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The relationship between infrastructure governance and the ways we read and represent waste systems, examined through three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects. Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we know about the distant past we know from discarded objects unearthed by archaeologists and interpreted by historians. And yet the systems and infrastructures that process our waste often remain opaque. In this book, Dietmar Offenhuber examines waste from the perspective of information, considering emerging practices and technologies for making waste systems legible and how the resulting datasets and visual...
The MIT based SENSEable City Lab under Carlo Ratti is one of the research centers that deal with the flow of people and goods, but also of refuse that moves around the world. Experience with large-scale infrastructure projects suggest that more complex and above all flexible answers must be sought to questions of transportation or disposal. This edition, edited by Dietmar Offenhuber and Carlo Ratti, shows how Big Data change reality and, hence, the way we deal with the city. It discusses the impact of real-time data on architecture and urban planning, using examples developed in the SENSEable City Lab. They demonstrate how the Lab interprets digital data as material that can be used for the formulation of a different urban future. It also looks at the negative aspects of the city-related data acquisition and control. The authors address issues with which urban planning disciplines will work intensively in the future: questions that not only radically and critically review, but also change fundamentally, the existing tasks and how the professions view their own roles.
An ambitious vision for design based on the premise that data is material, not abstract. Data analysis and visualization are crucial tools in today's society, and digital representations have steadily become the default. Yet, more and more often, we find that citizen scientists, environmental activists, and forensic amateurs are using analog methods to present evidence of pollution, climate change, and the spread of disinformation. In this illuminating book, Dietmar Offenhuber presents a model for these practices, a model to make data generation accountable: autographic design. Autographic refers to the notion that every event inscribes itself in countless ways. Think of a sundial, for examp...
A growing part of the public is concerned about cities being designed and governed in a responsible way. In the contemporary information society, however, the democratic obligation of the citizens to inform themselves thoroughly, so that they can participate in public affairs has become impossible to fulfill. Rather than submitting to the opinions of self-proclaimed experts, citizens need new ways to make sense of what is going on around them. Accountability technologies stand for new innovative approaches to bottom-up governance: technologies to monitor those in power and hold them accountable for their actions. Accountability technologies are designed to coordinate citizen-led data collection, visualization and analysis in order to achieve social change. This book takes a close look at initiatives that have succeeded in making an impact on the reality of the city, as well as the motivations, strategies and tactics of the people who create and use these technologies. How can data generated by citizens be put into action?
A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data e...
The mental image of the city has become complex. Since mobile phones have become geo-social devices, location-based data is increasingly shaping the way we experience public space. Until recently, the physical and the virtual spaces have been separate domains, now they are tightly packed together into what Malcolm McCullough calls the “Ambient Commons” – the collectively shared domain of environmental information. Media art practices have played an important role in shaping this development. This book investigates the potential of experimental and artistic forms of inquiry for helping us making sense of the city. The sections explore the sensory, structural and cultural aspects of new urban systems literacy – a re-examination of what constitutes public space in the real-time city.
"Space Between People examines how the emergence of digital technology reshapes our idea of place and our conception of reality. Along with critical contributions on the virtualization of the physical realm, this book presents projects from the first architecture competition held within Second Life."--Back cover.
Leading media scholars consider the social and cultural changes that come with the contemporary development of ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing and our cultural life promise to become completely interwoven: technical currents feed into our screen culture of digital television, video, home computers, movies, and high-resolution advertising displays. Technology has become at once larger and smaller, mobile and ambient. In Throughout, leading writers on new media--including Jay David Bolter, Mark Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, and Lev Manovich--take on the crucial challenges that ubiquitous and pervasive computing pose for cultural theory and criticism. The thirty-four contributing researchers consider the visual sense and sensations of living with a ubicomp culture; electronic sounds from the uncanny to the unremarkable; the effects of ubicomp on communication, including mobility, transmateriality, and infinite availability; general trends and concrete specificities of interaction designs; the affectivity in ubicomp experiences, including performances; context awareness; and claims on the "real" in the use of such terms as "augmented reality" and "mixed reality."
New ways to design spaces for online interaction—and how they will change society. Computers were first conceived as “thinking machines,” but in the twenty-first century they have become social machines, online places where people meet friends, play games, and collaborate on projects. In this book, Judith Donath argues persuasively that for social media to become truly sociable media, we must design interfaces that reflect how we understand and respond to the social world. People and their actions are still harder to perceive online than face to face: interfaces are clunky, and we have less sense of other people's character and intentions, where they congregate, and what they do. Donat...
Grounded in contemporary landscape architecture theory and practice, Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment blends examples from art, design, and engineering with concepts from cybernetics and posthumanism, offering a transdisciplinary examination of the ramifications of cybernetics on the constructed environment. Cybernetics, or the study of communication and control in animals and machines, has grown increasingly relevant nearly 80 years after its inception. Cyber-physical systems, sensing networks, and spatial computing—algorithms and intelligent machines—create endless feedback loops with human and non-human actors, co-producing a cybernetic environment. Yet, when an ecosystem i...