project12:Journal

On a weekday visit to the Kunststad at the NDSM Werf, you may find many designers and artists hard at work, or none at all. However, in a cosy studio within the Kunststad, you will find Many Haakmeester, the festival organiser of NDSM Werf.

In a brief exchange of words, she explains that the absence of artists in the Kunststad is that many of the designers may be out in the city organising their exhibitions, putting on plays or just working on their own projects elsewhere. Most designers work at the Kunststad during their free time, developing new ideas or completing existing projects.

The greatest benefit of having a studio space in the Kunststad, she added, is the cheap rent. In addition, the big open spaces allow many of the artists to work and display their sculptures outside their studio, proving a glimpse to other creative agents on their project. This tends to spark inspiration in others or potentially a collaboration with other designers. Furthermore, the variety of creative agents within the Kunststad allows the designers to discuss and tap on the expertise of other tenants.

As for Mandy, she is in charge of organising festivals in the NDSM Werf, such as the Picnic Festival in September 2011 and the IJ Hall in February 2012, the largest flea market in the Netherlands. These festivals bring all kinds of people to NDSM Werf, exploring the creativity of the kunststad and simply enjoying the gathering in the big open space.

The next event will be the Queen's Birthday Festival, on 30 April 2012. Be sure to turn up in orange! Click here for the official page of NDSM Werf or here for the Facebook fanpage. Remember to check their prototag to follow their story!

Rick
Bar Attendant at Noorderlicht Cafe

One of the quaint buildings in the NDSM Werf is the Noorderlicht Cafe, a great place to grab a bite or just relax after a hard day at work. In here, the friendly staff attends to you with a smile that will brighten up your cold day.

Rick, a bar attendant who has been working in the Noorderlicht Cafe for a year, tells us about the delight in working at the NDSM Werf. Although it is taxing to work in the cafe, he gets to meet a lot of interesting artists and designers who regularly visits the Cafe during lunch time.

In addition, the Noorderlicht Cafe also organises small parties during certain nights, playing live music, screening films outside or having a camp fire to enjoy the outdoors. Not only does Noorderlicht Cafe prides itself on the food they serve, they also infuse a sense of creative and open culture to its customers, embracing the creativeness that is of the NDSM Werf.

Click here for the official page of Noorderlicht Cafe. Remember to check their prototag to follow their story!

[13.02.2012] Introduction to Distributed Systems

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by Dr Stefan Dulman
Dr Stefan Dulman gave a short seminar about distributed systems in computer software. Some of the distribution systems he introduced were familiar to me, such as Cellular Automata, L-System (Lindenmayer System) and Particles System. These systems are very much Cantor Dust, Penrose Tiling, Sierpenski Triangle, Dragon Curve and Fractal Distribution.

The important question I find myself asking is how does all these relate to architecture? Although the examples he gave are interesting, such as the Healing Pools by Brian Knep or the Hyposurface by Jose Jurves, to me they are a subsection of architecture and not architecture itself. In my last semester studio at the University of Melbourne, I attempted to use the Fractal Distribution to direct my project, in both urban planning and architectural stages. However, I found it difficult to merge the systems with the construction practicality.

In this project, I will attempt again to associate the site with a distribution system, and hopefully design my project around it, allowing whichever system to determine the emergent architecture.

Notes
Complex interaction only needs 1 simply rule
Spatial Computing = Interactive Environments + Collective Desire
Decentralized Systems: Simple rules leading to intricate emergent behavior

[14.02.2012] Introduction to Rhino

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by Sina Mostafavi and Gary Chang

Rhino Commands
Surface Experiment: Array || FlowAlongSurface
Mobius Strip Experiment: Twist || Bend || ExtractSurface || CageEdit || BoundingBox
Folding Experiment: FoldFace || Smash
Surface Analysis: Divide || SurfacePoint || CurvatureAnalysis

[14.02.2012] To Build or not to Build

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by Msc1 Hyperbody Colleague
Collectively, what we found lacking, and an opportunity to develop, is the connectiveness of NDSM Werf and its subjects. In almost everyone's presentation, there was the mention of the connectivity (or lack of) from the micro, that is the designers and artists within the area, to the macro, how NDSM seems disconnected to Amsterdam, or in some other cases, Amsterdam Noord. However, the hard-pressing question is how should NDSM Werf continue to develop?

