Wow, this is just beautiful! This installation art piece by Joon Y. Moon, an MFA students at Parsons, combines killer looks with intuitive high tech. Take some time to see what the installation does, it really is a sophisticated piece of AR.

via Games Alfresco

The coolest aspect of the installation is that it is not immediately clear which parts of the machine are digital. The trees, the birds and the people are clearly digital augments, but what’s the relation between the light and the shadows? It illustrates my main interest in AR really well: digital augments can add meaning to objects. Without the shadows the cubes are just cubes. With the shadows however, they magically transform into houses with people in them.

One thing people often forget is that screen project light. In this work, the light and the projection merge, which make the machine so much more natural.

Usually AR is used as a projection over a camera feed, but here the blend between physical and digital comes from the input interface. So instead of adding digital data to a physical location, a digital location is being augmented by physical inputs.

Part of the research behind Archadia was done from the offices of the Waag Society. This is an extremely inspiring place to be at, especially if you are interested in technology, media and social innovation. One of the biggest reasons for this is the amazing group of people who work at the Waag, who triggered my inspiration and imagination with their enthusiasm and their fast, creative and open minds. I interviewed several of them and these interviews will be presented in three parts, of which this is the first.

Tom Demeyer is the ‘head of technology’. Frank Kresin is the ‘program manager’ and ‘research director’. Rinske Hordijk is the ‘head of the education program’. Edwin van Ouwekerk Moria is a ‘mobile developer’. Dick van Dijk is a ‘concept developer’. To start of the interview I asked everybody what their main fascination on the theme of technology and the city was:

Edwin: I am a programmer; my interest is in the technology. It is nice to see that the stereotype of the solitary nerd is starting to vanish because internet and applications are becoming more social every day. Also, because the technology has become social, more and more people start to embrace it. My grandmother loves Skype.

Tom: My interest is not in the technology itself, it is in the application of the technology. Our world has become so much larger thanks to the internet, and so much more is still to come. If you look at how our communication has changed over the past 20 years, you’ll see it is spectacular. One of the important questions is how our interaction with this part of our world will evolve. I expect us to gradually embrace a more permanent connection with the web, with intuitive ways to gradually open up or shut the connection.

Frank: The city is a constant collision of strangers and cultures. Each collision can change your vision of the city and of life itself. Technology has the power to stimulate these collisions or to enrich them. Technology is an important infrastructure of the city, intended to enhance connections.

Dick: My main fascination is with the users of the technology. Technology is a means to empower groups of people to lead better lives. In my eyes it needs to be accessible to everybody though, so I prefer low-tech that is easy to use over the most advanced (usually complex and/or expensive) technologies.

Rinske: We can experience culture in new ways. The blend between the physical and the virtual allows for enriched experiences. These enriched experiences can be used to create meaningful learning experiences, or stronger game experiences with for example AR games. Also, as Blast Theory does, we can create contextual theatrical performances.

Dick: Our ways to experience art has also changed. Musea are using the technology to lure people inside, but a more interesting trend is showing: We can use our cultural heritage for other means, for example to fight dementia, or to enhance social cohesion. Our institutions should be using technology to let the art explore the world outside the museum and interact with people and places.

MD: Which technological trends do you expect to have great influence on our urban experiences?

Rinske: Definitely Augmented Reality (AR). I am eagerly awaiting artists to make better use of it. (MD: check out Sander Veenhof’s latest work). The key is to enrich the experiences. We were working on a project called A.R.chitect, which would allow children to become architects through tactile play with clay. The results would be scanned in 3D and represented in AR.

Edwin: I agree that AR offers a lot of possibilities, but I have to say that the examples I have seen so far (the Layar and Wikitude model) do not interest me. They’re kind of cool because they show something that was not possible a year ago, but they don’t really exceed the technology showcase yet. There is nothing in it for the user yet.

Frank: The current commercial kind of AR is nothing but a simple visualization, instead of a real blend of physical and virtual. I hope to see an actual read/write city, where the inhabitants can help develop the city (an example would be to crowd-source new better traffic light interval algorithms or other programmable parts of the city.)

Tom: I don’t even consider Layar to be real AR. It’s only a camera feed with some imagery added. There are some serious applications that use AR that quite successfully, for example, maintenance applications like ARMAR

ARMAR: Augmented Reality for Maintenance And Repair

Tom: Another field that has my interest is the open data movement. The idea is to make public data available to the public, in its raw, essential form.

