This weekend marks the first of many new ventures in my once, and soon to be again, home city of Boston. I have been invited by Boston University to design and host a workshop for BU students which explores creative urban responses to some of the challenges facing the city of Boston. You can find the website for the workshop here, or read on for more information.

The workshop is being run as part of my work with concepts to “reprogram the city”: working with the existing urban objects, spaces and infrastructure to create new functionality out of existing urban assets.

The BU Lab is an opportunity to generate multi-dimensional ideas for Boston’s future challenges, solutions, and opportunities. BU Lab will be a R&D department for the city, utilizing a cross section of disciplines within BU – from Engineering to Law; Biology to Fine Arts – creating a framework of ideas and applications for the city. The diversity of these disciplines is fundamental in creating holistic, sustainable solutions to the city, and Boston University is uniquely placed in having such a rich pool of resources to bring together.

The initial “test bed” for the BU Lab will be the Commonwealth Avenue corridor, defined by the MBTA route running from Kenmore Square to Agganis Arena. This corridor provides a rare sampling of almost all urban elements that need to be addressed with future urban thinking: public transportation, traffic, pedestrian areas, retail interfaces, shared space, green space, bridges and essential infrastructure.

BU Lab can also function as a means of creating tactile environments for some of the larger issues facing Boston and cities at large. T platforms (Boston’s subway is known as “the T”) and shelters could be test models for everything from rain water collection systems to energy production sources and sustainable shelter design. The student population and transportation corridor provide quantifiable and predictable metrics of use and population statistics which are highly valuable and can be used for everything from specific testing opportunities to opportunities for arts students to create visual or narrative journeys for these populations along the corridor.

The first BU Lab workshop will serve as an insight into a new way of approaching the city – using a mosaic of skills, interests and insights to develop robust, sustainable ideas for urban issues.

It’s going to be a wonderful experience to return to Boston for this, and promises to be an inspiring time ahead, for the workshop, myself, and Boston. Watch this space.

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1. Reprogramming the City: Article Series for Boston Society of Architects The Boston Society for Architects recently asked me to write a...

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The Boston Society for Architects recently asked me to write a series of articles for them outlining strategies for “The Resourceful City” by reprogramming existing urban infrastructure to serve new urban functions. The four-part series runs this month, and the first two installments are up now.

The overall arc of the four parts is about urban resourcefulness and exploring alternative potentials for the city through the reuse and reprogramming of its existing buildings, objects and spaces instead of tearing things down and starting over again. As urban citizens, we are dealing with two realities. We have come to terms with the fact that our resources are finite, whether material, financial, or spatial. We also live in agile times – our cultural, economic and political relationships are in a constant state of flux, and often the physicality of our structures and cities are not able to respond to these shifting dynamics. Reprogramming the City introduces agile and malleable responses to a usually rigid urban environment. The existing city is the infrastructure we have inherited; it is our shared hardware. Strategies to reprogram what we already have is the software.

The four parts of the series are below:

+ The Resourceful City, Part 1: Reprogramming Buildings

+ The Resourceful City, Part 2: Reprogramming Space

+ The Resourceful City, Part 3: Reprogramming Infrastructure

+ The Resourceful City, Part 4: Reprogramming Possibilities

I hope you enjoy the series.

If you would like to keep track of my future articles or projects, please subscribe for RSS updates. Thank You.

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My starting point was something I’ve long been obsessed with – desire paths. Desire paths are the footpaths created by the public when the formal paved routes of a space don’t represent the most efficient, or desired, route between points A and B for the public, and they chose their own paths, their desired paths, as shown above. I wanted to find a way to capture the desired movement of people in a public space and use this incidental movement as a tool to enable a sense of contribution, connection and ownership between individuals and the shared spaces of the city.

Working with designer Jon Stam (centre, above) and programmer and Studio MSP guru Mattijs Kneppers (far left), we identified a space in the NDSM area of Amsterdam and set out to create a system to transform it into a platform for aesthetic narratives created by the movement of the public.

The beauty of only having a couple days to create a prototype for a project is that you instantly shift to hacking and rapid prototyping mode. So we grabbed a Kinect, some cables, a few blocks of Styrofoam, booked some time on a CNC machine, and went at it to communicate our idea. The full narrative outlining the concept and the playback system we devised for the space during night time follows. For those who want the quick walk-through of the concept, our summary presentation can be found at the bottom of this post; for an even quicker bite, here’s a video of us demoing it:

Concept Overview
We hacked the Kinect to serve as a prototype of a public camera overlooking the space, layering it with the ability to pick up a single object or colour on a visitor when they enter the space, and then remember that object and track it as it, and the person, moves through the space. If visitors to the space want to remain anonymous, they simply enter the space and walk through. If someone wants to take ownership of their movement in the space, they touch in at one of the check points with an RFID tag on their key fob, and they are given a unique colour path, which which they can draw something in the space, and then download an image of what they’ve drawn with their movement if they wish.

