It’s taken me a while to get the notes cleaned-up and post this, a talk from January this year that I gave over in Sierre, Switzerland at their TechnoArk event. Thanks very much to Nicholas Nova and Laurent Haug of LiftLabs for their kind invitation.
I’ve been keen to post it as it’s a pile of ‘beginnings’, rather than a self-contained thought.
It’s a bunch of thinking about how designers (and BERG in particular) might start thinking through making products for ‘smart cities’ (as they’re known for good and for ill) including the qualities that these products should possess in order for them to be invited into people’s homes – something we’ve started calling ‘mujicomp’ as shorthand in the studio.
Also it talks a little bit about how the aggregation and combination of smart, connected products could build into bottom-up infrastructures rather than giant top-down municipal approaches to augmenting cities with technology.
It draws on themes from my ‘Demon-Haunted World’ talk at Webstock, from 2009, but also it entangles some thinking from the MSR Social Computing Summit I attended back in January.
Specifically, looking at doorways and thresholds as rich places to investigate with products and services – something which at the summit we called with-tongue-firmly-in-cheek ‘Porch-Computing’…
People Are Walking Architecture, or making NearlyNets with MujiComp, January 2010
7 Comments and Trackbacks
1. Toby said on 19 May 2010...
Matt
Have you seen this – http://amzn.to/bR3Bkl
and his other stuff about pattern language.
porches, makes me think of bay windows too – http://downlode.org/Etext/Patterns/ptn180.html
as well as this http://downlode.org/Etext/Patterns/ptn112.html
Toby
2. Dan W said on 19 May 2010...
The ending on doorways and thresholds reminds me of the concept of the Fina in old mediterranean building codes, details at http://www.tndtownpaper.com/council/Hakim.htm. Perhaps ubicomp can form a new kind of invisible extension beyond the immediate boundary of the home. Or perhaps we shall end up with doorbells that tweet.
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[…] People are walking architecture, or making NearlyNets with MujiComp – Blog – BERG Yes, someone at BERG has done a thing, and I'm linking to it again. What this thing is is a short exploration of bottom-up ubicomp, and how it is making our cities come alive. Cleverness is basically the art of drawing useful connections that others don't, and Matt Jones is bloody good at it, skating here from Archigram to Clay Shirky via Muji and Guy DeBord, and laying out a way of bringing on the future of our public spaces. Plus, I love the idea of the porch being the point where the public and the private mesh. Much friendlier that the computer-nerd term DMZ, much more useful. (tags: technology ubicomp architecture cities) […]
Trackback: FifthIdea » People are walking architecture: making smart cities via smart products 24 August 2010
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