Frank: When this data is available for free, people can start to combine different sets of data (for example the status of bridges, traffic lights and garbage services in the city as an addition to traffic navigation information) and add extra layers of meaning to them. This mixing of different sets of data (preferably from different domains) we call mash-ups. One of my favorite examples is www.appsfordemocracy.org by Peter Corbet of istrategylab. I am currently working with a European consortium to start a similar initiative. Currently we are also working on the Personal Travel Assistant, which is navigation software, which uses public data and social networks to make the process of way finding much more effective (and fun, if possible). Another side of the open movement is open design, which is represented in the Waag by our partnership in the Fablab network. This is a kind of do-it-yourself, distributed, on demand manufacturing workshop. The more of these workshops we get, the lower our communal footprint can be, because we can decrease the movement and the storage of goods.

Dick: Mapping is becoming increasingly important, especially now that locative media have become so abundant. I really like how Esther Polak, after creating Amsterdam Real Time together with the Waag Society, stuck carefully to her method of tracing object with GPS and finding ways to represent this on maps. (MD: I agree, mapping is becoming increasingly important. Here is an interesting read, with a mapping project I did on the cover)

Tom: Amsterdam Real-Time really was the first time that a city was being visualized with GPS data (it has been copied often, though). It also led to new projects at the Waag, like frequency 1550 and eventually 7scenes.

Dick: I love Christian Nold’s emotional cartography (MD: example Greenwich; example San Francisco; example East Paris

Tom: Yeah, they are beautiful. I am ways drawn to maps that depict something different then pure location. In a way they change geography, like internet has changed space, location and geography. When it takes us less time to communicate with someone on the other side of the globe, the distance has shrunk. Because of internet geographical location is no longer a necessary condition for establishing a community. None of this is visible in plain geography.

Cristian Nold – Emotional map of Greenwich

Rinske: I also expect to see a lot more theatrical and gaming elements permeate everyday life. At the Creative Learning Lab we use games to simulate contexts that make the learning process a more profound experience. Initiatives like STEP at MIT, who use AR games for education have done great research on the topic. The people at Area/Code have several projects (budgetball, shark runners) which have brilliant ways of transmitting awareness about a certain topic, while playing games that seemingly have nothing to do with the topic.

Project Zeitgeist is a good examples of how Waag Society uses gaming elements and storytelling elements to drag people into a learning environment (other examples would be Rituals, Operation Sigismund). In the game, children go searching for an archeological story while chasing an ancient artifact. In their quest they meet actors, who lead them through the story, so it becomes a kind of location based theater. However, there is not much knowledge about the learning effects these kinds of games have. We expect the results to be positive, but we are still researching.

Edwin: Storytelling is a reoccurring theme in the projects we do at the Waag. 7scenes for example is a platform I am quite proud of. Locative media are starting to become commonplace and the power to create is becoming increasingly simple, but I think that the storytelling layer we have created for 7scenes is unique. While building it we noticed we were at the edge of what is possible technically, so it is pretty leading edge too.

MD: Many of the projects you mention are associated with very local situations. 5 years ago everything that had to do with the web was about globalization. What can we expect?

Rinske: People prefer shared experiences over individual ones. Sharing experience, knowledge or something you created is interesting. The web made it easy to find your peers. Lately it has become possible to do this locally, instead global. People can be matched according to their location, so the heavily missed  focus on your direct surroundings has reappeared. However, the mix of the global and the local is interesting too. For the 400^th anniversary of New York the Waag initiated ‘The Island’ where people from Amsterdam were hooked up with people on Manhattan. They acquired historical merchandise that was connected to their city and learned about the production. Subsequently they traded them with the players in the other city and learned about the trading business in that period.

Tom: This is something I call ‘translocality’. Amsterdam and New York were connected of course, they share a history. ‘The Island’ was a hybrid constellation of two physical locations. I actually see the shared virtual platform as a location too. It has an address and a homepage in cyberspace. You could see this constellation as a new kind of location. Anyway, I think we need to redefine the term location.

