfaces as actuators in space.

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A more detailed definition is given by Bongers (2002) in the form of interactivated space. He defines an interactivated space as an environment that senses the action of people within it and interacts with them accordingly. It is a real space with real objects that is augmented with computer-enhanced, sometimes tangible, interaction facilities, displays and audiovisual media installations. Moreover, the focus of his definition lies on user participation, as well as on the influence of the user on architectural spaces and environments in real-time.

In this sense, interactive spaces have been developed as interactive installations, bridging the gap between architecture, art and media. One example is the installation ACCESS by Maria Sester (2002) that has been exhibited at several locations and is permanently installed at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. It tracks anonymous individuals in public spaces and spotlights them visually as well as acoustically by an accompanying audio commentary. The public space of transit is transformed into a stage with involuntary performers at its center.

Some try to escape the attention; others take the opportunity to perform, thus interacting with the space in a mediated fashion.

ADA, by contrast, is a multimodal immersive interactive space that was created for the Expo 2002 in Neuchâtel. Realized as an artificial intelligence system, ADA was able to track, identify and play with the visitors, based on the various sensory and audiovisual inputs it received. In contrast to ACCESS, ADA was a built-in interactive space, a space specifically designed for interaction purposes. ACCESS, on the other hand, was added onto existing spaces; augmenting them and thereby changing their character and how they were perceived and used (Bullivant 2005a).

Another kind of interactive space is Jason Brugesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; installation Sparkle

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Park for the Tate Britain in London in 2006. Bruges created an interactive environment that was enhanced by augmented objects, thus transforming the way the exhibition space was perceived (Bruges 2006). Two thousand helium-filled balloons equipped with LEDs filled the space, recreating the sparkles of fireworks on touch. Serving as tangible interaction devices, the balloons also facilitated interaction in terms of their own relocation in space while the visitorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; movements and actions were monitored and again projected onto the space (Bullivant 2007).

However, just like many other interactive spaces, Sparkle Park was only commissioned for a limited period of time, in this case only for a day. As Garcia (2007) points out, the actual success of interactive spaces with regard to a lasting enhanced social engagement can thus not be estimated.

Reactivating Space and Tracing the Non-Visual The aim to reactivate spaces by initiating thought-provoking, as well as playful, interaction has been at the core of the projects that will be described in the following. Leuchtenschwarm and Traces engage the users spatially and thus re-establish the connection between space, place and people.

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Leuchtenschwarm

Figure 1 and 2: Leuchtenschwarm by Katja Knecht, Bauhaus-University, Summer 2009

Leuchtenschwarm, which can be translated as ‘swarm of lights’, was developed as part of the semester project Raumapparate at the BauhausUniversity Weimar in summer 2009 and was shown at the annual exhibition of student works. As an interactive spatial light installation, it was conceptually situated in between past memories, the present and the future. The lamps employed were relicts of a time gone by, a former place and a forgotten life. The aura of recollection surrounded them without becoming too concrete and thus enabled the visitors to explore their own associations and reminiscences. The lights evoked the past, but, at the same time, freed from regular constraints and taken out of their usual context, they started a new existence by developing a life of their own and forming a swarm.

The swarm reacted to the physical presence of the visitors. The movement of people in the space influenced the brightness of the swarm’s elements

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and thus the lighting conditions of the space. A light space evolved, which changed continually through the bodily interaction of the visitors.

As an interactive environment, Leuchtenschwarm changed the visitorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; perception of the space as well as their experience of the space and of the objects within it.

The installation was based on camera tracking. The camera information was evaluated in processing with the use of differential image analysis.

The distance between visitor and lamp determined the lampâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brightness.

In addition, the status of one element influenced the other elements of the swarm. Based on the movements detected, the brightness value for each lamp was calculated in Processing and afterwards sent via serial port to an Arduino board. The Arduino indirectly controlled the lamps by transmitting the brightness values to white LEDs, which controlled the electric dimmers into which the lamps were plugged.

The networked behavior of the lamps made the swarm perform like an autonomous organism which entered into a dialogue with the visitors and their movements. Intrigued by the swarms of alternatively flashing and dimming lights, the visitors started playing with the installation by moving in the space. At the same time, they became aware of the individual elements within the swarm and the different lamp types served to trigger memories of places and bygone times.