At this point the class seemed to take two sides. One, to enhance the programs on site and two, to introduce more programs to the site. It was a long and arduous debate as to which direction the NDSM Werf should follow, with both sides arguing that a lack of more programs will cause the site to die out slowly and that an increase in programs will cause the site to lose its sense of identity, and die out as well.

In my opinion, the debate felt like the head of a coin saying it does not have a tail and vice versa. Both sides of the arguments are valid. Obviously, there is no way to safely determine which is the best direction NDSM Werf should follow. After all, it is the users and activities within the site that will determine the success of the place. For us architects, we can only try our best to predict what is best for the site and pursue the ideology.

Personally, I will try to introduce minimal new programs as I like the 'desoluteness' of the place. I find that to be the attraction of the place, that it is away and 'disconnected' from the city. It allows me to dissociate from the city and into my personal creative haven. I believe that the artists feels like that too, since they themselves also created walls within the kunststad to hide themselves in their own studio so that they can concentrate on their own projects.

If I brought in too many programs such as a supermarket, more cafes or even an institute, it may become more convenient for the artists at the kunststad but I sure won't like to have strangers to knock on my studio every hour and disturb me.

To build or not to build? Minimally and delicately.

[16.02.2012] To Build or not to Build continued

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by Linus Tan
Refer to NDSM Wharf, To Build or not to Build, Requirements and Demands and System Design Theory.

[21.02.2012] Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software by Steven Johnson

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by Linus Tan
To understand more about System Design Theory, it is crucial to also understand its impact, which is the emergence of patterns. Instead of designing an anarchy which will centralised the governance of the system, a bottom-up system is required to for generative systems. This will result in an emergence of behaviours and patterns that becomes feedback to the decentralised entities, which formulates with one another to inform the generative system again, creating a close-looped cycle.

Below are notes taken from the Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software by Steven Johnson. In order to allow others to custom-use the information, the notes have been taken straight from the book.

Part One
Complexity is a word that has frequently appeared in critical accounts of metropolitan space, but there are really two kinds of complexity fundamental to the city, two experiences with very different implications for the individuals trying to make sense of them. There is, first, the more conventional sense of complexity as sensory overload, the city stretching the human nervous system to its very extremes, and in the process teaching it a new series of reflexes - and leading the way for a complementary series of aesthetic values, which develop out like a scab around the original wound. (page 38)

There is also the sense of complexity as a self-organising system - more Santa Fe Institute than Frankfurt School. This sort of complexity lives up one level: it describes the system of the city itself, and not its experiential reception by the city dweller. The city is complex because it overwhelms, yes, but also because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self-organises out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions. This is the ‘systematic’ complexity that Engels glimpsed on the boulevards of Manchester: not the overland and anarchy he documented elsewhere ,but instead a strange kind of order, a pattern in the streets that furthered the political values of Manchester’s elite without being deliberately planned by them. (page 39)

Understood in the most abstract sense, what Frederich Engels observed are patterns in the urban landscape, visible because they have a repeated structure that distinguishes them from the pure noise you might naturally associate with an unplanned city. They are patterns of human movement and decision-making that have been etched into the texture of city blocks, patterns that are then fed back to the Manchester residents themselves, altering their subsequent decisions. (page 40)

The history of urbanism is also the story of more muted signs, built by the collective behaviour of smaller groups and rarely detected by outsiders. (page 41)

Jane Jacob’s Death and Life: She conveyed a vision of the city as far more than the sum of its residents - closer to a living organism, capable of adaptive change. “Vital cities have marvellous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties,”. (page 51)

The software, Tracker, had evolved an entire population of expert trail-followers, despite the fact that David Jefferson and Chuck Taylor had endowed their first generation of ants with no skills whatsoever. Rather than engineer a solution to the trail-following problem, the two UCLA professors had evolved a solution; they had created a random pool of possible programs, then built a feedback mechanism that allowed more successful programs to emerge. In fact, the evolved programs were so successful that they’d developed solutions custom-tailored to their environments. (page 62)

