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Monthly Archive for December, 2003
Dodgeball is an urban social software Web service for mobile phones, aimed at game-players in New York City. Users work it by txting, sending various queries and receiving processed responses. One may use their Guide, Circles, and Scout functions: query the neighborhood for friends, or tell local friends about what you’re doing; look for venues; form a group and ping for members.
Walking is the best way to experience the environment, but how to walk in such a way that is becomes not just a tool to be a spectator but to actively explore it. We decided to use what we learned from the ‘Game of Life’ & complexity and combine that with the legacy of psychogeography, a sub-cultural strand in the pedestrian culture which can be traced back all the way from the Flaneur, the British pedestrian writers of the Romantic age to the peripatetic school of Aristotle.
What is PML?
PML is a protocol that can be used to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about urban space. PML is a unified system of classification that lurks behind the psychogeogram: the diagrammatic representation of psychogeographically experienced space.
PML is the base layer for a psychogeographical content management system that can
1) be used to transform a mass of subjective data into an objective representation
2) be used as an engine that, after being fed certain parameters, generates new psychogeographical drifts
3) be used to develop further a cartography that negates the territory
4) be datamined to show never before suspected patterns in the urban fabric
5) be turned into a knowledge base on urban environments
6) be fired up into a new mythology for urban space
7) be used to take the fingerprint of a city 
make searchable urban features & experiences by means of the semantic web
PML should enable the international psychogeographic community to document walks according to a fixed protocol that is able to record sensible, relevant & location specific information about what makes a space/place tick. By using a protocol it becomes possible to compare different PML datasets about the same place in different times. This turns PML into an objective tool to measure psychogeographical effects over time; for instance before & after urban redevelopment. PML does contain the possibility for including illustrations (photo’s/video/GIS) but is not image dependent.
PML incorporates work done in fields like annotated space, geo-tagging, mental mapping, GIS & collaborative mapping but is different in that it aims at the invisible & the absurd.
From the definition of the semantic web at w3.org:
The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine processable form.
Is it possible to transfer the same concept at the ubiquitous physical space? Is it possible to give meaning to the space so that people can understand it better? Is possible to give them tools for authoring the space they inhabit?
The aim of Recyclicity is to stimulate recycling or re-use of waste and to provide new applications for these materials. The objective is to re-use the waste material for construction applications with as little added energy as possible for transport and processing of materials. By this means Recyclicity does not just want to contribute to awareness of environmental issues, but also to provide for a solution for – part of – the waste problem.
Copying from Nico: we plan to carry out a short research project about professions that needs location awareness like firemen or people who conduct field studies.
The idea is to discover the social meanings of location awareness. Many questions are to be answered :
- When people need to locate others ?
- Why people need to locate others ?
- How people need to locate others ?
- Which activities require them to locate others ?
- What are the activities they do together which require their co-presence ?
- Is their activity possible without copresence ? Are there parts of the work which does not require co-presence ?
- How frequently do they gather into groups ? and locate each other ?
- How people express location ?
- What’s the context ?
- Where the activities in which location is important are performed ?
The idea is to establish their needs. Understanding people’s activity, their difficulties
Methodology : inteview or storytelling ?
A new service just started by Google, enables users to post a question to an open community and get an answer. The user has to define the prize for the correct answer to the question, then he can review and rate all the received answers to define the winner(s).
I found it a very interesting principle. However, 2 points can be raised from this approach.
1- Is there real “collaboration”in this community?
2- Is it possible to imagine a different kind of retribution besides money (e.g., social ratings)?
Here a blog post on Google Answers
http://answers.google.com/answers/
(0)This book is a resource for academics and students who want to develop collaborative learning environments (or communities of practice) in which people work together to create new knowledge while learning new skills. See also the background info about the book.
(0)La estructura de la Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Universidad ARCIS corresponde a los conceptos contemporáneos de la enseñanza en esta disciplina.
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