As the visitor walks across the space, his path leaves a trail in the grid of LED lights are embedded in the surface of the space. The next visitor to enter the space will see the trail left by the previous visitor, and other recent ones as the ghost of their travels are held by the LED lights in the pavement, each previous path fading slowly with time. The space holds a living history of its use throughout the day, and becomes a canvas for those who have ID’d themselves when they entered the space.

Night Time Use
The space holds the memory of its use at night. When dusk falls, a playback of the daily travels through the space begins, each path glowing and traffic patters growing as the timeline of the space’s use from the previous day is played back over night, as this video shows:

Through this playback of the day’s movement in the space, a relationship builds between those who use the space during the day and those who use it at night. The brightness and density of the light paths in the space at night will depend upon the traffic patterns in the space during the day – the more traffic during the day, the brighter the space will be at night. Ultimately, the normally ephemeral qualities of safety and security in the space at night become factors created and influenced by its use during the day.

For those who use the space both during the day and at night, the relationship between the two realities will form. Perhaps a few co-workers will be gathered to create some crazy shapes in the space during the day for them to enjoy as they come home that night. Or paths will be formed in circles to see if pedestrians at night will follow.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, every night, the design of the space will be different, directly correlating to the use of the space during the day, its animations, patterns and luminosity being the creation of those using the space 12 hours earlier.

Platform for Play
People are not the only thing able to be tracked in the space. Someone can place a ball on the square to be ID’d, and it will be tracked as well as it moves throughout the space. Children can enter from different entrances and invent a game where their movement become games pieces on a large urban board.

The space no longer becomes a passive area for its population, but an active participant in their daily lives, enabling creativity, connection, safety and narrative to be built during its daily use.

Platform for Data
In addition to the personal and narrative relationships enabled by use of the space, the space will generate data for use by the city. Data created by the space will be visual use patterns; data of the visual flow and use of the space.

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Just back from a few days in Berlin, where, among many other things, I had a chance to get together with Aram Bartholl to talk about his SPEED SHOW project, a beautifully simple initiative to turn your local internet cafe into a digital art show.

As Aram describes in his SPEED SHOW manifest:

“Hit an Internet-cafe, rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night. All art works of the participating artists need to be on-line (not necessarily public) and are shown in a typical browser with standard plug-ins. Performance and life pieces may also use pre-installed communication programs (instant messaging, VOIP, video chat etc). Custom software (except browser add-ons) or off-line files are not permitted. Any creative physical modification to Internet cafe itself is not allowed. The show is public and takes place during normal opening hours of the Internet cafe/shop. All visitors are welcome to join the opening, enjoy the art (and to check their email.)”

I love the simplicity and DIY nature of SPEED SHOW, done in five easy steps:

1. Find Internet Cafe. Rent time on all the computers for the evening.

2. Select work to show on standard browsers. Create gallery plan.

3. Invite people.

4. Enjoy the show.

5. Make Internet Cafe owners incredibly proud and happy.

For a full description of the project and more video and photos, visit the project site here.

Photos by Kuc, top video grab from Aram’s video on project site.

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For most people with even a passing interest in innovative urban problem-solving, the words Jaime Lerner and Curitiba, Brazil will hold special reverence. Lerner is the urban planner and three-times mayor of Curitiba who transformed the once traffic-congested, economically and environmentally challenged city into one of the world’s most livable urban spaces. This Wednesday at the British Film Institute, London, a documentary exploring his innovative approaches for “transforming problems into solutions” in the city will be shown, and following the screening I will be joining Jaime Lerner on stage to discuss his approach and visionary techniques.

The talk will be hosted by Peter Jenkinson OBE, an exceptional individual himself for his work with creative solutions in the face of limited resources. For those of you in London Wednesday 4 November, please come join us at the BFI for this exceptional opportunity. More information on the evening can be found here. For those unable to attend, please watch the trailer above and go see the film as soon as you can. It is a game-changer for urban strategies.

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Discouraged by all the talk of economic crisis? Well, with this plugin enabled, your news will now be brimming with with tales of optimism:

The plugin is only available for Firefox, and is available in Portuguese, English and Spanish. It can be downloaded directly from the Firefox add-ons page here. (Of course, once you install the plugin, this post will make no sense whatsoever. Oh, the irony…)

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Google Creative Labs’ Creative Director Ji Lee emailed me the other day to tell me about Chrome Experiments, a new product Google Creative Labs has just launched. Now that I’ve had time to play with the site and many of the experiments, I have to report out that not only is it all good, but there’s also something particularly worthy about creative catalysts such as Chrome Experiments, as I’ll explain.

