Idea Snippets » Urban Computing

Every wall is a door. – R. W. Emerson

alex.abreu — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:31:23 +0000

A door is definitely a valve and restricts access by means of one type of security or another. Sure enough, we’ve all grown accustomed to keeping things private or semi-private, and a door does just that. Whether building a hinged, sliding, louvered, pocket, or the mood-inferring door described in the reading and comments, doors serve a pretty well-defined purpose. Restricting access is part of the game. Not everyone is always invited over for tea. We’ve also created a language around the door which highlights this mystery of restricted access. The door in a lot of ways, represents chance. There are, by far, too many doors to count, and trying to keep track of the contents behind each of them is that much more impossible. So we’ve resigned ourselves to not having to think too much about doors. After all, random chance and dumb luck are just that. Random and dumb, and we like that.

Opportunity knocks only once
The girl next door
Behind door number one

Screens are not windows (yet?).

alex.abreu — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:58:05 +0000

The argument is attractive and mighty compelling, but it doesn’t quite capture all the variables necessary to make the case. Simply put, there is something very real and tangible about looking through a window that is lost when viewing the same or comparable image on a screen. The Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida published an interesting paper highlighting the inaccurate representation of the laws of physics in more than a few Hollywood films. Ignoring the fact that a screen is a 2-D snapshot of the real world, the modification of the laws of nature in making images for mass consumption creates a real problem for me. I’m definitely a member of the generation of people who have spent the most time (historically speaking) in front of screens. Televisions, computers, cellphones, I-pods, yadda yadda. Each and everyone has proven itself to be a powerful and valuable tool in and of it’s own right, but the screen to window analogy misconstrues the purpose and utility of such devices. The minute we, as in humanity, forget that screens are not windows, we loosen our grip on our understanding of the world we inhabit. Suspension of disbelief while in a movie theater and permanent suspension of disbelief are two very different things. The case has been made that increasingly larger amounts of screen time have led to the weakened spatial reasoning and mechanical aptitude of entering engineering and physics students. I believe these symptoms (if true) speak to a larger issue. Should we truly aim to replace our real world with a digital copy? I have no doubt we have (or will have) the technology to do so, but I fear that no copy will be truly accurate. Unfortunately, if a copy becomes our reference point, we won’t be able to understand the difference. So for now, a screen is a screen is a screen.

As a quick aside, I think the solution to this dilemma is to never allow technology to replace the natural world, but simply to augment it. We must use all the good technology has to offer to provide a clearer view of the world we live in and never get caught doing the opposite.

If these walls could talk.

alex.abreu — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:37:08 +0000

I hadn’t really ever stopped to analyze my relationship with the walls of the world, but doing so did give me some insight into my unconscious behavior while walking through the city. Walking around this week, I began to notice that I always leave a fair bit of distance between myself and any wall I happen to be walking by. The width of a sidewalk is immediately reduced by this automatic buffer, amplifying the claustrophobia factor of a heavily-trafficked narrow sidewalk. I also began to notice just how many walls surround me in the city. The walls which make up the buildings in this city make up a a gigantic labyrinth which I just meander through as I go about my day. Shops and restaurants distract me while in route, but the overwhelming majority of my time is spent walking parallel to a wall of one form or another.

Earlier this week I noticed a ‘new’ form of advertising in the subway tunnels around the city. Some company or another has started placing advertising panels in the subway stations complete with a 30 second sound clip ready to be listened to by a curious commuter equipped with headphones (I believe Pepsi may have done it first in Canada). At first, I thought the campaign a bit silly, but I caught myself and realized the power behind such an idea. Granted execution in the form I’ve described is less than perfect, but this company figured out how to make the everyday regular old unnoticed walls around us talk. Right now they only play a part of a song, but what if they could do more than that? What if they could tell secrets, or be listening booths, or song-sharing stations? What if there was way for us to interact with the very real walls which surround us? I believe this transactional model yields the potential for a passer-by to look to the wall as more than just a barrier, and then to begin to inscribe some part of herself upon the wall in a non-damaging way.

This idea of a ‘non-damaging’ relationship is important to me as I believe that others have just as much a right to a relationship with a given wall as I do and vice versa. I was recently in the Czech Republic and was horrified to see what so-called graffiti artists had done to some of the historic cities around the country. I understand a certain desire to leave a mark, rebel, and create art, but I simply cannot understand juvenile attempts at such destroying walls and monuments that belong to a greater community. It would be great, if interactive walls provided a means of voting for which graffiti enhanced or detracted from a given space to then be able to identify which graffiti should be removed. In this way, I think certain spaces could be taken back from imitators who can’t do much more than poorly write some obscenity, and deeoer graffiti art which has a larger message in mind. The wall could then become the stage for a democratic process of determining what types of things should be imposed on the greater society which also shares the wall.