Part Two
Call it swarm logic: ten thousand ants - each limited to a meagre vocabulary of pheromones and minimal cognitive skills - collectively engage in nuanced and improvisational problem-solving. (page 74)

Local turns out to be the key term in understanding the power of swarm logic. We see emergent behaviour in systems like ant colonies when the individual agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbours rather than wait for orders from above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behaviour (page 74)

If you’re building a system designed to learn from the ground level, a system where macro-intelligence and adaptability derive from local knowledge, there are five fundamental principles you need to follow. Gordon’s harvester ants showcase all of them at work: (page 77 - 79)

More is different - This old slogan of complexity theory actually has two meanings that are relevant to our ant colonies. First the statistical nature of ant interaction demands that there be a critical mass of ants for the colony to make intelligent assessments of its global state. Ten ants roaming across the desert floor will not be able to accurately judge the overall need for foragers or nest-builders, but two thousand will do the job admirably. “More is different” also applies to the distinction between micro-motives and macro-behaviour: individual ants don’t “know” that they’re prioritising pathways between different food sources when they lay down a pheromone gradient near a pile of nutritious seeds. In fact, if we only studied individual ants in isolation, we’d have no way of knowing that those chemical secretions were part of an overall effort to create a mass distribution line, carrying comparatively huge quantities of food back to the nest. It’s only by observing the entire system at work that the global behaviour becomes apparent.

Ignorance is useful - The simplicity of the ant language - and the relative stupidity of the individual ants - is, as the computer programmers say, a feature not a bug. Emergent systems can grow unwieldy when their component parts become excessively complicated. Better to build a densely interconnected system with simple elements, and let more sophisticated behaviour trickle up. (That’s one reason why computer chips traffic in the streamlined language of zeros and ones.) Having individual agents capable of directly assessing the overall state of the system can be a real liability in swarm logic, for the same reason that you don’t want one of the neurones in your brain to suddenly become sentient.

Encourage random encounters - Decentralised systems such as ant colonies rely heavily on the random interactions of ants exploring a given space without any predefined orders. Their encounters with other ants are individually arbitrary, but because there are so many individuals in the system, those encounters eventually allow the individuals to gauge and alter the macro-state of the system itself. Without those haphazard encounters, the colony wouldn’t be capable of stumbling across new food sources or of adapting to new environmental conditions.

Look for patterns in the signs - While the ants don’t need an extensive vocabulary and are incapable of syntactical formulations, they do rely heavily on patterns in the semiochemicals they detect. A gradient in a pheromone trail leads them toward a food source, while encountering a high ratio of nest-builders to foragers encourages them to switch tasks. This knack for pattern detection allows meta-information to circulate through the colony mind: signs about signs. Smelling the pheromones of a single forager ant means little, but smelling the pheromones of fifty foragers in the space of an hour imparts information about the global state of the colony.

Pay attention to your neighbours - This may well be the most important lessons that the ants have to give us, and the one with the most far-reaching consequences. You can restate it as “Local information can lead to global wisdom.” The primary mechanism of swarm logic is the interaction between neighbouring ants in the field: ants stumbling across each other, or each other’s pheromone trails, while patrolling the area around the nest. Adding ants to the overall system will generate more interactions between neighbours and will consequently enable the colony itself to solve problems and regulate itself more effectively. Without neighbouring ants stumbling across one another, colonies would be just a senseless assemblage of individual organisms - a swarm without logic.

