[photo: networkcultures]

Bloggers call themselves curators, graphic designers become software developers, journalists become designers. Everyone is a photographer. Cultural disciplines we knew are changing and the borders between them are disappearing.

Thus reads one of the many quotations jammed into Everyone is a Designer in the Age of Social Media, a new book edited by Geert Lovink and Mieke Gerritzen. This text was just published by BIS and scatters short passages penned by theorists who include Alexander Galloway, Ellen Lupton, Peter Lunenfeld and McKenzie Wark amongst an array of sharp, frenetic and colourful layouts by Gerritzen. The central premise of the project is revisiting Everyone is a Designer, Manifest for the Design Economy (a book project the pair of researchers published a decade ago) to reconsider the democratization of design by/through social media. The publisher's blurb for the text sets the stage:

This completely new version of the book will look at the position of design itself in the ever expanding areas it finds itself in. The growth of design schools seems unstoppable. The designers born after 1980 have a total different view on visual culture, on aesthetic products, visions and history than the people born before the eighties. The (communication) aesthetics are in a constant temporary state, design became a dynamic and unstable area.

How do Lovink and Gerritzen and their impressive roster of participants respond to the new ephemerality? With a chaotic, sprawling, non-hierarchical catalogue that is not only about the web, but of the web.

The new Everyone is a Designer… appropriates the structure and visual language of web culture and redeploys it as a 'delivery device' for observations and commentary. There is a wonderful friction at play within the layout of this work as Gerritzen carefully diagrams the limited number of stock templates within web design and then turns around and uses them to organize the book. Accordion menus, grids of thumbnails, lists of tags and radio buttons become a framework to organize arguments. While there are a few short essays (Lovink's "Three Trends in Web 2.0" and an entertaining but drawn-out article on the history of razor design by Koert Van Mensvoort) the technology and culture of the tumblr generation is apparently best described in fragments, sound bites, unclicked menu items and texts the length of short blog posts. This strategy is enormously effective and book is truly a pleasure to browse and explore. Wark considers praxis, Lev Manovich highlights the universality of software, Galloway talks sweatshop 2.0 and Jaron Lanier speaks to our inner troll. Is this book really about design? Kind of, but it has much more in common with Marshall Mcluhan and Quentin Fiore's broad, culture-probing collaborations than a garden variety, blandly positive design manifesto. Lovink and Gerritzen have carefully crafted an essential read for those looking to critically engage the social web, and done so with a cynical half-smile.

Well, it was inevitable but we are now seeing the first of architecture studio-specific forays into application development on mobile platforms. On Tuesday I came across an interview with programmer and artist Rui Guerra of INTK who developed Aim@OMA (screen captures above), a new iPhone app showcasing the work of Rem Koolhaas' OMA. This free app geolocates the mobile device of a user and displays list of built OMA projects, sorted by proximity. It also contains a brief synopsis of each building (with accompanying photographs) and allows a jet-setter user to log which projects they have visited.

Although the functionality within this app is hardly revolutionary, it certainly reveals some of the limitations associated with the standard architectural monograph. Aim@OMA is just as much a promotional tool as a coffee table book, but unlike most exercises in architectural publishing it seems to privilege direct experience as the primary means to understanding buildings. Between strategic cropping, shooting from low angles, digital image editing and populating scenes with model-perfect occupants, architectural photography is more about artful deception than illustrating how people actually inhabit space. This app bypasses any inauthentic attempts to communicate the interior life of a building – it simply helps an architectural tourist locate projects designed by OMA. Aim@OMA is undoubtedly a minor PR coup and I expect it is already being utilized by design students in the midst of their summer architecture pilgrimages.

Within the aforementioned interview, one comment by Guerra particularly jumped out at me:

How often have you visited the website of an organization or institution prior to visit their physical space? Have you noticed the difference between the online experience and the onsite experience? It is not so much that we are interested in a smooth transition between online and onsite. We are concerned with the fact that these two 'platforms' seem to be growing apart. We are interested in developing strategies that take into account both platforms. A possible strategy would be to open up communication channels between the online and the onsite 'platform', allowing the physical space to influence the virtual space and vice versa.

What kind of functionality would allow for physical and virtual space to influence one another? Is mobile app development a fertile middle ground where urban informatics and architecture might interface with one another? I'm not sure, but these desires seem ambitious to say the least. I do know that building-specific information dashboards aren't particularly interesting – a banal assortment of data is the last thing I'd want to see on my phone if I'd travelled 2,000 km to experience a building.

The above recent tweet by Stephen Becker speaks to the great unknown of how mobile applications might augment standard architectural practice. To step aside from conversations about urban informatics and Grasshopper it should be noted that a mobile phone with onboard GPS and a pair of headphones would be the perfect delivery device for audio commentary related to a building. The audio files could be object or area-based so rather than be tethered to a specific path, a user could roam about and trigger aural anecdotes through exploration – unlocking architectural trivia easter eggs and such. However, rather than adopt the didactic tone of a stiff museum or gallery audio tour, perhaps we could get rambling and informal commentary from a cast of characters including principals, project architects, lighting consultants and interns. If taken far enough, a listener would be exposed to how the culture of a studio generates a building.

Another thought by Guerra worth grabbing on to: "Speed is one of the main characteristics that keeps software and architecture apart." Indeed, but once a software typology is established it propagates like wildfire – we will probably see additional mobile applications commissioned (or designed in-house) by architecture studios soon. Given the rigour of their more conceptual projects, maybe Diller & Scofidio + Renfro can put a gyroscope and accelerometer to good use.