[Evan Allen & Matthew Worsnick / The Networked Omniscient / 2006]

Tonight the final lecture of Visualizar'08 took place and a large, enthusiastic crowd crammed into Medialab-Prado for the event. Adam Greenfield (design director at Nokia) presented The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tails of the networked city, a talk on ubiquitous computing and urban space. Greenfield opened his talk by defining everyware, a geo-web paradigm in which "all the objects and surfaces of everyday life are able to sense, process, receive, display, store, transmit and take physical action upon information". Greenfield characterized distributed computation as being an era in which "microprocessors could be scattered like grass seed" and then proceeded to deliver a rather nuanced discussion on the networked city.

Like fellow ubiquitous computing researcher Dietmar Offenhuber, Greenfield began his presentation with a nod to the work of Mark Weiser at Zerox PARC in the 1980s. He highlighted South Korean developments such as Cheonggyecheon and New Songdo as definitive examples of augmented environments. Greenfield differentiated the here/now terminology in his talk title from that of the Long Now Foundation by offering his own reading of "contemporary" space and time as:

that which primarily conditions choice/action in the city but resides in the invisible and intangible overlay of networked information that enfold it... a persistent and retrievable history of the things that are done and witnessed there over any place on earth than can be specified with machine-readable coordinates.

To help illustrate these ideas of space and duration he delved into a very thoughtful discussion of Oakland Crimespotting by Stamen Design. Being very familiar with this project [see previous post] it was great to hear a info-culture pundit dig into the validity of the data undergirding a visualization. While Greenfield acknowledged that a site like Oakland Crimespotting could be an informative tool he questioned the validity of a data set in which rape is classified as "aggravated assault". How could this (and other questions of classification) affect the way that a user engages a visualization/mapping service? If we are going to view urban space through these kinds of filters we have to be mindful to question the perspective they provide.

The 1K Project (pictured above) was referenced as a definitive example of the "big now", an expansive layered present which contains multiple streams of information, trajectories and possibilities. Greenfield name checked twitter as a great example of this type of spatial density, a place in which all things happen constantly.

I definitely appreciated the tone of Greenfield's presentation he is obviously very well versed on the theory front but completely accessible and engaging as a speaker. It is refreshing to hear a refined, slightly critical response to the standard technology/market cheerleading that passes as web culture future-casting. My favourite line of the night? The assertion that the city of the 21st century is one that will "respond to the behavior of its residents and other users, in something like real time... underwriting the transition from browse urbanism to search urbanism."

If you're interesting in learning more about Adam Greenfield's work be sure to check out his collaborative text Urban Computing and its Discontents co-authored with Mark Shepard (the text is available as a free PDF here) - he also blogs at Speedbird.

Edit: I just found a video of a shorter version of this lecture that was presented at LIFT Asia two weeks ago.