Dick: Again, to me the most interesting part about this is the blend between the virtual and the physical. When this is applied to locations (especially on the scale of the street and the neighborhood) we start seeing really cool things happening. There is this project where historians started mapping stories in which small local shops appear (MD: for the importance of these local shops, read Jane Jacobs – “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Part One, Chapter 3: The Use of Sidewalks: contact). The storekeepers started putting up the story on their storefronts, people started collecting their own stories and emailing them to the initiators. The result of an online project became connected with everyday physical life, creating a sense of local solidarity. I found another nice idea in a library in Haarlem. They used their return drop boxes to create a type of rating system. Instead of having one mailbox, they made several, which had tags such as ‘bold’, ‘boring’, ‘funny’, etc. All you had to do when returning your books was to drop them in the appropriate box; the RFID chip in the books would automatically add the tag to the book in the library system (called Lazybrarians). That’s a fun way to add meaning to everyday, physical activities in your neighborhood. (MD: The project failed. The software the library used was unable to use the tags, and what’s more, adults could not be bothered to separated the returned books according to the provided tags). We should embed these techniques in the city too. If people are already performing activities, why not use them?

Auto tagging system ‘Lazybrarians’ by Jan David Hanrath

MD: The primal fear people express when thinking about these pervasive computational elements in everyday city life seems to be about the protection of information about their identity. How do you expect this will evolve?

Rinkse: This issue is not new, and does not come from the focus on location. The issue of privacy has been going on for some time now, and ‘media awareness’ campaigns have been started in schools all over the country. The problem however is that these campaigns often focus on the dangers only, disregarding all the opportunities digital media have for children. If we can stimulate children to create and share their creations, we can teach the children to be more open and to find out about their identities. A lot of teachers underestimate their scholars’ potentials, because the old educational structures don’t appeal to them. These scholars might prove to have way more creative powers then their teachers expect them to.

Edwin: People should realize that the role of privacy is changing. To put overly simplified: 20 years I would not give away any of my personal information. Now I deliberately choose which information I share with certain target groups. The problem is that we don’t have the right controls yet to fine-tune this.

Facebook is in the middle of a privacy storm. Truth be told, they did boost the discussion by giving people some control over what they share with whom. Of course this does not justify abusing people’s lack of understanding of the control buttons.

People should realize that your Curriculum Vitae is not only the piece of paper you’ve studiously written, it is also every trace you’ve left on the internet. There will be a digital layer around everything you do. People don’t understand the proportions of their actions on Facebook, Google and Twitter. Modern privacy is being in control of this layer.

Frank: People keep talking about privacy while they should be talking about privacies as Rob van Kranenburg taught us. We should be designing reciprocal relationships together in such a way that privacy is being respected in every situation. We should not be focusing in limiting the users’ freedom in order to protect their privacy. We should however be looking at big institutions like multi-nationals and governments who are taking too much liberties.

Dick: I totally agree. We have numerous identities, each which different scale levels of complexity. Sometimes we open up all the scales, sometimes we close the majority, dependant on the places you visit, the networks you travel in and the relationships you maintain. This should be a design issue in the new online services, especially now that we start carrying them into the public domain. We should be able to shield ourselves off. We should know who and what are asking for our data. Future systems have to be designed in such a way that we benefit from the data we share and be notified when third parties use our data. We should have a voice in determining what happens with our data. I don’t fancy advertisement spaces that pinpoint me and serve me personal ads, but I would be happy with a little control of what advertisements do or don’t show me. This reciprocity has been lacking so far. The problem might be that too much control will become a hassle. The system should also work unconsciously.

Tom: Actually it is not that hard to solve. We should look at privacy from a system design perspective. However, that means that the designers of new applications should all embrace the same shared notion. We need some development on the technical and judicial sides of the problem, so for now we still have to be a bit paranoid, but I’m quite sure we can solve the problem if we start designing according to system design principles, of which some are:

1. Data minimization (only collect the data that is necessary)
2. Data encryption (protect everyone’s data so it is not for everyone to use)
3. Use-policies with the users
4. Avoid function creep (when a system can collect more kinds of data then what it was intended for.)
5. Design cradle-to-grave (define the validation interval for the availability of the information)

To give an example: If I am at my local liquor store the salesperson should be able to check my age.  He has no business enquiring about whether I have driver license, what my marital status is and where I live (data minimization), which is exactly what he does when he asks for my ID. To address this, we could build a system that knows everything about me, through a trust broker or a notary. In case of an information request, (like in the case of the liquor store) it can ask for a onetime only verification at my trust-broker, which is valid for five minutes only.

