Real-Time Cities: an Introduction to Urban Cybernetics Harvard Design School: SCI 0646900 Spring...

Real-Time Cities: an Introduction to Urban CyberneticsHarvard Design School: SCI 0646900Spring 2014

Cano, SolExercise #2: Case Studies in Data Analysis (5 Ways to Make a Story out of Numbers)

Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] is an open source software platform for cultivating public sound gardens within contemporary cities. It draws on the culture of urban community gardening to posit a participatory environment where new spatial practices for social interaction within technologically mediated environments can be explored and evaluated.

Project Video:http://www.tacticalsoundgarden.net


1 |TACTICAL SOUND GARDEN


What is the raw data?

Sounds recorded and planted virtually in a physical location

What processes are deployed to transform the raw data to information?

The TSG Toolkit enables anyone living within dense 802.11 wireless (WiFi) hot zones to install a sound garden for public use. Using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA, laptop, mobile phone), participants plant sounds within a positional audio environment. These plantings are mapped onto the coordinates of a physical location by a 3D audio engine common to gaming environments— overlaying a publicly constructed soundscape onto a specific urban space.

What is the information that is the outcome of the aforementioned processes?

By wearing headphones connected to a WiFi-enabled device, participants drift though virtual sound gardens planted by others as they move throughout the city.


How the act of sensing or access to raw data leads to comparison, judgment, reflection, reasoning, and abstraction?

The aim is to experience how the city is augmented and managed via the prosthetic implantation of an earbud.

While the urban subject is typically situated within encounters of the gaze and the spectacle, the project examines gradations of privacy and publicity within the contemporary public space as well as the experience of the city with or without augmented sound possibilities .

How the sum of all the above processes is resulting in a limited sort of agency for the data-driven construct?

There has to be a population willing to record sounds and people with smartphones experiencing the installation.I wonder if there is an agency curating the posted sounds, and if there could be a sound sequence..

Street Life proposes “smart” streetlights made from color shifting LEDs that dynamically change colors based on the presence of crowds and ambient noise levels

Project Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfgZu8_pruM

2 | STREET LIFE

2 |STREET LIFE

2 | STREET LIFE


Crowd and noice levels within a specific lamp


The new streetlights designed for New York City uses Color changing LEDs that dynamically change colors based on crowd and noise levels and also passively change every week.

The design includes a people counter and microphone that keeps track of people and sound levels in the area.As crowd increases, the third color gets added on by a percentage proportional to the crowd under it. In high levels of noise/people, it turns white.


The information relates to security levels and confort in a public space.

The aim of the creator is to experience spatial colorism, wat he calls ” a totally new plastic art with its own independent laws, and with a potential far outstripping that of both architecture and painting. Spatial colorism elevates the schematic form to physical form and it is for this reason an indispensible expressive factor in the human creation of space in the broadest sense of total human settlement.”

2 |STREET LIFE


Color becomes a personal experience which becomes the focus when alone. In crowd, the color turns white thus shifting the focus on the crowd.

As noise increases brightness decreases. Streetlights are meant to make one feel safe on streets. When noise levels are high the need for bright lights reduce.


The colour and lighting choice is not considering environments where there is a ot of people but still a person can feel unsafe, and limiting the amount of light might not be the ideal solution.

On September 11th, 2001 the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) building at Berlin Alexanderplatz became the world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights.

The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind the building's front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. There was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own love letters on the screen as well. The program enabled everyone to create animations and to take part on the animation contest

Blinkenlight feature set has constantly improved and used in other buildings such as in Toronto (Stereoscope) and Paris (Arcade).

Project Video: http://blinkenlights.net/blinkenlights

3 I BLINKENLIGHTS

3 I BLINKENLIGHTS

Project Video: http://blinkenlights.net/blinkenlights

3 I BLINKENLIGHTS

3 I BLINKENLIGHTS

3 I BLINKENLIGHTS


In this case the raw data is:1. The animations created for the specific performance , by authors as well as by the public, and voted by the public as

well. 2. The pong game that viewers can play by calling a specific phone number.3. All of this is projected through lighting specific windos of a façade with syncronized reflectors on each window programed

through a software.What processes are deployed to transform the raw data to information?


