For the last several weeks I have been helping the good folks at GAFFTA (Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco) with their next Urban Innovation Weekend, coming up this weekend, July 22-24. This event runs as part of their Summer of Smart and this particular weekend, which will focus on transportation, sustainability and energy, is exciting because of a few reasons. Firstly, the city is opening up new transportation data sets specifically for the event, but secondly, we are also tackling the topic of energy-use – an issue that we believe will benefit immensely from some community-generated prototypes and thinking.

Here’s why:

Like the transportation sector before it, the energy sector is finally starting to standardize and open up its data, bringing new opportunities for people like all of us to do interesting things with it. Initiatives like the PAP10 will ensure that there is a standardized information model of energy usage that facilitates national smart grids and also allows individual consumers and other entities access to energy-use data. In addition, some states have already mandated customer access to meter-based information (hopefully we will see anonymized data at a zipcode level following this), paving the way for neighborhood energy competitions and more. Meanwhile, San Francisco is one of the first cities to require commercial buildings to take part in the Energy Manager Portfolio system, which helps owners track, assess and compare energy and water usage in individual buildings, thereby creating an incentive to reduce consumption.

These standards and initiatives are moving us towards a more transparent energy sector, and we couldn’t be happier. However, while research institutes, governments, and think-tanks are working hard to open up data and create standards, it is up to our community of developers, planners, activists, urbanists, artists, and others to dig deep into how and for whom this energy information might most benefit. In particular, how can open (and user-generated) information be used to address the fact that America’s buildings account for approximately 40% of total US energy consumption (according to the U.S. Department of Energy) and that 30% of buildings’ energy is simply wasted (The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency).

This brings us to the second reason why this weekend is so exciting. With an estimated 100+ people coming together from all backgrounds, we can start to generate a real understanding of stakeholder needs, and incentives that can be used to power these new energy applications, projects, and ideas. These incentives can include, but should also get beyond high-level objectives – like saving the environment or doing it for the greater good. For example, we could imagine an app that targets facility managers (our custodians of energy-use in buildings) and turns them into heroes for managing their building in the most efficient manner. Equally, we could imagine interplay between tenants who spot energy inefficiencies in their building and building owners who wish to keep quality tenants while also saving money. Or how about an app for individuals, which not only allows them to keep track of their ‘good energy deeds’ but also equates this with something meaningful, like how much money or trees you are saving, in a gaming environment?

What is clear is that the energy sector is ripe for innovation at the public level, starting from the bottom up. It’s happened in transportation, and now it is energy’s turn. We have already seen a response to energy use in the material sciences sector (think improved LED lighting, low-impact or better-insulated materials or solar panels), through policy changes (one-quarter of all cities have already set targets for the use of renewable energy), and in the construction of real-time energy management systems and smart-grids, and now it is time for the Summer of Smart participants to take advantage of increasingly public data sets and use them to power the next generation of energy saving apps, project, and ideas.

Perhaps the best part of the hackathon mentality is that we have absolutely no idea what will emerge from this weekend – and I couldn’t be more excited to find out.

The national media has a narrative about Detroit - it is an industrial city gone bad. It is dying, it is dangerous and it will eventually become a ghost town. I unwittingly bought into this narrative until I went there to speak at the From Rust Belt to Artist Belt Conference last week.
Yes, Detroit's population has dropped by 25% according to the census figures, but did you know that over the last 10 years, the number of people with professional degrees in Detroit has risen by over 50%? Anyway, at the conference was an amazing array of people who were passionate about their city and who understand that yes, this is a city with a vast digital divide, but at the same time, it is a city of communities and there are people who want to make that work.

One of the amazing people on my panel was Jeff Sturges. Jeff started Omnicorp Detroit - local hacker and maker spaces that runs workshops interested and interesting people. We got talking about projects in Detroit that could utilize real-time data, but that cater for non-smart phones. Guerrilla urbanism where we would track bicycles or buses or whatever else would provide value to the community and through SMS (again, no smart phones) give the info back in real time. We would then teach people how to visualize this data and use it as a tool to get local government or transport authorities to implement similar systems in a more rigorous fashion.

Watch this space for more details!

Thanks to David over at Urbanerds for this beautiful post that shows a project by Timo which This project that "explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs". Brava!

More information at nearfield.org

Today I found this great tutorial through movements.org that showed me how to use OpenHeatMap to create a super-quick heat map of where Copenhagen Wheel inquiries are coming from.

I wish this was a pre-cursor to me saying, "and we are releasing it next week!" but unfortunately we are still in the process of re-engineering it so that it can be sold at a suitable price-point and meets safety standards etc.

