If there are two things I love, it’s serendipity and clever urban interventions. As I was working on my Urban Guide for Alternate Use today the two came together when Collective CC in Lisbon sent me some images of their latest intervention, Senioritas.

As most who live in or visit Lisbon and most southern European cities will know from experience, there exists an eagle-eyed population of women who spend their days keeping watch over the street outside their window, one phone call away from reporting any wayward activity to the police – in effect, functioning as an alternate version of CCTV in these neighbourhoods. So within Collective CC’s intervention – in addition to the clever re-contextualization of the role these women serve – is another great visual joke. The signs that Collective CC has secretively placed beneath these women’s windows is a perfect copy of the omnipresent Securitas security/CCTV company visual identity.

There’s nothing about this project that isn’t superb. Well done, guys, and thanks for sharing.

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Oscar Lhermitte working rooftop on his Big Dipper Project

One of the drawbacks of living in London (and most other major metropolises) is that the ambient light from the buildings, street lamps, etc, make it impossible to see the stars in the sky at night. So when designer Oscar Lhermitte applied to the London chapter of the Awesome Foundation, of which I am a proud trustee, with the proposal “to recreate the missing stars in London”, we knew we had something Awesome to consider.

Oscar’s The Big Dipper project is an ongoing project which uses a combination of balloons, LEDs, and various control mechanisms to recreate stars and constellations in the night time sky over London.

An Early Prototype of Big Dipper over London. Photo by Cormac McGloin

He presented his project at the Awesome Foundation London award ceremony earlier this month along with four other strong contenders, and at the end of the evening, walked away with the Awesome Fellowship to advance his work. If you were unable to make it to the awards, you can see his presentation here on slideshare, and view his video overview of the project below (see it on vimeo here), which features some touching commentary from people on the street who have watched his experiments:

For those of you in the UK, Awesome Foundation London is receiving submissions for our June 2010 funding award. Submissions close on 30 June, so please go here to submit your Awesome idea for funding consideration.

Congratulations to Oscar for an inspiring and Awesome idea. He’ll be back later this year to show us how the Awesome Fellowship advanced his work, so stay tuned.

Oscar Lhermitte with his Awesome Fellowship cheque

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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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When I was on the jury for the SHIFTboston design competition a few months ago, I was impressed by their desire to go after and embrace Big Ideas for the future of Boston. From contemplating transportation corridors for blimps and corresponding air ship terminals to floating extensions of the city, I came away from the experience wondering where they could possibly go from here. Well, now I know. Moon Capital is SHIFTboston’s latest competition, which humbly challenges:

“When considering the future of design let’s start looking out into space. WHAT IF we could occupy the Moon only 100 years after our first visit there in July of 1969? Might the Moon become an independent, self-sustaining, and sovereign state? If so WHY NOT start designing for that new world NOW?

SHIFTboston is calling on architects, space-architects, scientists, engineers, urban designers, landscape designers, industrial designers, fashion designers, artists and futurists to submit their most provocative ideas for the moon. Think: WHAT IF this could happen on the moon? SHIFTboston seeks to collect visions that will provoke thought on the moon as a new destination. We want radical ideas for new lunar elements such as rovers, growing pods, inflatable structures, droids and lunar habitats. How about a new moon culture? Envision: Fun on the moon – activities, moon fashion, and spacesuits! YOU TELL US. Competitors are encouraged to form teams in order to tackle multiple concepts.”

With some impressive momentum coming off of their last competition, they’ve assembled a stellar impressive cast of partners and jurors for the Moon Capital competition – visit the SHIFTboston competition website for more information.

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Several years ago I was the victim of a fairly vicious case of identity theft. Vicious may be a strong word to use in connection with identity theft, but I feel it fits here, as the perpetrator went the extra mile: as bizarre as it sounds, he legally changed his name to Scott Burnham, and then began to absorb my personal data and identity as his own.

If you think it’s difficult when someone gets ahold of your bank statement from your trash or copies your passport information at a hotel, try having someone claim to be you, armed with legal documents showing that, actually, he is you… but he’s not. It’s not a lot of fun.

