when people need information, they will often turn to other people rather than use more formalised information artefacts (e.g. asking people for advice when lost in a city instead of studying a map)

Yesterday I attended Beppe Grillo’s show at the Colosseo’s theatre in Turin. One of the most funny sentences of the speech was:

“the stone age is not ended because we ran out of stones” …

Meaning that we do not have to consume all the petrol of the world before starting thinking about the next step…

I attended Katherine Albrecht, talk at the RFID Privacy Workshop @ MIT, which I found really interesting. One of the most interesting point was that RFID is considered to enable “Silent commerce”, which is considered positively but there are several threats that are not considered intensively at the moment:

1. chips tat cannot be detected;
2. readers that cannot be detected;
3. customers not aware of this technology;
4. human tracking and spy profiles;
5. a unique ID worldwide.

The speaker works for CASPIAN and the full report of this study is published on their internet site.

Sometimes I found that the industry vision on privacy respect is not the central theme of discussion when talking about our future.

Friendster is an online community that helps you to find friends or dates through a network of people that share their contacts. In this way a person can connect to a friend of a friend of a friend ….

http://www.friendster.com/

Meeting with Paola Viganò_

The concept of “deriva” (french: dèrive, english: drift) was introduced by surrealists as a rapid movements through different places.

Dr. Vigano, agreed that walking into the city adds an incredible value to the exploration and to the understanding of the city. She teaches her students to go on the field and to walk for a determined amount of time in order to grasp the sense of the place. When questioned: “what are the things you get on the physical place you do not get from the map”, she answer: “all that is related with the 5 senses”. You have to touch the city, to hear the city (a reference to the city sound), you have to see and to smell the city.

She doesn’t think that the psychological dimension is prevalent in respect of this sensorial dimension, because she think that there is a psychological dimension even when you read a “map”. The psychological dimension pass through the map, whereas the physical dimension is not available than in the physical place. There is a map of Switzerland that is called Dufur Map, in which the heights are marked with orthogonal marks rather than isobars. This kind of approach can be considered as a “romantic” approach for literature.

Dr. Vigano thinks that the “project” creates knowledge only when it produces description of something. Some dimensions of a place became known only through a project.

A context in which she applied the participant approach is when she worked in the urban re-design of Prato (FI) in Italy. This city was an industrial one, unique in Europe because residential areas where dispersed through industrial plants. She carried out a project where she actively interviewed people on the streets, and walked with people on the street to understand the city. People give her a great feedback, highlighting personal and very “secret / intimate” perspective of the urban tissue that where unexplored or unknown up to that moment.

One of the dimension of collaboration she sees in collaborative design is the challenge of speaking the same language. She tried, several times to have external consultants (like geologists) participate in the project. In this sense, she supports the idea that different people working together have to compare different mental maps or internal representations, to converge on a common view of the city.

References:
1. Chombart De Lauwe:
Sociologue franÁais (Cambrai, 1913 ó Paris, 1998).

CrÈateur du Centre d’ethnologie sociale et de psychosociologie, il s’est surtout consacrÈ ‡ l’Ètude des problËmes de la civilisation urbaine (Paris et l’agglomÈration parisienne, 1952; Des hommes et des villes, 1965; Aspirations et Transformations sociales, 1970; La Fin des villes, mythe ou rÈalitÈ, 1982).

2. Paola ViganÚ, Un progetto per Prato, Alinea, 2000 (Laboratorio Prato PRG)

3. Situationists cities (2000-2003); Internazional situazionista (IS)

4. Giancarlo de Carlo, approccio partecipativo
(b. Genoa, Italy 1919)

Giancarlo de Carlo was born in Genoa, Italy in 1919. He trained in Italy as an architect from 1942 to 1949, a time of political turmoil which generated his philosophy toward life and architecture. Libertarian socialism is the underlying force for all of his planning and design. De Carlo sees architecture as a consensus activity. He generates his designs from the inherent conflict that occurs in the site and historical context of architecture. His ideas link CIAM ideals with late twentieth century reality.
Although his political beliefs have limited his portfolio of buildings, his ideas have remained untainted by ‘Post-Modernist’ beliefs through his journal Spazio e Societa and through his class on the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD), as well as through the support of his Team 10 colleagues.

Creative environments focus on research activities that are organised in cross-disciplinary projects mixing interactive media, space and activity. The projects are grouped into three different themes: (a) Architecture and interaction technolgies, (b) performance and dramaturgy, (c) design and learning.

Creative Environments

Sometimes technologies drives us crazy, this is an example (a picture in a picture)

Meeting with Pierre

Of the 5 elements that Lynch describe in his book, Pierre believes that some of them are better represented into the 2dimensional map and some of them are more suitable for being understood on the ground.

MAP (2D) | FOOT ON (3D)
———————————————————————-
Paths X |
Limits | X
Nodes X |
Landmarks | X
Districts ?

Maybe we can find a way to move from the flat representation to the three dimensional world and vice versa. Using this system we can track down the most common paths of people and to appreciate the ‘height’, the ‘interest’ and the ‘slope’ of a place in the formation of the image of the city.

This is an unknown domain so we need to formulate very simple hypothesis.
-> understanding city/ reading the city

The goal of the project is not to build on the city but we need to focus on the first step: the ability of reading the city, to analyse the city and to make sense of the city. In doing so we want to use a very structural analysis with the elements proposed by lynch and with a very simple grammar which can be [drop] or [remove], … and a simple group of adjectives like [shape] or [colour].
Through the system the users can collaborate in defining paths and all the other elements and the way they constructed the relation of these elements. The goal will be to reach an emergent and shared meaning for the image of the city: its spaces, its features, its elements.

The image of the city is constructed psychologically by everyone.
Every person construct socially the mean of the places where we live.
Sharing these spaces is a collaboration and a communication in which we exchange directions and intentions in place assuming a common ground of understanding of space as entity.
Sometimes our perception of space may differ and the implicit communication of place is corrupted. Is when we lost ourselves or we do not co-ordinate properly in the space.
I propose a framework where people can share and construct the idea of the city reflecting on their own reasoning process in a metalevel of learning.