Stay tuned though and in the meantime get busy visualizing those spreadsheets...
(NB: I have to admit that I am slightly confused by this visualization. Our spreadsheet only includes countries, but somehow this has been extrapolated into cities? I should write to @PeteWarden and see what the process behind the viz is).

Sometimes I get sent an email that contains really great information, but before I get a chance to read it, it gets buried under a pile of things to do.

But now, thanks to this Blog, the info in the email - all about the Internet of Things (by McKinsey, IBM, Harvard Business School, The Economist, CISCO and several others) - will see the light of day!

Enjoy!


ONE
Exploring the potential of the “Internet of Things”
From: McKinsey IoT Webcast
Report from McKinsey & Company about the actual numbers of the IoT market, and future developments.
Full Article Here

TWO
The Internet of things
From: IBM Social Media
Short desciption:  Over the past century but accelerating over the past couple of decades, we have seen the emergence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself - natural systems, human systems, physical objects - have always generated an enormous amount of data, but we didnt used to be able to hear it, to see it, to capture it. Now we can because all of this stuff is now instrumented. And its all interconnected, so now we can actually have access to it. So, in effect, the planet has grown a central nervous system.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfEbMV295Kk

THREE
Anywhere: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business
From: Emily Green
The last book written by Emily Green, published earlier this year, in which she tries to draw the larger picture for the reader of the consequences of the expansion of connectivity, including to more things. Chapters in particular that focus on connecting things are Chapter 4, where I discuss the coming connectedness of consumer devices, and Chapter 9, where I look at the extension of connectivity within the enterprise, including machine-to-machine applications.
http://www.amazon.com/Anywhere-Global-Connectivity-Revolutionizing-Business/dp/0071635149/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1290357603&sr=8-1


FOUR
Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business
From: Harvad Business Review
What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they're capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments.
Full Article: http://hbr.org/2001/05/swarm-intelligence/ar/1

FIVE
The Big Idea: The Next Scientific Revolution
From: Harvad Business Review
A visitor walking the halls of Microsoft Research’s campus in Redmond, Washington, today is likely to overhear discussions not only about computer science but about a surprising variety of other subjects, from which way a galaxy rotates, to a new AIDS vaccine, to strategies for managing the planet’s precious supply of fresh water.
Full Article: http://hbr.org/2010/11/the-big-idea-the-next-scientific-revolution/ar/1

SIX
Sensors and sensibilities
From: The Economist
Short desciption:  A special report on smart system.
Full Article: http://www.economist.com/node/17388338

SEVEN
Four Implications of the Internet of Things for Business 
From: Daily innovation with John Sviokla
The IoT has four implication for Business:
      1.- Those who have a superior virtual value chain will be more efficient
      2.- There will be crazy new applications that have fascinating, unintended consequences
      3.- There will be a torrent of data to digest
      4.- All companies will need to worry about their privacy policy
http://www.sviokla.com/business-strategy/four-implications-of-the-internet-of-things-for-business/

EIGHT
The Evolving Internet, Driving forces, uncertainties and four scenarios to 2025
From: Cisco, GBN
It is offered as a contribution to ongoing discussions and efforts to harness the huge potential of Internet and IP networks to drive economic and human development around the world. This is of particular relevance to emerging-market countries where the relatively low level of Internet use today reveals a wide opportunity gap in terms of economic productivity and social inclusion.
Full Article: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/ekits/Evolving_Internet_GBN_Cisco_2010_Aug_rev2.pdf

NINE
Rise of the Embedded Internet
From: Intel
Various forces, including political, economic and social, are driving the need to tightly couple embedded devices and sensors with established applications, such as healthcare, production planning and social networking. The result is the Embedded Internet, which will create new opportunities and technical challenges, many of which are addressed by Intel® silicon products and platform technologies
Full Article: http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/embedded/pdfs/ECG_WhitePaper.pdf

TEN
Smart Products, Smarter Services: Strategies for Embedded Control
From: Mary Cronin
It goes into much more detail about smart things; in particular chapter 2 looks at the ecosystems that support them, and chapter 9 touches on privacy issues.
http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Products-Smarter-Services-Strategies/dp/0521147506/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1290357751&sr=1-1

ELEVEN
GlowCaps: connected pill bottles
From: Forbes

Short desciption:  From a pill-bottle cap that calls your druggist to GPS locator shoes, high-tech ideas to help seniors are proliferating.

Full Article: http://www.forbes.com/2010/09/15/high-tech-keeps-seniors-safe-personal-finance-nanatech-gadgets.html

Congratulations to our City Innovation Group member, Jase Wilson and his team at Luminopolis, Kansas City for helping to put together the bid that won Kansas City (Kansas) Google's first super-fast fiber network!

A link to the story is here.