Chrome is, of course, a new open source web browser from Google. I’m a new tech addict, so when it first came out last year I fired up the old PC (the Mac version is “coming soon” says Ji), and after taking Chrome out for a ride, looking under the hood and kicking the tires, I dig Chrome.

Browsers are quickly becoming the OS of our computing lives. When I first log on early in the morning, I open the browser, work on projects with partners all over the world, email, chat, video conference, review designs and tweak images and documents, and never once leave my browser. It’s the platform for my work and global connectivity. And with Chrome Experiments, Google is extending it as a platform for creativity.

While Ji recommends “Browser Ball” and “Video Puzzle” as experiments to get things going, personally, I’d like to highlight the Monster experiment as a model of the Chrome Experiment’s creative potential. There are other experiments that are more dynamic and vibrant, but as Monster is a demonstration “of what can be done with browser web standards (without Flash)” it provides a window into another key element of creativity that is obsessing me at the moment: the creativity of constraints.

When you begin playing around with Monster, its functionality feels so much like you’re inside a Flash movie, run through the Flash plug-in. But this is straight-up Java, baby – toggle the background colour, rotate it, pan it, get right inside the creative process, with nothing but you, your keyboard, and the given functionality of the browser itself.

There’s a harmony here between experiments such as Monster, and many others within Chrome Experiments, that use only the given functionality of Java and browser standards, and the recent Wired feature Design Under Constraint: How Limits Boost Creativity. From magazine design’s constraints of a fixed page size and its 2D platform, to designing album covers for minuscule display on digital gadgets, across the board, constraints have always been a defining aspect of creativity. Today, however, as the general zeitgeist and the financial collapse turns all thoughts to one of constraints, those creatives who look at constraints, standards and fixed limitations as catalysts for expanding creative dialogue instead of choke points are well placed for a long ride upward through the downward economic cycle.

I recommend spending some time with Chrome Experiments and viewing your browser not only as a functional app, but as a platform for creativity. And for those of you who want to dig a bit deeper into Google’s platform philosophy, I recommend the book What Would Google Do?

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The reason is that largely, the old model is still at work – huge, expensive institutions are being built as vehicles for regeneration and as catalysts for the ‘creative economy’, but with very little attention being paid to the integration of these institutions into the creative fibre of the city or indeed to the business plans for the years to come. In short: a lot of hardware, and very little software. This isn’t a sustainable approach for the long-term, nor wise in the short-term in light of the global financial slowdown. So my approach, for both good times and bad, is to look in the opposite direction:

Focus on the Micro-Entrepreneur

Famed entrepreneur Mark Cuban said a very interesting thing when asked what his advice would be to President Elect Obama in steering the US out of its financial turmoil:

“Entrepreneurs that start and run small businesses will be the propellant in this economy. PE Obama needs to have the counsel of those who will take the real risk inherent in creating companies and jobs. Those who put their money and lives on the line with their business…Entrepreneurs will lead us out of this mess. Talk to them.”

The same principles apply to cities and their cultural and creative strategies. This isn’t the time to be investing in the urban macro, when the urban micro, specifically, the urban micro-entrepreneurs, are collectively a far more valid and adaptive force for change and revival in this climate. They are the software that’s needed to run the city’s hardware.

A prime example of how this hardware and software can combine to support the micro-entrepreneur is Sao Paulo’s Endossa.

Endossa is a collaborative store which caters to craftspeople, designers, independent musicians, inventors, foodmakers, and a wide cross-section of creatives “who devote their time to tactile ideas and need assistance to ‘publish’ them.” The principles of Endossa are as follows:

• Rent empty shelf boxes to every micro-entrepreneur who wants some space to sell products, without asking for sales commission.
• Any product can be sold in Endossa from bottles of chilies to handmade notebooks and its time on the shelf depends on demand: high sales means high visibility.
• Create a micro-community of young entrepreneurs and curious people who visit Endossa to get fresh inspiration from the creative pieces inside the store.

In addition to its “real world” benefits, an interesting side effect of the store is its ability to cross-over with online culture.

As shown in A Cor do Brasil’s flickr photo above, people have begun to promote not only their work, but their physical positioning in Endossa online, promoting both their work and the store, and enabling a comments thread online that feeds back to the physical store. The integration with Web 2.0 philosophies is intentional, as Endossa explains:

“Endossa works more like blogger or digg than as a search engine. The store allows everyone to “publish” their products and then lets customers “sort and rank” them through sales… There´s an algorithm. We call it the ‘Every Purchase is an endorsement’ mechanism. Basically it compares the size and location of a rented space with its revenue, and decides if the space can be rented again by the same brand next month.”

Cementing Endossa as a model of a software sensibility within the Sao Paulo creative economy is the reality that within their retail system, “new modules are being added all the time, depending upon the necessities identified by the user.”

Endossa is an exceptional example of the Focus on the Micro-Entrepreneur strategy. Stay tuned or get in touch for more.

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