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Traces

Figure 3 and 4: Traces by Katja Knecht and Yuan Qi, University at Buffalo, Fall 2009 (Pictures: Jody Pfister)

While Leuchtenschwarm attempted to evoke memories and create a subtle interactive light space based on movement, Traces aimed to create an interactive space that uncovers the non-visual traces of movement and visualizes bodily action in space as a memory of our past physical or virtual presence in reality as well as in cyberspace. The installation was developed as part of the production class â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Media Robotics Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; at the University at Buffalo in fall 2009, and was also an attempt to sensitize the users to the issue of surveillance and to create an awareness of the traces of information they leave behind when surfing the internet or walking in surveilled public spaces.

To this end, we monitored a specified area in our lab with an IR sensitive surveillance camera that was mounted on the ceiling. A projector was placed directly beside it, which projected the image of the traces right back onto the surveilled area. The video image of the camera was processed in

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Processing using differential image analysis. In Processing we also generated the traces of the movement at the center points of the detected blobs. The traces faded out over time, which consequently visually accentuated more recent traces. In addition, the traces reacted to movement in their vicinity, having been coded as a particle system.

With the help of a broom, the traces could be deleted to regain “anonymity”, which is, however, usually not possible in cyberspace. By pressing a button on the broomstick, the system switched from the tracing to the cleaning mode and vice versa. The broom was tracked through LEDs that were attached to the corners of the broom and lit up in the cleaning mode.

As the projection and with it, the area of interaction, was limited by the lab space and its dimensions, we extended Traces with the help of another group’s motion sensors, so that the installation also took motion outside the surveilled area into account. By using the sensor input values we were able to get information on people’s movement on room scale. People’s movement along the sensors left an invisible mark in space that only existed in bits and bytes. This blurred electronic imprint influenced the location of the traces. Just like the flap of a butterfly’s wings, the movement detected by the sensors created a soft (virtual) breeze, which stirred the traces and disturbed the trails.

The easily understandable and direct connection between action and reaction in terms of user movement and spatial output in the form of traces enabled an easy way of interaction with the installation. Although Traces was not exhibited per se, it provoked a playful spatial interaction among the students.

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Conclusion As part of the discussion on interactive spaces in art and architecture, Traces and Leuchtenschwarm are installations that initiate thoughtprovoking, as well as playful, interaction and engage users spatially. In this sense, interactive spaces have the potential to reengage peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention with regard to architectural and urban space and may be an answer to the ongoing problem of disassociation, even if, as has been noted by Garcia (2007), long-term data on the benefits of socially engaged interactive spaces is still missing.

Unlike contemporary environments, however, which perceive the passerby only as a viewer and a recipient of messages, interactive spaces augment space with media-enabled technology in order to create an interaction between passer-by and space, and evoke participation. Thus interactive spaces attempt to unseat the habitual auto-pilot and re-establish the connection between space, place and people.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank my instructors at the Bauhaus-University Weimar and at the University at Buffalo for their help and positive critique, and for providing me with the opportunities and the facilities to realize the projects presented in this paper. Special thanks goes to Yuan Qi, with whom I developed the installation Traces.

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References Augé, M. , 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.

Bongers, B., 2002. Interactivating Spaces. In: 4th Annual Symposium on Systems Research in the Arts: Music, Environmental Design and The Choreography of Space, in conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics and Cybernetics. Baden-Baden, Germany July 31-August 3, 2002 Bruges, J., 2006. Sparkle Park. [online] Available at: http://www.jasonbruges. com/projects/uk-projects/sparkle-park [Accessed 30 August 2010] Bullivant, L., 2005a. ADA: The intelligent Room. A.D. Architectural Design, 75(1), pp. 86-89.

Bullivant, L., 2005b. Introduction. A.D. Architectural Design, 75(1), pp. 5-7.

Bullivant, L., 2007. Playing with Art. A.D. Architectural Design, 77(4), pp. 32-43.

Garcia, M., 2007. Otherwise Engaged: New Projects in Interactive Design. A.D. Architectural Design, 77(4), pp. 44-53.

Hornecker, E. and Buur, J., 2006. Getting a Grip on Tangible Interaction: A Framework on Physical Space and Social Interaction. In: CHI 2006.

Montréal, Canada 22–27 April 2006, ACM: pp. 437- 446.