I don’t talk about that experience much, but the steadily eroding data privacy policy of Facebook and my own brushes with it have brought identity issues – specifically the relationship between trust and identity – back to mind.

As online privacy issues appear in the news daily, it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is a huge opportunity for an online service which anchors our identities securely within a trusted framework. Facebook had that chance, but its callous drive towards the commercialisation of our personal information and identities quickly kicks the supports out from beneath an allusion of trust. In other words:

When hundreds of millions of people hand you their personal data, the business opportunity is to protect it, not pimp it.

The latest episode of the podcast This Week In Google nailed it when co-host Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine identified a fundamental problem when our identity becomes more of a commercial resource for another company than our own property. In order to maintain privacy over aspects of our identity we don’t want commercialised, we have to exclude or obfuscate our personal information, which in turn erodes the larger framework of our online identity, lowering trust and truth. As Jarvis says:

“The more our identity becomes Facebook’s property, the more we feel free to lie about it. The more that the canonical ‘me’ becomes my property, the more truthful I’m going to be about it. We have to own our own identities, and when we do, that will maintain the highest value possible … [the opportunity] starts with services that help you maintain your own identity. That give you control. The reality of where we are right now is that our identities are what you find online about us. So how can I manage that?”

The seasoned netizen will respond that there are an array of services out there that allow you to manage your online identity. There are, and I use most of them daily. But they are reactive by nature, with most offering you the chance to track what is being said about you elsewhere on web. We need more services to control what is, as Jarvis says, canonical information about ourselves, and what is not, without having to worry about how our identity is being monetised.

Google Profiles has a foot in the door there, but they’re not leveraging it actively, at least not yet. And while many give Google a higher trust index than other online services (due largely to their embrace of The Data Liberation Front and open standards), the recent uproar over Google Buzz privacy holes show just how fragile trust can be when dealing with our online identities.

Regardless of the media or the medium, one thing never changes: the killer app is always trust. It is only recently that we have had to debate the exchange of our trust and identity for the sake of connecting with other people, which is a perverse exchange. Identity should never be treated as a monetised platform, and trust is a commodity that holds limitless value. And there’s the window of opportunity.

For those who want to dig further into the issue, Jeff Jarvis goes deeper into some of these ideas on his blog here.

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I was in Paris the other day and came across the latest campaign from French online clothing retailer La Redoute. The first thing that caught my eye was of course the pixelated trails that were coming off of the images of the models. At first, I thought I had stumbled across an always pleasing moment of unintentional design, the billboard print escaping some quality control, as celebrated perfectly in the book Glitch: Designing Imperfection. But then I realised it the pixel motif was intentional, and it then became even more interesting to me.

Though it is most likely an abstract of the intention of the design, the pixels provide a rare moment of authenticity in the design itself; transparency in a sense – admitting that for all the beauty and style being communicated, the poster is indeed a digital creation. There is an honesty in the pixelated traces coming from the models – the painter’s brushstrokes still evident in the final work. (OK, more like the Photoshop Jockey’s mouse strokes… but ‘painter’s brushstrokes’ sounds better.)

Of course, the actual intention is most likely less poetic and far more pragmatic in communicating the digital origin in the campaign. And that is obviously connecting the imagery directly to the store’s website. It is impossible to look at the adverts and not think one thing: digital. You see the clothes, and understand that the digital experience is directly tied to them. That the fashion and the lifestyle is accessible, but there is something in the way of it becoming real, and that thing is the digital world. So just visit the website, and you can remove this barrier.