This is the secret of self-assembly: cell collectives emerge because each cell looks to its neighbours for cues about how to behave. Those cues directly control what biologists call “gene expression”; they’re the cheat sheet that enables each cell to figure out which segment of DNA to consult for its instructions. It’s a kind of microscopic herd mentality: a cell looks around to its neighbours and finds that they’re all working away steadily at creating an eardrum or a heart valve, which in turn causes the cell to start labouring away at the same task. (page 86)

Paul Krugman’s 1995 lectures, “The Self-Organising Economy”, include a remarkably simple mathematical model that can account for the “polycentric, plum-pudding pattern of the modern metropolis”. Krugman’s system assumes a simplified city made up only of businesses, each of which makes a decision about where to locate itself based on the location of other businesses. Some centripetal forces draw businesses closer to one another (because firms may want to share a customer base or other local services), and some centrifugal forces drive businesses farther apart (because firms compete for labor, land, and in some cases customers). Within that environment, Krugman’s model relies on 2 primary axioms: (page 89 - 90)

1. There must be a tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, with neither too strong
2. The range of the centripetal forces must be shorter than that of the centrifugal forces: business must like to have other businesses nearby, but dislike having them a little way away

There are manifest purposes to a city - reasons for being that its citizens are usually aware of: they come for the protection of the walled city, or the open trade of the marketplace. But cities have a latent purpose as well: to function as information storage and retrieval devices. Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots. Ideas and goods flow readily within clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don’t die out in rural isolation. (page 108)

[23.02.2012] A New Kind of Building by Kas Oosterhuis

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by Linus Tan
Taking a step back, we need to understand the need how information is changing the way architecture is derived and why it is important that architects embrace the need for it in building generative systems.

Below are notes taken from the A New Kind of Building by Kas Oosterhuis. In order to allow others to custom-use the information, the notes have been taken straight from the book.

Buildings and their constituting components no longer can be seen as passive objects. This assumption revolutionises the way we organise the design process, the way we organise the manufacturing process, and the way we interact with the built structures.

The crux of the new kind of building is that all reference points will be informed both during the design process and during its subsequent life-cycle. Even if we are commissioned to design for a static environment, we must set up the Building Information Model (BIM) in such a way that all constituting components potentially can receive, process and send streaming information.
The Building Information Model will understand its new meaning as Building in Motion

Basic building blocks need to be redefined as a merger of old organic real and the virtual real

Changes the idea of dying deconstructivism to synthetic architecture

The building components are like the cells in the body, small processors of information, working together while constituting the character of the building body as a whole

Information exchange from point to point basically needs to be seen as streaming information, not just as an instance from a stream

The parametrisation of the leading building detail implies an extreme unification, it requires a uncompromising systemic approach, thus allowing for a rich visual diversity at the same time

People are always tempted to rethink a procedure while executing it, to rethink a process while running it, typically changing the rules while playing

All production must be computer numerical controlled, all components must be prefabricated, inclusive of structures and foundations

This is seen as sustainable as it ensures 100% efficiency, avoidance in bureaucratic procedures, building mistakes, waste material and keeping building site clean

[24.02.2012] Site Research

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by Linus Tan

The above images are the site research conducted on the NDSM shed occupants.

[09.03.2012] Media Studies

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by Linus Tan

Below are notes taken from the Architecture as a Medium presentation by Sang Lee.

Techniques: processes and/or materials that accommodate/contain/carry certain contents
Messages, narratives and/or discourses transmitted through/on a medium

The technological changes in media and contents bring the changes in scale, scope and pace … The medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan 1964

Techne: The kind of knowledge that is gained by pursuing materials and production methods (aletheia, disclosure) in order to discover the nature or essence (physics, self0emergence) of things

Autography: Designer-builder, self-made plurality (Brunelleschi)
Allography: Author-designerm proxy-made, singularity (Alberti)

Apparatus
1. A heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, etc… the system of relations that can be established between these elements
2. Opens a new field of rationality … between these elements, whether discursive or non-discursive, … a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function
3. A formation … responding to an urgent need … thus has a dominant strategic function

Media - easily manipulated by anyone
Can use architecture as a medium to fake things around

Digital age & apparatization
The age of inter modality, mass-customization and new generative autography

New generation: Inter model - can change its shape

The aesthetics of variability and serialisation

Intermodality
1. Anything ca be 'data'
2. Shift from the 'cool' to the 'hot' media (McLuhan, 1964)