Jatsch, M., 2004. Entgrenzter Raum. Unbestimmtheit in der visuellen Raumwahrnehmung. Debordered Space. Indeterminacy within the Visual Perception of Space. Stuttgart/London: Edition Axel Menges.

Manovich, L., 2006. The poetics of urban media surfaces. First Monday, Special Issue #4: Urban Screens: Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society, [online] Available at: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1545/1460 [Accessed 30 August 2010] Massumi, B., 2002. Strange Horizon. Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic. In: Massumi, B., Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 177-207.

Sester, M., 2002. ACCESS. [online] Available at: http://www. accessproject.net/ [Accessed 30 August 2010]

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RAINBOWS Kyd Campbell Bauhaus-Unviersit채t Weimar http://frontierlab.org/rainbows Are there consequences to carefree dispersion of digital data? When you throw away a digital file, where does it go? Is this garbage piling up somewhere? Is it a threat?

Similar to the practice of recycling different types of waste, RAINBOWS consists of an interactive system that allows anonymous contributors in public space to safely dispose of their unwanted digital images and contribute to the occurrence of real rainbows.

RAINBOWS is a public artwork questioning the consequences of digital image consumption through the creation of magical natural phenomena.

This interactive installation uses electronics and muscle-power to transform unwanted digital images into real rainbows. Using common USB technology, images can be sent to the Rainbows system, which is controlled by a Python script. The system reads the quantity of images, extracts the colour data for all of the rainbow colours (roygbiv) and stores the information. The devices uses a water pump, a high pressure misting system, and a custom light source in an enclosed environment, creating actual rainbows. This is triggered by the computer and through an arduino microcontroller.

This installation takes a fantastical approach to critiquing the culture of digital image and data consumption. It transforms digital data and, with the ceremonial occurrences of rainbows, participants are given MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 601

the opportunity to feel part of a collective action of disposing of their image-memories. Users of all ages can easily relate to and interact with RAINBOWS, becoming involved in thinking about their own use of technology. The mysterious element of questioning where digital files go once they are â&#x20AC;&#x153;trashedâ&#x20AC;? promotes more exploration of digital technology and open source culture and increases exposure for sustainable technology and energy solutions.

User Process - Once an image is sent to the system, it is erased from its original source [erased off of the camera or other USB storage device], as if it had been thrown in the garbage.

- When the system receives enough or each desired colour, it triggers a mechanical function that produces real rainbows.

- The mechanical function consist of a spray of mist, a light source and carefully configured reflection, making the effect of a real rainbow visible.

- All the the machinery for this installation [computer, water system, electronics] is housed in a mobile unit.

- Once a rainbow has been produced, the system is reset and ready to count again.

- The occurrence of the rainbow is unpredictable [based on the colour and quantity of incoming images]. In this way it maintains the magical quality of a rainbow.

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Rainbows â&#x20AC;&#x153;Manifestoâ&#x20AC;?

As a digital artist, I find it important to about the growing masses of digital data, especially the enormous amount of digital photos which are thrown away daily. I explore the relationship between the human and the digital image. With the project RAINBOWS, I seek to find solutions to the threat of the world being inundated under an ocean of digital images. I believe that digital photos must not be disposed of carelessly. They retain valuable and heavy properties beyond their digital weight, including memories, sentimentality and visual appeal. They are meaningful to society and that they must be put to use for the bettering of the world. The intervention Rainbows is a practical action to metamorphize our digital garbage.

Facts + Prototype object built at Escuelab, Interactivos?09, in Lima, Peru, 2009 + Supported by Canada Council for the Arts, MediaLab Prado Madrid & HOME Residency Lisbon + Dimensions: installation, 60cm/60cm floor, 170cm tall + Interactive installation [+ artist mediation] + Wood, manual water pump, micro-aspersion valves, Arduino microcontroller, Python scripts, various electronic components, incandescent lights, optical prisms, mirrors, metal crank system, plastic hoses, linux computer, usb interface, paint, watersafe container, computer fans, computer speaker

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Collaborators + Kyd Campbell (CA/DE) - project author, concept, research, object & interface design, water system, lighting, optics + Daniel Foster-Smith (UK) - arduino programming, electronic circuits, object + interface design + Frank Cebreros (PE) - electronic circuits, water system, lighting, optics, consulting + Edson Ticona (PE) - python and unix programming, linux + Antye Greie aka AGF (DE/FI) - sound design Consultants: Patrick Valiquet (CA), Roc JimĂŠnez de Cisneros (ES), Marius Schebella (AT)

