Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces

This was one of the best talks i've ever been to. Even though i missed the beginning and only got to hear Ben Cerveny @neb talk. The focus of the session was as the in the use of pervasive media as a means to meaningfully interact with urban environments. Cerveny managed to stay on topic while broadening the debate out to the effect of systems architecture on political action and potential. To paraphrase …democracy is a hack, and designing systems to be hackable means designing in safeguards against totalitarianism…. Cerveny went on to describe a couple of projects he is or has been working on. One was an early game based around sharing images on the web this project is more recently known as flickr. I find it totally inspiring that such entities can emerge out of social media games design. Another was a hexagonal grid of meshed computers designed for opt in situations like pleasure parks. The system is able to handle multiple sensor inputs, bluetooth, RFID etc as well as the control of several output formats screen based outputs and projections, audio, lighting, etc. pretty much whatever you wanted. as the system was a meshed grid triangulation of sensor input was trivial therefore tracking peoples movement through the system was easy. This meant that individual users could be given individual environments or environmental cues. an example he gave was a pleasure park where every visitor had a totem animal follow them around the park . Systems like this are clearly open to abuse if they are not opt in and he noted that he had been approached by the administration of a Chinese city. An ofer he declined but one which highlights the importance of designing hackability into such systems.

This ability to overlay media onto urban environments brings up the possibility of skinning a space to suit a certain theme or occasion. Ben's conceptualisation of this includes a spacial CSS.  Just as web designers are currently able to redesign a data infrastructure with ease using data CSS. Design in urban spaces could be aided and standardised by the use of spacial CSS.