Tinkering towards Utopia – Townsend
In alexander’s explanation of interconnected city lattices he describes the effect a news rack had outside drug store near his office in Berkley, “the news rack, the people, the sidewalk, even the electrical impulses that controlled the traffic signal were woven together in networks of surprising complexity that formed a distinct urban place” the urban place he describes seems to follow Gabry’s analogy of withness in that it is effected by technology but not dictated by it; reserving a symbiotic relationship with the citizens and built context. Are moments of withness such as these left to DIY communities to implement?
Alexander argued that hierarchal structures plagued artificial designs as they fought against complexity. Could that have been in pursuit of efficiency? Is that which is unquantifiable inherently inefficient? And in our pursuit of efficiency are we abandoning all that is too complex to compute? Is an infrastructure that is both complex enough to allow for variable interactions to unfold and simple enough to be rendered “efficient” even feasible?
“The city is an open grid of possibilities, the suburb a universe of dead ends” – It can be argued that even the city grid imposes certain constraints on our interactions, but despite that we have been able to populate it’s nodes with layers of communication and interaction that generate respective states of withness. It is then up to the citizens (regardless of the imposed infrastructure) to arrange the unfolding of such performances, ones that supersede the limitations of the smart “grid” but exploit it’s structure. Law, order, structure is dire to preserve the freedom of self expression that we value so much; preventing complete chaos. Generating moments of organized chaos seems to have been left to us.
“Alexander’s vision of the city as a lattice underpinned the design of the software that now filtered by own view of it” (Foursquare) – Could this be the reason why we’re glued to technology interfaces? Going back to Turkle’s hypothesis about our preference of means of communication that allow division of attention, are we “alone together” because the perceived solution to our solitude has pulled us away from the seemingly isolated and fragmented built environment?
It’s interesting to note the pattern resonating in the history of disruptive companies such as Foursquare. It began as a DIY organization seeking to exploit the available technology, encouraging active participation in the form of check ins and in doing so successfully draping a “new digital lattice atop the city’s physical one and connecting the two with code”, evolving and promising to “exploit all of the new technologies that had come on the scene”, and slowly morphing due to the expression of agency of it’s users. It’s worth questioning if Foursquare is a product of interaction or rather if interaction was a product of Foursquare. Perhaps asking this question is a testament to the symbiotic relationship that formed as a product of the software, interaction of active participants and their expression of agency. Soon, foursquare would “mine date on your habits as well as your friends’ to recommend nearby venues”, beginning to augment the users’ decision making and effectively tipping the ratios; painting users as consumers, not active participants.
According to Townsend the computer age began with IBM PC, soon after the MITS Altair 8800 was released in 1975. “The Altair dramatically democratized access to computing power” – soon after that “Hobbyists formed groups to trade tips hacks and parts for these DIY computers” serving as a training camp for innovators such as Apple, who would later overthrow IBM’s dominance of the PC industry. We all regard apple as a top down firm now, especially when considering that their products are engineered to be the furthest thing from modifiable. Does this raise the question of a certain life cycle that dictates the evolution of DIY start-ups, to successful monopolizing corporations, to their decline in more open sourced innovative start-ups that use the latest technology & infrastructure (provided by the corporate giants) to supersede existing corporations? Is this inevitable? Can it not be argued that the cycle itself is responsible a constant state of social, cultural and technological evolution?
Engaging the idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism – Gabrys
“It is then worth noting that there is a much wider stream of participatory urbanism projects underway that runs alongside and at times mutually influences or diverges from sensor driven approaches to the city” – Does Gabrys effectively confess to the need (or the favorability) of a pre-existing infrastructure based on smart sensors etc, that at first may indeed result in false hypotheses of the city & it’s people, but will present with a platform of data that could then be used by Smart citizens or entrepreneurs to develop innovative and groundbreaking social applications?
“Passive data collection generally entails citizens having to do very little, other than turn on their smartphones or other sensor devices”, “it does not require input from the human user and it takes place by users simply being equipped with smartphones”. Foursquare seemed to (at first) have approached this issue correctly by motivating check ins and active recommendations, but as we’ve seen, at some point when participation reaches “capacity”, contingent uses take over, morphing technologies and respective corporations. Is this contingent usage pre-coded into the software’s usage (consciously or not?) or is it the sole product of the expression of agency over technology?
“As Stengers suggests in relation to the idiot, “the idea is precisely to slow down the construction of this common world, to create a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say good”, although poetic and warranted, is this ideology once again a product of individualistic tendencies? Should the common good not be that of the livability and habitability of the planet? Although “habitability” constitutes a large category including ephemeral and non physically identifiable or quantifiable attributes, should we not assume a stance of survival in the face of environmental crisis we face today even if it threatens to “engineer society”? And then begin to use the implemented infrastructure to tend to the unquantifiable in innovative ways through bottom up processes?