Recently I have been hatching a plan with Kyla Fullenwider over at The Public Studio to launch an LA version of New York's Big City Apps competition.
This has had its problems - partly because the City of LA is broke and we can't get direct funding from them, and partly because Kyla and I have a lot of different projects on the go.
But! I am pleased to announce that we now have a champion at the city who is helping us gather data and we will also be launching our competition at the upcoming GOOD LA party/workshop weekend.  This event will celebrate the launch of a GOOD LA magazine and the formation of a new community, that is passionate about our city, our neighbors and the future of LA.

In conjunction with the competition launch, Kyla and I will be running a "Smart Camp" where we will:
        - paint a vision for what smart LA could look like;
        - ask you what you think LA's greatest problems are; and
        - ask you to come up with ideas for apps that will help alleviate the problems.

These answers will be fed back into our competition site so that developers have something to respond to when developing apps for our competition.

Lastly, we hope that we will also be able to turn this mini-project into a kickstarter fundraiser --> Have you heard of Kickstarter? it is an amazing business model.
So stay tuned, watch the video for more details and if you haven't checked out what the guys at GOOD get up to, then do so now.

I realized the other day that I bandy around the term Ambient Informatics without having a proper definition for it. What follows, therefore, is an attempt to define 'Ambient Informatics' and what it might mean for implementing architectural and urban projects.

Let's begin with a narrative from Peter Hirshberg (Technoratti, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts). The Internet is rapidly evolving into a trillion node network. It started from the Internet of pages (hundreds of thousands of nodes) has become the social Internet (we are in the middle of this right now – nodes in the low billions) but is slowly but surely evolving into the Internet of smart-things (trillions of nodes).

This age of ‘smart-things’ brings miniaturized, networked and pervasive technologies into our urban environment – our buildings, urban infrastructures, objects and communication devices.  In other words, computing becomes ambient or “of the surrounding area or environment.”

Informatics on the other hand is “the study of information processing”, though academically, it has also begun to encompass all forms of human-computer interaction, information science, information technology, algorithms, and social science.

Thus the practice of ambient informatics involves the deployment of sensors into the urban environment and the study/design of how these sensors can process and transmit information to viewers, users or passers by in an urban setting.

This brings us to the architectural/urban component of this post… Hands up who wants to live in a Minority Report world where billboards, buildings and devices with sensors constantly bombard us with customized messages and advertising?

Anyone? Anyone?

I didn’t think so. But in truth, this is a possible scenario (albeit extreme) of the future – particularly if some of the DOOH (digital out of home) advertisers have their way.

How we can avoid this surreal mediated environment has been on my mind lately and this is where I would like to (re)introduce the concepts of “Calm Technology” or “Slow Computing”. Mark Weiser and John Seeley Brown started writing about this in the mid-90’s and in my mind it is incredibly relevant for the architectural practice as we move into the ubiquitous computing era.

Here is a quote from their paper:

Designs that encalm and inform meet two human needs not usually met together. Information technology is more often the enemy of calm. Pagers, cellphones, news-services, the World-Wide-Web, email, TV, and radio bombard us frenetically. But some technology does lead to true calm and comfort…We believe the difference is in how they engage our attention. Calm technology engages both the center and the
periphery of our attention, and in fact moves back and forth between the two.

A few examples of calm-tech will help illustrate this.

MIT Media Lab’s ambient orbs are a great example of calm-tech. They orbs slowly change color depending on the information that you want them portray. For instance, you can program an orb to show you changes in stock prices. Red could mean the price has risen, green could mean the price is falling and so on. The point here is that these changing colors sit in the periphery of your vision and you can quickly assess information in a calm way without the need of a GUI or widget (at least not immediately). However, it is true that these are still an 'object' and as architects/urbanists we are prob

Another example is the beacon on top of the Hancock Tower in Boston which is programmed as follows: Steady Blue = Clear, Flashing Blue = Cloudy, Steady Red = Rain, Flashing Red = Snow. (Incidentally flashing red on a Red Sox day means the game has been cancelled due to bad weather). Once again, information is transmitted in a slow or calm manner.

So architects and urbanists, what's next? Can we work with the coming age of ambient informatics and use our built environment as a platform to create experiences for people using technology (not just an experience with a computer screen, but an actual urban experience) or program our buildings to show relevant information (appointments available at a doctor’s office or a public lecture taking place at a university) in a calm-way? Do these signals actually elicit a public response and can we measure this (close the feedback loop) and are there other mechanisms besides lighting? All this and more - stay tuned !

Why did I blog this:
In a recent discussion about possible projects that could get seed funding at UCLA, I realized that I was bandying around the term ‘ambient informatics’ without providing a proper definition for what this actually is.