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The Facadeprinter â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Distance Printing Device for Communication in Urban Contexts Julian Adenauer Technische Universität Berlin ZMMS, Graduiertenkolleg Prometei Franklinstr. 28/29, Sekretariat FR 2-6 D-10587 Berlin julian.adenauer@zmms.tu-berlin.de Michael Haas, Martin Fussenegger Sonice Development GmbH Adalbertstrasse 32 D-10179 Berlin michael@sonicedevelopment.com martin@sonicedevelopment.com Adrienne Gispen Symbolic Systems Program Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305 aegispen@stanford.edu

Abstract In this paper we suggest distance printing devices as a new medium for communication in urban contexts.

We developed the Facadeprinter (Sonice Development GmbH, 2010), a software controlled robot that can apply information and artwork dot by MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena 607

dot onto distant surfaces. The printer takes digital images (pixel or vectorgraphics) and processes them to routes for the motors. It aims with an airpressure-marker and fires color balls that build up large scale graphics.

The process can be compared to an inkjet-printer in architectonical dimensions.

Using this method, inaccessible and uneven surfaces can be used for large scale prints.

Figure 1. Pointillist artwork â&#x20AC;&#x153;Three Stonesâ&#x20AC;?

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Introduction Current possibilities for displaying information in public spaces are limited. Besides painting using scaffolding or auto-hoists, the primary solution is the use of large posters which are hard to handle and expensive.

Apart from these static methods of communication, there is a trend of displaying information dynamically (e.g. projectors, LED-screens).

Though these are becoming cheaper, they remain long-term investments and are therefore inappropriate for temporary purposes. Moreover, such displays cannot compete in size with traditional techniques.

As an intermediary solution, we suggest automated distance printing devices to apply digital artworks directly onto the surface of buildings.

Using this approach, it is possible to display information in places that would be difficult or impossible to access using conventional media.

Figure 2. Components of the Facadeprinter

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As a proof of concept, we developed a small machine that is able to shoot color balls onto walls: The Facadeprinter. The device is controlled by an industrial computer, which allows it to process graphical input files and print them directly onto large surfaces.

Print aesthetic and method are notably different from conventional print and advertising techniques. Artworks are applied onto the walls directly, like the drawings of a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;magic penâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

With the current prototype we are able to print artworks from a maximum distance of 12 meters, producing works that are around 8m high and 10m wide. The shooting frequency is up to 5 dots per second.

Technology As a print head the Facadeprinter uses a modified paintball marker system that operates with compressed air. The color balls are regular paintballs.

Thus supplies and spare parts are easily accessible in normal paintball shops. A ball tank conveys the gelatin encapsulated color balls to the marker (figure 2).

The color in paintballs can differ considerably with regard to UV stability or dripping characteristics depending on the manufacturer. Thus the printer can be used to create works which fade within a few hours or remain visible for several months.

Graphics are created using common graphic design software like Adobe Illustrator and saved as Vector Graphic File (Scalable Vector Graphic, SVG) onto a standard USB flash drive. The drive is then transferred into the printerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s control unit, an industrial PC running a Linux operation

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system. Using the built-in touchscreen, an artwork can be selected and its position and scale can be modified. Before starting the print, its bounds can be displayed on the wall using an integrated laser, allowing precise onsite adjustment of the outcome.

When all adjustments are finished, the software calculates the real-world coordinates of the image, which eliminates both perspective and ballistic distortion. These coordinates are then translated to commands for the motors.

The Facadeprinter uses two stepper motors with 400 steps per revolution.

Combined with gears that have a transmission ratio of 1:100, angles can be adjusted in 0.009째 steps. A movement of this size corresponds to 1.6 mm on the wall when the printer is 10 m away.

When the motors reach the desired position, the control unit triggers the paintball marker. This accelerates each ball to a speed of 200km/h, causing it to burst on contact with the wall and leave a color dot five to ten centimeters in diameter. The cracked gelatin shell falls to the ground where it can be removed or left to decompose naturally.

Dot after dot, the artwork is applied to the wall. In case of malfunction or danger printing can be paused at any time.