Notably, when you do visit the La Redoute website, the pixelated motif doesn’t follow through online. It has already done its job, intrinsically linking the advertised imagery to its digital origins. And now you’re at the website, so the once digital images begin to become real. A great campaign that reaches a bit deeper than I suspect the agency realised. Analogue delivery of digital realities, which are all available…

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The winner of the SHIFTboston competition for new ideas for Boston has been announced. Congratulations to Andrzej Zarzycki and Sapir Ng of Arlington, Mass for their proposal for “The TUTS: Tremont Underground Theater Space”. As the TUT submission asks:

“WHAT IF the abandoned TREMONT STREET SUBWAY TUNNEL became an interactive social environment? What if we shifted these contemporary urban ruins into a network of underground, interactive social environments–experiential theatres and immersive digital (art) galleries—while celebrating the past through a media-infused trolley museum inside North America’s oldest subway system?”

As I posted a few weeks ago, I was on the jury for the competition, and for full disclosure, The TUTS received my vote. I loved the use of existing and overlooked infrastructure – in this case, an abandoned subway tunnel – and its benefits to the urban fabric of downtown Boston, linking the Green Line and the Orange Line of The T in an imaginative way.

SHIFTboston is gearing up for another competition for new ideas for my beloved Boston, so watch this space, as I’ll be sharing their future plans soon. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit the competition site to check out the other competitions entries that won Runner-Up and Honorable Mention. It’s always a pleasure to be on a jury for new urban ideas, and SHIFTboston held a bounty of them. I’m looking forward to the next iteration already.

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Open Chairs by Nina Mrsnik

As the folks at the Exchange Radical Moments Festival explain in the festival catalogue:

Resourcefulness has become one of the most important skills for people to develop today. What resources do you see being treated as waste in your city that could be used to benefit others? The Urban Guide for Alternate Use is a catalogue of city-specific opportunities for resourcefulness  within existing urban environments, compiled simply by asking the city’s residents to devise alternate uses for things already present in the city. It is a guide that acts as a catalyst for a new form of resourcefulness in the city, and as a communicative vehicle for exchange among residents.

For the festival Exchange Radical Moments, a guide will be created for one of the participating cities, filled with the ideas submitted by the city’s residents, as gestures of donation to their fellow citizens. The city guide will be written by the imagination and resourceful thinking of its residents,  and can serve as an alternate guide to the city.  Together the different submissions will form a powerful collection of insights into how people mentally and physically play with the urban landscape  as a conglomeration of readymade objects ripe for intervention.

From hacks such as using traffic bollards as ladders to gain a better view of a football training session (top image), to re-imagining Amsterdam street sweepers as bird baths between shifts (as seen below), the Urban Guide for Alternate Use is an open platform for people to explore and re-imagine the uses of their existing city’s objects and areas. It’s early days, so release date, call for contributions, etc., still to come, but thought I’d share one of many things to come in 2010. Stay tuned.

Improvised Amsterdam Bird Bath

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Boston is a city very close to my heart. It was my home for several years during and after my time at Boston University, and of course home to the Red Sox. But for all the things about Boston I love, I have always been dissapointed that the city hasn’t become a league leader in radical urban thinking and bold new strategies.

The ingredients are all there – the city has proven its ability to deliver on big ideas, having pulled off The Big Dig, one of the boldest urban development projects in recent history. The intellect is certainly there, with the faculty and students of Harvard, MIT, BU, and dozens of other universities based in the area. It always seemed that the city needed more catalysts to bring it all together and go after new a urban future for the city. Well, one has arrived.

SHIFTBoston has just announced a competition for bold new ideas for Boston’s urban future. As they describe on their website:

The aim of this competition is to ignite the spirit of innovation that has long lived and thrived in Boston. SHIFT seeks to collect new visions for Boston’s urban environment, rediscover Boston’s role in innovation and reaffirm the city’s position in progressive design and development … The competition is open to architects, artists, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers, students and anyone else who would like to tackle the question: WHAT IF? What if this could happen in Boston? Express your idea of what a metropolis such as Boston needs.

I am delighted to have been asked to be a judge for the competition, giving me a front row seat to what the future could hold for Boston. The deadline for submissions is 11 December 2009. I encourage anyone who wants to go after some bold new ideas for Boston’s future to visit the SHIFTBoston website for more information and to download the call for entry and submission form.

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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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