The Liquor store is a simple issue, because it asks only for one single snippet of information, but with good design methods the same thing can apply for more complex fractions of your identities, like when a mortgage broker, health insurance or drug store would request data.

(MD: elaborating on this idea, we might even take away all our private data from the government and store it at the trust broker. As long as we accompany the entire system with a very clear and transparent set of rules, this should give no problems, even if we look at the most complex situations, such as crime prevention, or scientific research. To be continued…)

MD: What others chances or dangers do you see with the implementation of all this computer power in the public domain?

Rinske: The Web 2.0 gave the users control over the creation of content. YouTube apparently has more upload then download traffic. How will we control the quality of all this content, especially when we consider the internet to be one of the most important learning environments for our children?

Frank: We have to acknowledge that our canvas has grown, the world around us has become our canvas, and we have more ways to paint on the canvas also. I personally think that every new medium or instrument is enrichment to cultural expression.

Edwin: Apart from the quality issue, there is also the issue of finding interesting information in the ever more rapidly expanding stream of data. Location however is a good filter in this aspect. It is beautiful to see that people can start to leave their stories (in word, sound, video or text) at specific locations for people to literally stumble upon.

It is so important that we start designing from a user’s perspective again, which I mean literally in this case: A lot of architecture looks beautiful in bird’s eye view but has no possibilities of interaction for pedestrians. The human scale is lacking and you can say the same about a lot of IT-projects.

Frank: I am looking forward to what virtual media will do for the energy issues. We’re constantly online, which requires considerable more energy. However, if smart applications can help us decrease the amount of kilometers we spend traveling to each other all the time that will have a much bigger effect. That could bring our footprint down considerably. Also, we see more and more projects in which digital media are used to render elements visible that were invisible before, such as hyper local real-time climate factors in the city. Citizen’s research projects with climate sensors create more awareness about the impact our actions have on your direct surroundings.

Rinske: The next step would be to connect these data with other kinds of user generated data, such as emotions and sentiments.

Dick: However, we do have to think about the accessibility issues: The devices and media we speak about are not as ubiquitous as we seem to think. Sure, in Amsterdam, among the creators, everybody seems to have a smartphone and know how to get the most out of it, but these technologies might not be as transparent to people in other regions, with other interests or of different ages.

Edwin: That is merely a question of time. Designers are becoming better at designing for everybody, and within one generation everybody will use these media as if we never lived without them.

Tom: All we need is a killer app. Where is porn when we need it? Seriously though, porn usually is a big advocate for new technologies, and it has been absent in the urban technologies so far. It will be interesting to see what will happen when we start seeing it to appear.

A close-up of one of the maps I created during my master thesis at the TUDelft has been selected as bookcover “Border Conditions“, by Marc Schoonderbeek, which is the Archined book of the month.

“Border Conditions presents the initial results from the research and design studio of the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. The book offers a collection of essays and experimental architecture projects that emanated from research into the spatial impact of socio-political developments, with an emphasis on mapping the contemporary urban milieu. The book provides a thematic overview of the contemporary discussion surrounding borders in architecture, from conflict situations to marginal urban areas; from Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Gibraltar, Kaliningrad and Kiev to Benidorm, Marseille and Rotterdam. A selection of projects shows how mapping can be used to not only register and interpret urban processes, but to show how these design principles can act as the basis for architectural interventions.”

Another great movie by Keiichi Matsuda, the maker of Domestic Robocop. He’s back and this time it’s in stereoscopic 3D, so for best results watch it through oldskool red and cyan 3D glasses. If you don’t have these at your disposal you’re best of at Youtube by selecting the “left image” option from the 3D menu

Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Keiichi has a clear vision on augmented space (Manovich: The Poetics of Augmented Space) and his primary concern is the architectural and urban quality of augmented space. Archadia deals with the same theme, and therefore the problems we run into are somewhat similar. Domestic Robocop is the best visualization of the way augmented space might look, but it describes a very pessimistic, nearly dystopic outcome for our lives when immersed in the mixed reality. Augmented City underlines some of the spatial possibilities rather then the invasiveness of the medium. I asked Keiichi about these issues:

“I made domestic robocop as a satire, rather than a dystopia. Although both films talk about a potential future, I really wanted them to comment on how we live today, the way we occupy and consume space. In fact I am slightly suspicious of the words ‘dystopia’ and ‘utopia’, as they are absolutes, creations of modernism. I think it is much more interesting to imagine futures which have benefits, but come with their own problems; they are neither utopian or dystopic, but simply projections.

