On Adam Greenfield’s excellent blog, an interesting discussion has risen on urban culture, public sphere, design and so called third spaces. In a reaction to the growing number of laptop nomads colonizing neighborhood cafes, using wifi networks to turn these convivial places into boring office spaces (ok, I am exaggerating), Adam revives his idea for starting up an alternative coffeehouse chain called Faraday’s. Contrary to current trends, this coffee house will not have wifi or any other technologies that allow patrons to turn it into a temporary office. Rather it will be designed to stimulate ‘human-2-human interaction’. It’s not that Adam is against camping out in cafes per se. The point is that we should realize how the layering of a Hertzian space of communications on top of our physical locations will change our interaction in space:

The digital layer’s availability or nonavailability demonstrably toggles behavior in the space between two different conditions, and it changes what the café is in the profoundest sort of way. I’m sure you could feel the difference blindfolded, and with ears plugged. It’s not necessarily what Kazys Varnelis means by “network culture,” but it sure is an example of same.

Why is this interesting? To me the article raises two important questions.

• The first is that the addition or removal of Hertzian spaces has to become part of the design process. Rather than just applying the anytime-anything-anywhere paradigm, designers should think of the character of the place they are designing and how urban informatics will fit (or won’t fit) the specific context. What kind of social situations are we after, and how do we design for them?

Under the condition of ambient informatics, we will need to consciously create platforms for the specific kind of conviviality we recognize as animating our “third places,” and we will generally have to do this by physically denying, buffering or mitigating the Hertzian overlay. And this will be true at least as long as we recognize that there is an inherent value to the specific kinds of interactions we only tend to have when confined to the possibilities physically present in the room.

• The second interesting question is the notion of public culture that underlies design decisions for third places like coffee houses. On Adam’s blog, a discussion arose about just that:

Adam himself points out that although third places are not necessarily places where strangers immediately engage in eloquent discussions, they are places where people through repeated presences can become accustomed to each other. He finds that quality lacking in places where people primarily settle down to work on their power-points or screenplays.

It’s probably the case that, historically, people did not often initiate encounters with absolute strangers in places like these, but the low pressure to commit afforded by the easy conviviality of a classic third place did allow those relationships to be pushed one subtle notch up the intimacy gradient: from utter stranger to “familiar stranger,” from nodding acquaintance to drinking buddy, and so on. And we know that it’s just these weaker, lower-commitment ties that actually bind a community together.

This leads to two questions: Is this kind of interaction really desirable? And if yes, does the office culture disguised as cafe culture prevent these processes from happening?

One of the commenters addresses the first point – and as we say in Holland: posing the question is answering it:

Is it wrong for people to want to plug in, get work done, and be asocial in a public space? Especially when the alternative might be doing the same thing alone at home, or at a high-pressure office environment?

Another point of discussion is the relation between familiarization, interaction and publicly setting up one’s telecocoon-office. One could argue that exactly camping out in these places while doing some work could perhaps over time promote the idea of ‘familiar strangers?’ People working in their neighborhood cafe stay their longer than those drinking a cup of coffee and they might become familiar strangers with other neighborhood teleworkers, and perhaps even starting shifting roles. Will we develop a way in which we can easily shift between online and offline presence? A study by Ito e.a. in Personal Portable Pedestrian suggest we may. The study describes how Japanese teenagers have a new notion of presence: while they sit in a cafe chatting with each other, some group members may temporarily be engaged in a txt conversation with a friend who is not physically there, there is a constant shifting between Hertzian and physical interaction spaces.

On the other hand, as another participant notes: technobubbles could promote bonding with far away friends, rather than those nearby:

I am not saying that airports are particularly convivial places, but the forced intimacy of the ‘we all been screwed’ mentality that often permeated airports–especially during long delays–has been mutating into an ‘every technonomad for herself’ type of place.