Sample and Remix: hardware-software specificty
Surveillance: Extension of bio-politics, control and subjectification
Cellspace: Physical space that is "filled" with data and can be accessed by devices (Bennahum, 1998)
Ubiquitous Computing: Extension of the Unconscious (Weiser, 1991)

Augmented Space (interfaced model)
Intelligent Architecture is wired to provide cellspace applications
Intelligent Space monitors user's interaction with them via multiple channels and provide platform for information retrieval, collaboration, and other tasks

Context-conscious (or Ambient) Computing helps produce intelligent space.
Smart Objects connect to the cellspace, sense users and responds in a 'smart' way
Sensor Networks provide surveillance and environmental monitoring to implement intelligent spaces and similar platforms
i.e. "Overlaying dynamic and contextual data over physical space"

Proprioceptive Architecture - A medium beyond the Interface Model

Proprioception: the sense of the relative position and movement of the body and its parts
Architecture in which the movement of the body is the content
i.e. Cognition and experience of space beyond vision

Parametric architecture should be an experience of space and not a visual impression due to how the architecture is a reaction to the proprioception of the person
Interactivity beyond the Jouissance Model

Architecture will "function not as a self-contained machine, but a biological and psychological extension of the New Man integrated with his environment" - Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, 1926

Smart Architecture as a medium of mimesis (extension of man and nature) is

NOT

Representation of one thing by another
Resemblance or identification between two beings
Reproduction of a produce of nature by a product of human

BUT

The disclosing of the operation of physis, the self-emergence
Entertainment value should not drive the goal of an interactive architecture

Below are notes taken from the Space // Instrument presentation by Dieter Vandoren.

Adolphe Appia: Light is to space as sound is to time
e.g. Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, Edgard Varese - Poeme eletrconique 1958
Iannis Xenakis - Polytopes 1967 / Diatope 1978

Kurt hentschlaeger - Zee 2008
Identify the senses, isolate them, 'remove' certain senses, and bombard the 'left over' senses to disorientate the body with the environment
Other examples: Chunky Move - Mortal Engine 2008, Step Up 3 - Lights and Dance

Electronified Architecture
This discipline indeed continues where music has elect off and, by doings, turned its back on its most important task: composing space and sound in such a way as to lift both units above the trivial - Dick Raaijmakers in 'Cahier M: A Brief Morphology of Electric Sound"

Further Reading:
1. DIck Raaymakers, A monograph, text 'The Great Plane'
2. Chris Salter, 'Entangled'

[23.03.2012] Media Studies

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by Linus Tan

Below are notes taken from the The End of the Virtual: Situating Digital Methods in Internet Research by Richard Rogers.

How research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture alone

How to capture and analyse hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived websites, and other digital objects

Internet came to stand for a virtual realm, with opportunities for redefining consciousness, identity, corporality, community, citizenry and (social movement) politics

Daniel Miller and Don Slater challenged the idea of cyberspace as a realm apart where all ‘inhabiting’ it experienced its identity-transforming affordances, regardless of physical location

With respect to the relationship between the real and the virtual, virtual interactions supplement rather than substitute for the ‘real’, and stimulate more real interaction, as opposed to isolation and desolation

The argument advanced is that virtual methods and user studies in the social sciences and the humanities have shifted the attention away from the data of the medium, and the opportunities for study of far more than online culture

New media theorist Lev Manovich proposed to build massive collection, storage and analytical facilities for humanities computing

Library science scholars in particular concern themselves with the changing locus of access to information and knowledge

The sense of privacy. Is Manovich proposing a model that collects statistics against our will of disclosure?

The larger contention is that data collection could benefit from thinking about how computing may have techniques which can be appropriated for research

The proposal is to consider first and foremost the ability of computing techniques, how to diagnose cultural change and societal conditions using the Internet

The proposal challenges existing methods of data collection, and reopens the discussion of the Web as anticipatory medium, far closer to the ground than one might expect

Examples: Google Flu Trends Project | Google Person Finder

For the third era of Internet research, the digital methods program introduces the term online groundedness, in an effort to conceptualise research which follows the medium, captures its dynamics, and makes grounded claims about cultural and societal change

The relationship between ‘who I should speak to’ and ‘who else do you link to’ is asymmetrical for journalism, but the latter is what search engines ask when recommending information

If we were searching under a larger spectrum for more opinions and investigations, how is online groundedness shaping our approach into a bias one?