It was difficult for me to follow Domestic Robocop with something more positive though.. in a sense, ‘augmented city’ is more naive in the way this techology could actually be used, which i consider closer (and probably less obvious) to domestic robocop. Augmented city is really more about the way space can be configured and modulated by the user, and programme applied to space, so it is fairly neutral in tone.”

If you are interested in Keiichi’s vision, I recommend you read his master thesis, it is an interesting read.

This is big, and I just found out about it today. The UK government, one of the first governments worldwide to put open government data on the agenda, has released the Combined Online INformation System, or Coins.  Basically this is a huge online dataset in which the government shows every aspect, to the tiniest of details, of their expenditure.

With Coins everybody can dive into them and monitor how the UK budget is being spent. The database is so large and complex that simply reading won’t do the trick. It is now up to the online community to make this database insightful. I hope to see open-source search engines and representation tools soon, so we can actually see what all this data means.

The government is not done yet. in it’s Big Society Paper it states that it is planning to release further datasets, including:
• Ultra-local data on crime, health and education
• Every item of local and government and quango expenditure over £25,000, plus every project that receives EU funds
• All procurement tender documents for contracts worth over £10,000

The opportunities are amazing: Central governments can do only so much with the vast amounts of data. Now everybody can start analyzing problems that live in their society. The community is presented two new tools. First of all, they can monitor the government and judge their actions, based on objective data. Moreover, the public can tap into one of the most important tasks of the government: identify problems. The question of course, is whether these issues will find their way into the other tasks of the government: finding a solution to the problem and executing this solution. My hope is that because of this tool initiatives will start to emerge that present these issues in such a way that the governments are forced to put them on the agenda.

The idea of crowdsourcing governance might bring a whole new level of democracy. Now that the UK government is actually playing ball, let’s see what the community will do with it. A positive example will be a huge stimulus for other countries (like in The Netherlands, where this notion is completely absent on the level of the central government). I don’t know about you, but I’m holding my breath.

You can check the original article on the guardian here

This edition of  Test_lab, a bi-monthly event by our friends at V2_ featured a selection of freshly graduated artists, architects, and designers from European art and design academies whose projects explore the invisible aspects of our contemporary urban environments. This sounded interesting enough to travel to Rotterdam, where I found out that the event had grabbed a lot of peoples attention: the room was packed.

Let me start of by saying that it was hot. So hot in fact that none of the participants got what they deserved: interaction with the audience. We were simply unable to think.

With that out of the way I let’s see what the event was like. The opening speaker, Theo Deutinger is known for his data-visualizations. He learned from the best: he was trained at Rem Koolhaas’ OMA, who besides architecture make wonderfully evoking visualizations. OMAs style was recognizable in Deutingers presentation, however only one part actually made sense to me. With a beautiful animation, Deutinger showed us that the world actually goes to sleep everyday at 24:00 GMT+1. I always figured that when we went to sleep, people were at work on the other side of the world, and this would balance out over the day, keeping a stable amount of people who were at work. However, in his Work around the world project Deutinger shows the opposite.  Play around with it. It looks beautiful.

Besides the opening speech, 6 graduation projects and one performance were the main event. Not all the projects appealed to me on the same level and the selection criteria did not seem to be particularly narrow. Also, not every part of V2_’s space could host all of the audience and, as I said before, it was steaming hot. There were three projects stuck with me. Pleximo, a mechanical installation by Renee Hulshoff, referencing Constant Nieuwenhuijs’ New Babylon is a beautifully made and fascinating machine. The mechanical working of the machine is the artists protest against the invisibility of governance, the lack of feedback between cause and effect in urban planning. Okay, to me it just looked pretty good. As soon as I can find a video of it I’ll update this post. For now you’ll have to do with the image.

