#urban computing

Ambient informatics

A state in which information is freely available at the point in space and time someone requires it, generally to support a specific decision. It’s information that is persistently available, “just there, like the air.” We can use any device to access this information, anywhere, and the information can be processed or displayed in different ways depending one our needs and preferences. If computing becomes ubiquitous, it can give rise to a state of ambient informatics, since the actuators everywhere will need to tap on information from wherever they are to perform their tasks.

Locative media

Media elements that are bound to a physical location. E.g. the Pokestops or the Pokemon that are bound to specific locations in the physical world. There are two types of mapping of locative media: annotative (fixed tags on the world), and phenomenological (tracing the actions of the subject in the world). AR can be used to access/reveal locative media, but it’s not the only way. E.g. Yelp/Foursquare accesses tags of locations on a map, but it doesn’t directly augment our experience of the city environment around us.

Read/write urbanism

The idea that the city’s users are no longer forced to experience their surroundings passively but have been empowered to make additions and alterations to the experience, anchored in place, and available perhaps to themselves or to others who pass through that place. E.g. Yelp is a kind of read/write urbanism, Yelp users can read from the software to discover places to go, and write to the software to contribute a review and thus alter the experience/decisions of users that follow. (Credit: Kevin Slavin)

The material substrate vs the technological substrate

The separation that arises when the experience on the personal display (head-mounted displays or mobile device) differs from the material world around the user. This distinction would be important in a mixed-reality world, where technology intervenes in our sensing of the real environment and mediates what we sense. For example, if I pointed my device at a building and the app on my phone overlays that building with a model of what it used to look like 30 years ago, the actual building in front of me is the material substrate while the representation of the building with its overlay on my phone is a separate experience that I am having.

Speculative design

Not a textbook definition, but I love the way Adam Greenfield puts it: “rendering the imaginary out ahead of its technical deployability.”

Deconfliction

The act of reducing the risk of collision among conflicting ideas, preferences, personalities through coordination. In urban computing, it would be important to deconflict the various individual experiences that a group of people demand from the same setting. E.g. if the environment senses anxiety levels and responds to them, but there are several individuals in a space, whose measurement should be prioritized?

Schizogeography

A pretty obscure term used by Adam Greenfield to describe a state where a particular environment hosts contradictory and confusing behavior of the people in it. Technology such as AR will lead to each individual experiencing a different combination of material and virtual realities, which could give rise to such schizogeography. An example would be a shopping mall where a majority of the people in it are shopping, but a small proportion of people are wandering around aimlessly just because they are on their phones, distracted, and are merely looking to staying in motion and avoid collisions.

UPDATE: I just found an even more comprehensive list of urban computing terms here. But listing the above terms out myself was a useful exercise in internalizing these concepts. 

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[1] This article was written in 2007. Adam Greenfield wrote Everyware in 2006. These ideas have been around for more than a decade, but haven’t really broken into the public’s awareness. I’d like to suggest that Pokemon Go was the first clear illustration of this subject. Location-specific products have been implemented in the past with occasional side effects, but Pokemon Go was the first that was so widespread in implementation and so popular that all the side effects of location-specific urban computing came into full view simultaneously

[2] It’s funny how knowledge is tied to a set of terms that are sometimes hard to find initially, but when you do discover them you open up a world of past research and discussion that you didn’t know existed. I’m sure there’s a name for this phenomenon, but (in a very meta observation), I would not know the name.

[3] I have to be careful not to get too comfortable with speaking in this industry lingo, though. This would risk making my thesis discussions unintelligible to the layperson. Along my thesis journey I should constantly find ways to make the discussion less technical, less intimidating, (to borrow Adam Greenfield’s explanation for his coming up with the term “everyware”.)

References:

Morais A.R., A Genealogy of Locative Media

Greenfield A. and Shepard M., Urban Computing and Its Discontents