For easy transport, the Facadeprinter can be closed into a handy case weighing 7,5 kg with dimensions 31 x 27 x 22cm. The amount of paint needed may vary depending on the application domain. To accommodate this variance, the ball tower and compressed air bottle are separate items which can be chosen to fit the current application. On location both can be connected to the printer easily via plug connectors.

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Applications Distance printing in general has a wide field of possible applications. In addition to potential uses in advertising and marketing, the Facadeprinter could also be integrated into post-disaster relief efforts. We have developed a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;communication in crisisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; scenario to demonstrate its potential in this domain. The machineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s printing process allows quick installation of new visual communication. For example, the locations of medical facilities, sources of fresh water, danger zones or meeting points can be communicated effectively (figure 3).

Figure 3. Communication in Crisis

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Discussion And Future Work The Facadeprinter prototype we developed as a proof of concept demonstrates the potential and also the limitations of distance printing technologies. During our work on the device, we have encountered and solved many of the problems that come with trying to apply color to distant surfaces.

Figure 4. Line graphic â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;A+â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

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Paint The main drawback of the current prototype is its dependency on paintballs. Because the main function paintballs serve is marking opponents in a game, they have been designed to be both highly visible on cloth (rather than concrete or bricks) and easy to wash out. As a result, we are limited to a small color range and prints fade or are washed away after some time (time span depends largely on manufacturer). While this can be an advantage for temporary prints and can generate pleasing visual results (figure 6), these effects limit the range of application.

As one of many improvements, we are currently working on ways to replace the paintballs with custom projectiles. The ability to use regular house paint for the prints would result in a huge improvement in versatility.

Figure 5. Faded graphic on dark background

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Accuracy The Facadeprinterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mechanics, drives and control system make it a high precision device. However, due to the flight characteristics of the paintballs, the accuracy suffers when printing over larger distances. This is both a result of high manufacturing tolerance and their soft shell. Moreover, the paintballs are very sensitive to temperature and humidity.

Even though we think that custom projectiles might improve these aspects, flight characteristics will always be a problem for distance printing devices.

This effect is stronger when the printing process is exposed to wind.

Figure 6. Sphere

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Graphical Style We started out using line graphics as input files since they are easy to generate and are perfect for typography and logos. Their scalability also allows on site adjustment of size and distance between points without loss.

A downside of these kinds of graphics is that outliers are very easy to detect.

For richer, shaded graphics we developed a more abstract pointillist style (figure 1 & 6). Since we haven’t yet found algorithms that conveniently convert graphics to this kind of artworks, the conversion must be coded by hand. Though this process is very time consuming, the results tremendously extend the capability of expression. Also the subjective precision is much higher (even from large distances) because outliers don’t stand out.

Figure 7. “Crab Pincher” – first test for multicolored prints

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Multicolor Prints At present, most of our artworks are printed in one single color. We are researching possibility of realizing prints that are shaded with multiple colors (figure 7).

Image Generation As mentioned above, the pointillist artworks are currently generated by hand. While this gives us maximum control over the outcome, this is a time consuming task. Thus, we are working on the automated generation of shaded point- pictures with algorithms that are optimized for our printing process.

Printing Process When using the Facadeprinter in public spaces, we noticed that the printing process itself generates at least as much attention as the finished artwork. Since most of the potential customers are seeking attention for marketing purposes, this is an additional benefit of using distance printing devices as compared to traditional media. The print can be seen as an event rather than just a method for applying images to walls.

Conclusion In this paper, we propose distance printing devices as new tools for distributing information in public spaces. As a proof of concept, we

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designed and built the Facadeprinter â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a computer controlled machine that uses electric motors, a paintball marker and color balls to apply artworks onto distant surfaces. Through working with this device for more than a year, we have gained insight into this form of printing.

Because of their low resolution, distance printing devices cannot be a substitute for conventional media. However, we see large potential in this technology to widen the design space of urban communication. Our technique can be an alternative to the uniformity of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s high-gloss styles. We argue that this new technology has its own aesthetic which generates attention through its roughness and unconventional approach.

Acknowledgments We want to thank the DFG, the Department of Human- Machine Systems Berlin, and prometei for their support.

References Sonice Development GmbH, 2010. [online] Available at: <http://www.facadeprinter.org> [Accessed 27 September 2010]

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Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena Jens Geelhaar 路 Frank Eckardt 路 Bernd Rudolf Sabine Zierold 路 Michael Markert (Eds.)