Joram Kroon aka Prace presented his musical work “First statement“. Endearingly honest he explained to us about his complete unawareness of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict and his wonder about how something that was so thoroughly communicated had failed to grab a hold of his attention. Joram blaimed written word: black lines and dots on gray newspapers would never be able to communicate the emotions that lay behind the story. His approach was to create hip-hop music out of crystallized ideas. I don’t understand how he failed to see the connection graffity – calligraphy or the link beats vs. rhymes, but his approach was nevertheless pretty impressive. He explained his use of samples in the following example: A lot of Palestinian families still treasure the keys to the house their family were forced to leave by the Israeli settlers in the 1940′s and 1950′s. It is a symbolical representation of their struggle. So Joram sampled their keys. Subsequently he kept on finding stories like these and distilling ideas from them, which he rendered in samples. While collecting these idea/sounds he studied Arabic music and learned how to combine them with hip-hop. The result is a CD called the “First Statement”. So, how would such a conceptual album sound like. Surprisingly, I would not mind hearing him perform in a nightclub, and I would not be surprised to see him play the festivals this year. Check the song below and head over to his site. You can download the entire CD for free, but for € 10,- you have a physical edition with a beautiful cover. Nice One!

Prace – Handela (from The first statement)
Download of koop de cd hier.

The final project, also revolving around the theme of a new kind of craftsmanship is the Fabulous Fabbers by David Benqué. His study focuses on new industrial production technologies that have grown smaller and smaller resulting into micro-industrial cells. This way, the industry itself might move back into the city. This time however. the industry would not have to consume large area’s of the city, but only small fragmented cells. Technologies like 3D printers who are actually capable of producing 3D printers are one of the ideas that led to the various concepts Benqué has come up with. Each socio-technological scenario was represented in 3D prints, lasercuts and photo-etched bronze. Once again, beautifully done.

Off course, as researcher in residence at the Waag Society this immediately reminded me of the FabLab that’s hosted at the Waag. I might just have to get to work.

Another company promising real AR-vision: Laster Technologies has started promoting their SmartVision technology, and it has got me excited. This is the first time I see AR goggles with transparent glasses. The goggles themselves are starting to look like normal glasses. The company says they expect to have a consumer product in the next two years. This is one I would love to try.

The ‘Nederlands Architecuurinstituut’ or NAi [transl: Dutch Architecture Institute] faces the possibilities of Augmented Reality head on. Earlier this year they showcased SARA (urban augmented reality application) and now they stepped their game up with UAR¹ (pronounced “you are”). UAR² gives us the possibility to experience alternate realities of Rotterdam: What has been, what will be and what might have been the architectural appearance of the city? Just pick up your (smart)phone, look through the camera and see buildings of the past or future in 3D in scale at their location.

Right now we can experience Rotterdam through Layar. Later on this year several other dutch cities will be added, including Amsterdam. I can’t wait!

As ‘mayor’ of ‘De Digitale Stad’ (the ‘Digital City’; DDS) in Amsterdam, Marleen Stikker developed the first free gateway and virtual community on the internet in 1994.

In the same year as the DDS opened, she founded Waag Society: aa medialab developing creative technological applications for societal innovation. Amongst others, Waag Society creates mobile citygames for the youth, develops storytables for the elderly and researches the possibilities for networked performances. Marleen was also at the basis of many organisation, including the Media Guild,PICNIC, and IT Innovation Platform Creative Industries.

Marleen Stikker studied Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Earlier she started the theatre magazine Alligator, the newspaper Daily Alligator, was director of media-performance festival Zomerfestijn, and chief editor of Live Magazine at De Balie.

On a sunny afternoon I got the chance to interview Marleen in her peaceful backyard in the heart of Amsterdam.

Second version of DDS, with visual interface

What’s your fascination with urban technology?

Amsterdam has been an important factor in my life. I was born here, moved out during nursery school, moved back during my teens, moved away again and returned. It felt like the city was taken from me and I had to recapture it again and again. The city changed each time I was absent and I had to reinvent what this city meant to me. In a way I was always interested in making the invisible layers of the city visible.

During the 80’s Generation X (in Dutch, more dramatically dubbed Generatie NIX) felt unwanted. The baby-boomers had pushed aside their fathers and claimed the important seats in our society. They were expecting us to do the same and fortified their positions, waiting for us to play our marginal roles while trying follow in their footsteps. My generation, especially in Amsterdam chose differently. We decided to take matters in our own hands and build our own lives.

Were you a part of the squatting movement?