When I got home, a quick Google search found that while the term has been used (in various Adam Greenfield lectures, for a workshop by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and even for a company website - that doesn’t appear to have done anything since 2005) it doesn’t have the weight that I thought it might.

South by South West, or 'south by' as the cool kids call it, is an annual music, film and interactive festival in Austin, Texas, that brings together a diverse range of young (and not so young) people who are doing great things within the three disciplines.
I was lucky to be there at the invitation of Vlad Trifa, a former colleague from the SENSEable City Lab who put together a great panel named Web Mashup Platforms for Future Programmable Cities. Fellow panelists include internet of things researcher Dominique Guinard and Mayor Bloomberg's newly appointed 'chief digital officer' Rachel Sterne.

We discussed - from a technical, architectural/urban and government perspective what it means to create new mash-up platforms for urban data, touching on privacy, gov 2.0 and the internet of things. Below are the OGILVY notes that were taken during our session. And here is a link to a (requisite) instagram of us.

We are very excited to have gathered 6 of our members from Italy, Boston, Kansas City and Los Angeles for a brainstorming session on Big Data Mashups and Behavior Chang. Please join the conversation by leaving a comment.

There is a lot of rhetoric around the idea that through collecting, visualizing and displaying 'big-data', we are providing individuals, groups and governments with a richer set of information from which they can structure better decisions and positively change their behavior. (This video of the Copenhagen Wheel provides a great overview of the vision).

However, as our most recent brainstorming session discovered, although the vision is out there, we are still in the questioning and mashing-up phase and there are very few  real-world, already implemented examples that make someone say "a-ha! I get why collecting and showing data goes beyond making pretty data visualizations and why it is useful to me, to my community and to our planet!".

This is not to say that the vision won't become a reality, just that it is a burgeoning concept that will take time to implement. What we did start to understand was that there appears to be no real methodology for understanding how behavior changes through data use.

We also collected:
a)  a number of applications that have promise for fulfilling the behavior change vision.
b) a number of applications that fulfill the behavior change vision on a personal level (as a side note, the group noted that this is where the behavior-change-through-data 'movement' is beginning - possibly because it represents the path of least resistance for new businesses).

Some applications that promise to influence behavior change:

Decal - an as yet fictional application that provides a user-friendly, universal measure way to compare products or count their daily energy intake. For example, the app would enable an 'energy dieter' to scan two otherwise identical loaves of bread and see which one required less energy to produce. However, the article goes beyond this and suggests that the Department of Energy could recommend daily energy allowances (thereby inciting behavior change).

311 - Back in November 2010 Wired posted an article and infographic about calls to the 311 hot line in New York. This is a great example of visualizing the data, but we would still love to see more evidence that this data is being used and that it affects behavior change not only of governments but also of citizens.

Bay Citizens Bikes - Bike accidents by the numbers: why, where, who's really to blame and what's being done about it (NB: it seems that the 'what's being done about it' aspect is still a work in progress.)

Various Gov 2.0 Apps - Applications like see, click fix, IBM's City Forward, CitySourced and Boston Citizens Connect all aim to collect, mash-up and display information so that action can be taken. What action has already been taken based on this data is a little unclear.

Some personal applications that promote 'positive' behavior change

Household Apps: Francisca mentioned Fooducate and the Goodguide app. Having just downloaded them, I can tell you that they already make me want to change my eating and buying habits!

Fitness Apps: Vincenzo mentioned that Runkeeper has shown that people who use their app are on average running more than they would have without it. This might be hearsay, but I have made a mental note to call up the founders and ask them some questions.

Transport Apps: Waze, Next Bus and CO2GO (still in development) are all apps that want us to think about optimizing our transportation choices or reducing the impact of traveling.

Information about the Environment:
In David McCandless's recent TED talk, he talks about the need for data to always be visualized in context if effective decisions are to be made. His own visualizations do this as does GE's CO2 comparison visualization and as Jase mentioned, power bills in the UK.

Quotes of note:
'There needs to be an open dialogue between data providers and software developers. The relationship between Boston's MBTA and developers is a good example of this and the fact that there are over 35 transportation apps in Boston is proof of the benefits of this relationship' Francisca Rojas

"I think the big problem of today is not data collection, but it is bringing the data to people in an effective way"
Vincenzo Manzoni

"Behavior change is not necessarily a direct and immediate reaction to being shown data" Jase Wilson

"Understanding behavior change is about traces and you need to be able to visualize changes over time and also visualize the choices that are presented" Adam Pruden

"What we are seeing is that there is a number of companies jumping in with different ways to personally motivate people (thereby allowing these people to change their behavior) but we are not yet seeing this on a city or global level." Christine Outram