Raymond Williams believes that media are specific in the forms they assume - forms shaped by the dominant actors to serve interests

Creating ‘flow’, the term for how television sequences programming so as to keep viewers watching, boosts viewer ratings and advertising

According to Lev Manovich, computer media not only refashion the outputs of other media, they also embed their forms of production

Examples: Microsoft Word | Adobe Photoshop

On the web, information, knowledge and sociality are organised by recommender systems - algorithms and scripts that prepare and serve up orders of URLs, media files, friends, etc

To literary theorists of hypertext, sets of hyperlinks form a multitude of distinct pathways through text, thus the new means of authorship are of interest

For small world theorists, the links that form paths show distance between actors

Social network analysts use pathway thought, and zoom in on how the ties, uni-directional or bi-directional, position actors

Actors can be profiled not only through the quantity of links received, as well as the quantity received from others who themselves have received many links

Actors may also be profiled by examining which particular links they give and receive

How has spam disrupt the accurate collection of statistics?

As NRC Handelsblad did, one could determine changes in societal conditions through the analysis of particular sets of archived sites

Are the histories of search engines, captured from their interface evolutions, indicating changes in how information and knowledge are ordered more generally?

The impact of recommender systems - the dominant means on the Web by which information and knowledge are ordered, making users increasingly expecting Web-like orderings at archives, libraries, tourist information centres and other sites of knowledge and information queries?

Some users do not look past the first page of results; and they increasingly click the results appearing towards the top. Thus the power of search engines lies in the combination of its ranking practices

Should search engines now be of mixed media i.e. A result of links, images and videos?

Is the inclusion of page creation date and the recent Facebook change from profile page to timeline page suggesting a societal change in preference for more current information rather than popular information

Apparent removal of a website in Google - from a top five placement for six months to a sub-one thousand ranking. The case leads to questions of search engine result stability and volatility

Examples: 911truth.org

Cross-spherical analysis compares the sources returned by each sphere for the same query and can be seen as comparative ranking research

Geo-IP technology, as well as other technical means (aka locative technology), also may be put to use for research that takes the Internet as a site of study, and inquires into what may be learned about societal conditions across countries

91% of the respondents use the (social networking) sites to ‘manage friendships’

The idea (of post-demographics) is to stand in contrast to how the study of demographics organises groups, markets and voters in a sociological sense

It also marks a theoretical shift from how demographics have been used ‘‘bio-politically’ (to govern bodies) to how post-demographics are employed ‘info-politically’, to steer or recommend certain information to certain people

It is instructive to state that MySpace is more permissive and less of a walled garden than Facebook, in that it allows the profiler to view a user’s friends, without you having friended anybody

Does it concern the purpose of these social networking websites? MySpace is about exposing the person, and their works, to the world whereas Facebook is about keeping contact in a closed circle

Networked content refers to content held together by human authors and non-human tenders, including bots and alert software which revert edits or notify Wikipedians of change made

The contention is that the bots and the alert software are significant agents of vigilance, maintaining the quality of Wikipedia

Below are notes taken from the Space & Internet - Periodised presentation by Richard Rogers.

Period

Hyperspace 1993 - 2005

Cyberspace 1995 - 1998

Network Space 1998 - 2002

Myspace 2002 - 2005

Locative space 2005 - 2008

Social space 2008 - 2011

Cloud space 2011 -

Hyperspace 1993 - 2005

SF notion of a spaceship taking a shortcut (faster than light) through higher-dimensional space

Google’s “I’m feeling lucky”

Randomwebsite.com

Idea of jumping from website to website
Dominant mode of analysis and interpretation

Fiction / literary / imaginative

The imaginary (Mirror worlds)

Cyberspace (1995 - 1998)