I never actually squatted a building, but I was linked to a lot that was happening. As I said, we were denied the important positions in our city so we decided to create our own society, along with our own ideals. It felt like we were like a tribe, trying to convert the city to our ideals. We started theatres and cultural outlets (like Aorta and Tetterode, Veemtheater, Ostadetheater), free radio (radio 100) and live television. In order to do these kinds of things we needed to emancipate ourselves from the existing structures (like broadcasting stations) and do it ourselves. I remember endlessly trying to configure antenna’s on the roof of Paradiso [famous pop-temple, enabled and realised by the squatting-movement] to establish a connection for the broadcasts we needed to have a line of sight between two locations. It was a very interesting combination of High and Low Tech solutions. [these activities resonate in todays Freenet organizations, where grassroot groups link WiFi internet antenna’s together to create urban networks. For further reading see: Mark Dek – Graduation research, MD]

This idea of emancipating yourself from the existing structures by learning the tools and recreating your own structure has been the basis for many of my later achievements. When we started our own magazine (Theatre magazine Alligator) we got familiar with the craft of typesetting and embraced the first DTP programs on personal computers. This DIY mentality was embraced in everything we did, whether it was for free radio or TV, for printing press with our own printing office, during the BBS period (software for sharing data between different computers before the world wide web). By mastering the tools we achieved autonomy, in organisation and in distribution. This is akin to the ideas of the squatting and the hackers movements. We became the engineers of a new city by hacking the source-code of our old city.

Manuel Castells (a famous communication scholar, MD) observed in his ’The information age trilogy’  (vol 1, vol 2, vol 3) that in The Netherlandsthe Internet is part of the public domain instead of an extension of the commercial market. People like Rop Gongrijp and Felipe Rodriguez of XS4all, and earlier Hack-tic magazine played an important role in the public appropriation of the net. ‘De Digitale Stad’ (1993) essentially  did the same thing. We claimed our position in the new medium, the Internet, and created it according to our rules.

What do you consider to be the most influential trends and developments that we will be seeing in the coming years?

I see several. The first one is about transparency, mutual trust and reciprocity. I think for example the ‘Open Data’ (link 2, link 3) movement will have an enormous effect. It will be the new standard and it will be disruptive. In other countries, like the UK and the US governments are starting to open up their information, but in the Netherlands the movement is being neglected by the government, keeping the transparency of data under lock-down, although in civil services enthusiasts are working hard on opening up their data. However we should not confuse transparency with meaning. Opening up the data will not create meaning, opening up the data is merely a first step. (for a critical point of view check this link and my interview with Geert Lovink, which will be published here on www.archadia.nl later this month, MD)

Up until now our government is squandering the benefits Open Data thinking would have on large scale technological projects like the ‘OV-Chipkaart’ (public transport chip card), ‘Rekeningrijden’ (road pricing) and ‘Elektronisch Patientendossier’ (electronic health record). In essence, it is a design issue. The systems that are being designed should be based on trust, reciprocity and transparency. The internet protocol TCP/IP was designed to be just this. Standards like GSM, the mobile phone network protocol, are not, because the government intervenes through laws, regulations and in public tenders.

The basic idea is that you should be the one in control over your data. You should be the one that chooses to reveal your location, not your telephone company. The standard should be opt-in instead of opt-out. This should be designed into the core of the systems we surround ourselves with.

The second major trend that I think will be of massive influence is ‘Bio-Hacking’. Waag Society already showed some examples of BioArt through artist in residence Adam Zaretsky. I think the influence of Bio-hacking will be huge, possibly bigger than the influence of the Internet has had on society. I think in 15 to 20 years everybody will know the genetic flaws of their bodies and live accordingly. This will change all of our perceptions, even our perception of time. When you know your body is capable of living only 40 years you will plan your professional future completely different. You won’t be saving for your pension, for example. Probably, you will choose your social partners according to their life expectancies, because your lifecycle expectancies will determine your actions. Society might see entirely new structures.

The current discussion about ethics will be incomprehensible to the people in 2030. “How could we have lived so recklessly?!”, they will ask themselves.

You seem to be a pretty firm believer in the ‘Maakbare Samenleving’. (the idea that we can fundamentally influence our society by government influence)

I believe in design thinking. All major trends and projects we addressed in the interview can be seen as a design issue. I am very interested in designing human behaviour. The OV chipkaart we talked about is a clear example of designing peoples behaviour. Thinking in terms of design should be more manifest in handling these issues.

I remember the Fluxus movement vividly. In Holland Willem de Ridder is a splendid example.

