[Gravity Probe B, the most perfect sphere humans have created, comes within 40 atomic layers of matching its Platonic Form. The litany of innovations it took to conduct a theoretically simple experiment – one which needed precise execution – is a testament to the wondrous complexity of meatspace.]
April 15, 2011 – 11:51 am
The Guardian interviews Benjamin Bratton: What can be done to foster and encourage more social entrepreneurs and innovators? …I don’t believe that innovation ultimately comes down to people’s attitudes so much as to systemic opportunities for ideas to actually take root and scale. Part of the reason that the internet was able to support innovation […]
September 30, 2010 – 10:28 pm
Readers who are both familiar with mammoth and the 50 cyborgs project are likely expecting a post arguing that cities are, in fact, cyborgs. It’s true. They are. And I’ll be happy to argue the point in the comments should anyone wish. But at the risk of straying too far from typical mammoth topics, I […]
September 16, 2010 – 6:27 am
Writing for The Atlantic‘s Technology channel now, Alexis Madrigal makes a simple but important argument about how cellphones and other mobile devices, by enabling new ways of life, are affecting the form and density of cities: …the latest network to overspread our country — the wireless electromagnetic one — is just not fully compatible with […]
September 15, 2010 – 12:02 pm
[A portion of the port of Tianjin — radically determined by the requirements, conventions, and techniques of international shipping; bing maps] Writing for Current Intelligence, Serial Consign‘s Greg Smith (and guest co-writer Jordan Hale) discuss the history of standardized shipping containers, how that history has shaped the urban form of seaports such as Tianjin (and […]
September 12, 2010 – 1:10 pm
To celebrate this September being the fiftieth anniversary of the coining of the term ‘cyborg’, Tim Maly — whose Quiet Babylon is, as it used to say on the cover, concerned with “Cyborgs, Architects, and our Weird Broken Future” — has corralled a team of bloggers and guest writers to produce fifty posts on the […]
Adam Greenfield (Speedbird) wrote a brief piece a bit over a week ago for Urban Omnibus entitled “Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism”, which is worth a read. Greenfield first extrapolates from services like New York City’s 311 and the UK’s FixMyStreet the probable development of an “urban issue-tracking board”, “visual and Web-friendly, […]
February 3, 2010 – 11:45 pm
1. Keiichi Matsuda‘s “Domestic Robocop” offers a glimpse of an augmented future which is part bliss and part nightmare: Matsuda’s video is via BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign, @doingitwrong, and more or less everyone else. 2. In BLDGBLOG‘s brief entry on Matsuda’s video, he suggests that “augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow”; if that […]
February 1, 2010 – 9:32 pm
My apologies to our readers for the (almost) week which has passed with nary a peep about the Apple iPad, as an iPad post or article is apparently de rigueur if you write about… anything. The problem is, we have had nothing interesting to say, and I’m pretty sure I still don’t. Instead, here […]
November 11, 2009 – 7:02 pm
You’ll want to read all of Dan Hill’s post on his involvement in the design of The Cloud, a proposal for “a new form of observation deck” overlooking London and its new Olympic stadium. The proposal draws upon a number of fascinating themes, including urban informatics, cloud computing, weather, crowd-sourcing, and “re-industrial” cities: Data is […]
October 16, 2009 – 12:52 pm
From the description of the above video at PopSci: Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond […]
October 13, 2009 – 10:04 am
I see that Dan Hill put the post from the Toward the Sentient City exhibit up at City of Sound, and that version improves on the version at Toward the Sentient City by including links and images. Reading Hill’s post again, I noticed a couple paragraphs that bear on the post below regarding architecture and […]
October 12, 2009 – 2:19 pm
You should read Adam Greenfield’s post “Towards Urban Systems Design”, which includes some response to my brief note on Dan Hill’s post at Towards the Sentient City. A couple items from Greenfield’s post below that I’d like to respond to, in reverse of the order in which they appear in the original, because that’s convenient […]
October 1, 2009 – 4:41 pm
[screenshot from Utopia, a rather unique game that blended SimCity-esque urban development with a proto-Starcraft model of realtime combat management in a science fiction setting] Getting quite close to the (October 9th) release date for Cities XL, which is at least moderately interesting to those of us (I’d imagine a fair percentage of designers in […]
September 10, 2009 – 1:41 pm
A fascinating talk by Danah Boyd, transcribed at alternet, first presenting the evidence of class divisions in social media, and then addressing what the implications of that presence are: How many of you currently use Facebook? [90 percent-plus of the audience raises their hands.] How many of you currently use MySpace? [A few lone figures […]
New Scientist is partnering with the SENSEable City Lab (mentioned a couple days ago here) for an intriguing project in which thousands of items of ordinary garbage are tagged with SIM cards, generating a live digital map of the waste infrastructures of Seattle, New York, and London.
Dan Hill has a great interview with architect Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, discussing the relationship between digital space and architectural space, the production of both, and the changing role of the architect: This is hardly the traditional work of the architect, yet this sense of working with a layer of soft […]