Also SF notion (“consensual hallucination”) albeit in the post-apocalyptic tradition with pirates, rumour-mongerers, pornographers

‘Outer space’ connotations, with ‘sea of imagination’, ‘web as jungle’ and ‘cyber’

Examples: Netscape Navigator | Internet Explorer | Safari
Dominant mode of analysis and interpretation:

Hypertext theory (surfer as author, path as story)

Taxonomic, new web library sciences, (yahoo directory, dmoz)

Network Space 1998 - 2002

Inter-linked websites demarcate space

Small worlds of website (19 clicks or degrees of separation)

Examples: Touchgraph | Visual Thesaurus | Kartoo Visual Search Engine

Network science / social network analysis (previously a relatively obscure field)

Rise of ‘Google scientometrics’, the great citation machine

Myspace 2002 - 2005

The rise of personalisation and customisation

Realisataion of Daily me (Negroponte, 1995), but amplified beyond online newspapers to online services generally
Dominant mode of analysis and interpretation

Pluralism of media critique / the ‘death’ of the fourth estate

Personalisation critique

Locative Space (2006 - 2008)

IPtoGeo technology - Yahoo! Lawsuit in France, 2000, resulted in tailoring content to user’s location (also of interest to advertising)

Local domain googles (google.de, .nl, etc)

“This content is not available in your country...”
Dominant mode of analysis and interpretation

New glocalisations (global appearing as local)

Surveillance studies and new database now include (current) whereabouts

Social Space (2008 - 2011)

Web as platform - Social as logic of recommendation

‘Friends’ recommend and are recommended’

Examples: EdgeRank (Facebook) | Nike - utility

Platform as ‘discursive work’
Platform definition:

Architectural: is a raise plateau or surface where people stand

Political: a stage where politicians would stand and positions of political party, or plank

Computational: where one can program and launch software

Figurative: where one can rise from e.g. Launching pad

Platform as ‘walled garden’ and data set and api (often inhibiting research)

Twitter (and Facebook) as revolutionary technology

Has these platform been abused to just platforms for subscription and following updates?

Cloud Space (2011 - )

Wholesale transfer of cultural memory to corporate servers

Culture sharing

Examples: Dropbox | MegaUpload
Dominant mode of analysis and interpretation

Politics of the cloud, cloud governance, cloud polis

Hacking the cloud

Did it arrive as a transfer of cultural memory or personal and private storage space?

Below are notes taken from the The Internet of Things and People presentation by Pim, Miriam and Lotte.

Introduction
Term refers to ‘Uniquely identifiable objects/things and their virtual representation

Examples: RFID (radio frequency identification) | QR Code | Barcode

Although statistic are being broadcast through the Internet, what about the transmission of emotive data?
Allowing access of information around the world

Examples: Google Books | Collegerama | Podcast

Internet change our interaction from face to face to through a digital/mobile device

Less social physical interaction but less people feeling alone because of internet (social media)

Extra References: watch.usnowfilm.com

The evolution from Internet of People to Internet of Things

Stage 1 Electronic Data Interchange

Stage 2 Internet

Stage 3 Mobile - Internet

Stage 4 Internet of Things

Evolution

The world is the index

Take the world online

Take control of the world

Let the things talk to each other

Let the things become intelligent

Pachube

One-to-one

One-to-many

Many-to-one

Internet of Things in Architecture

Examples: D-Tower, NOX Architects | Remote Home, Tobi Schneider + Team

What do we gain and loose from these connections
Connections between people

Connect through social networking

Shared interests

Locative

Lost of:

Spontaneity - real time data is updated and shown to the world

Authenticity - Personalised data is exposed on the internet where people can duplicate and fraud

Connections between objects

Social web of things

How to disconnect

Examples: Capsule Declaration by Kisho Kurokawa - Architecture is worked as a buffer

Dome over Manhattan by Buckminster Fuller & Shoji Sadao - All environmental changes and managed like objects

Connections between people and objects

What do they know about us, when everything around us is communicating data?

Relations are built on trust

Core components of trust: transparency and traceability

Instinctive skill of making connections will be lost due to the automated connections

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