4 faces of Willem de Ridder pt.1

In the ‘60’s De Ridder broadcasted ‘n8rit’ (night drive) as a radio drama. During the show, people were instructed to go out by night in their cars on a quest. Instructions were given over the radio, and eventually people were guided to a final destination (where nothing much happened). De Ridder mobilized a fair crowd.  In a sense he changed their perspectives and manipulated their behaviour. He toyed with peoples realities.

I thought about this recently when I was testing ‘En route with Job Cohen’, a route in 7scenes along the points of interest of our former mayor. (7 scenes is software created by Waag Society that allows users to create games or scenes, in which the user adds media to locations on his or her mobile Phone, MD). I was using my phone to observe the information that was added to the location of the office of the Labour party (PvdA, MD). Suddenly I noticed the people inside, looking at me as if I was a paparazzi. The same thing happened later on, when I was near the office of Bram Moskovich (famous Dutch lawyer, MD) where the security camera’s had picked up my presence. By navigating the city in this specific way my presence had changed. In the same way peoples presence has changed when mobile phones were a novelty. Users invaded the public realm with their private lives when they made intimate calls in public spaces. Right now this has become the standard, which means our public space has changed.

It starts getting really interesting when these changes can be made on a greater scale and with a more disruptive nature. During Amsterdam Real-time we fantasised about giving people the instructions to move cladding pipes from one point in the city to another, and see what kind of influence this would have on the dynamics in the city. This is the reason why with 7scenes we chose to use theatrical terminology. How can we let people experience something during a period of about 1,5 hour? How can we make them experience catharsis, who are the protagonists and the antagonists, how can we catalyse? The same thing we see in applications like Foursquare and Nike+.

Final map of Amsterdam Real-time

Aggregated data like this can make associations we would never have expected. People like Euro Beinat are conducting interesting research by reading out real-time cell phone activity in certain locations. Here the opening up and combination of certain data generate meaning, but what to do with it? If we can see that at the headquarters of ABN Amro bank people are working late, this might be sensitive information for the stock exchanges. It would not surprise me if we see companies laying out regulation concerning social media and use of cell phone applications. Maybe they will even start building Faraday cages or ‘geo-fences’

What I am trying to say is that the technology we use shapes our behaviour and shapes our society. This has to be addressed in the very cores of the designs. Designers have to start seeing the importance of transparency, reciprocity and mutual trust. The commissioners of large scale IT project, most notably the governments, have to start understanding the design criteria that have to be incorporated in the tender of these project. I think that if we start understanding this, we will be able to shape human behaviour and our society in a better way.

What future scenario do you see for the ‘digital city’?

When we started ‘De Digitale Stad’ the virtual domain was a terra incognita, a realm that had to be discovered. The present reality is that the city itself is becoming increasingly digital, for example through smart-grids, sensor technology and urban screens. We see locative media with our phones, but the real-time reading of the city data might still be something like 15 years ahead of us. Different kinds of data are being monitored and aggregated and will constitute an invisible ‘Internet Of Things’. Right now our water systems can read out the hormones that are being dumped, which gives them information about the medical state of the inhabitants. Will this information be used?

I like the idea that the city will change because we don’t have to physically build the information layers that are brought to us through the digital word through, for example Augmented Reality (like all kinds of signals and advertising): the idea that the physical city adjusts to its virtual dimension,although this will take some time. Sure we can give you all the information about public transport on your cell phone, we can project all the traffic signs on your car window, but we can not get rid of the physical signs until 100% of the users use their virtual counterpart: we will  keep on building information panels at bus stops for now, so I think at first the physical city will become even more filled with digital media like screens before we can start clearing them away.

In the interview with Claire Boonstra from Layar the idea of Augmented Reality glasses or even contact-lenses was proposed as a certain future. According to Claire the question is not whether we will see immersive AR vision, the question is how soon. It seems she might be right.

While we might still have to wait a little for the contact-lenses, Gizmodo shows us some stuff from ARE 2010, the big Augmented Reality Event in the U.S. where Tanagram Partners showed the world their army Goggles. This is just one example (using transparent OLED screens, pricy stuff) but my guess is we will start seeing alternatives that target the consumermarket soon. By the way, Tanagram Partners have announced that the iPhone version of their product will be ready in 2011. Consumer war supplies? Only in America.