The information is transformed into data sets projected through 144 reflectors that compose a synchronized lights screen.

During the night, the whole building becomes a constantly growing number of animations.

There was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own love letters on the screen as well.

The building becomes an animation through the images shared by putting them into the data folder. When coding the images library you can use processing's internal loading functions like loadImage(), loadStrings(), etc. to load files located inside the data folder into your library.

3 I BLINKENLIGHTS


Through motion achieved by syncronizing each ligh and converting each window into a pixel . The result is a urban canvas reflecting motion pictures that the city dwellers participated in doing. This becomes a public headlight displaying information of the city

Blinkenlights software is targeted on the UNIX platform as we are running most of our systems under the Linux and BSD Unix operating systems.


The image has to fit the 18 x 8 pixel frame which limits the outcome. When playing Pong, the limites agency is that there is only one screen so there can be one player against the computer at a time.

ProjectVideo: http://survival.sentientcity.net


The Sentient City Survival Kit probes the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing for urban environments. The project consists of a collection of artifacts for survival in the near-future sentient cityUnder (a)ware is one of the four projects part of the Sentinel City Survival Kit



RFID Antennas found throughout the city


The electric circuit senses an RFID antenna and vibrates so the user knows and can be able to protect his/her privacy

The parts needed are the following and you can buyt them online and DYO device:

1 LilyPad Arduino 328 Main Board http://www.sparkfun.com/products/92661 LilyPad LiPower http://www.sparkfun.com/products/87862 LilyPad Vibe Board http://www.sparkfun.com/products/110081 MCP3422 Microchip 18bit ADC http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/MCP3422A0-E%2FSN/MCP3422A0-E%2FSN-ND/16808811 SOIC to DIP Adapter 8-Pin http://www.sparkfun.com/products/4941 Conductive Thread - 117/17 2ply http://www.sparkfun.com/products/85441 C1 - Capacitor 82pF http://www.mouser.com


The user knowing wether there is or there is not an antenna



The project aims to raise awareness of the implications for privacy, autonomy, trust and serendipity in this highly observant, ever-more efficient and over-coded city.


There will be other antennas/information devices that as technology advances, the device wont be able to sense.

It might not work under specific condittions

We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It grows and changes as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds.

Project Video: wefeelfine.org

5 | WE FEEL FINE

http://www.livejournal.com/

http://spaces.msn.com/

http://www.myspace.com/

http://www.blogger.com/

http://www.flickr.com/

http://www.technorati.com/

http://www.feedster.com/

http://www.icerocket.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com/

5 | WE FEEL FINE

5 | WE FEEL FINE


We Feel Fine scans blog posts (including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google) for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".


Once a sentence containing "I feel" or "I am feeling" is found at the blog, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified "feelings". This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way.

From the Blogs profile page, the programmers can extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, they can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written.

This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day.


The result to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion.

http://www.livejournal.com/

http://spaces.msn.com/

http://www.myspace.com/

http://www.blogger.com/

http://www.flickr.com/

http://www.technorati.com/

http://www.feedster.com/

http://www.icerocket.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com/

5 | WE FEEL FINE


The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds, each one of these movements show a diferent comparison/point of view on the feelings collected.


The creators hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and helps people see beauty iand understand each other. The limitation is that the population that is part of this project is limited to people with internet acces and that use regularly blogs.

The interface can be quite slow and vague, in some cases it is not clear what they are comparing/showing

http://wefeelfine.org/movements.html%23madness

http://wefeelfine.org/movements.html%23murmurs

http://wefeelfine.org/movements.html%23montage

http://wefeelfine.org/movements.html%23mobs

http://wefeelfine.org/movements.html%23metrics

http://wefeelfine.org/movements.html%23mounds

Real-Time Cities: an Introduction to Urban Cybernetics Harvard Design School: SCI 0646900 Spring...

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