The Mobile City

Category: Blog

  • PICNIC ’09 report 1: augmented reality

    This year’s PICNIC (September 23-25 2009 in Amsterdam) had some really great sessions and speakers. The Mobile City couldn’t possibly attend everything. Therefore I will zoom in on two sessions that were particularly interesting for our themes. One on Wednesday Sept. 23, about augmented reality. And the other on Friday Sept. 25, about eco-mapping. In…

  • review: Stephen Graham – The Cybercities Reader (2004)

    In The Cybercities Reader (2004) Stephen Graham – at that time Professor of Urban Technology in Newcastle – bundles a great number of seminal texts about the intersections of digital media technologies and urban life. Some articles were written especially for this reader. Others were previously published. The book departs from the premisse that “[t]he…

  • Interview with Mark Shepard: ‘critical design’, architecture, urbanism and location based media

    Mark Shepard is a media architect and researcher. His current research investigates the influence of mobile and pervasive media, communication and information technologies on architecture and urbanism. He is one of the organizers of the 2006 symposium on Architecture and Situated Technologies. This fall, for the Architectural League of New York, he curates the exhibition…

  • Digital Cities 6: urban media / urban informatics and different notions of public space

    I attended the Digital Cities 6 Workshop this week in State College Pennsylvania (put together by Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano and Hiromitsu Hattori, thanks for that!). The workshop started from the notion that with the advent of urban informatics, it is now possible to collect large collections of data about the behaviour of people within…

  • Augmented reality on the mobile: MoMo Amsterdam #11

    Mobile Monday #11 themed “Visions on Mobile” took place on June 1 2009 and had some great speakers: Alan More, Jamais Cascio, Andrew Grill, Joe Pine, Howard Rheingold, and Robert Rice – yes, all guys with visions in the mobile world 🙂 Photo by Anne Helmond As MoMo is a kind of trend-watching event, the…

  • Storytelling with Locative Media: Michael Epstein’s take on ‘terratives’

    A few weeks ago I attended a presentation at the MIT6-conference by Michael Epstein, the CEO of Untravel Media, a Boston-based company that produces location based storytelling media. Or as Epstein himself calls it: terratives – a combination of territory and narrative. Untravel’s portfolio includes terratives for the New England Aquarium and the MIT Campus…

  • review: Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City

    review: Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City

    As part of a new effort of The Mobile City to compile an ever-expanding overview of literature relevant to our themes, I will review this oldie-goldie published in 1960: Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City. I particularly assess its enduring relevance for understanding the current relation between mobile & locative media and the…

  • Mediated Space. Or: How to translate the logic of media into architecture

    Recently I visited a seminar on Mediated Space at the Harvard School of Design. The organizers turned the usual approach to this topic – how is our experience of space changing, now that media ranging from mobile phones to urban screens have all but colonized our every day urban life? – around. Rather they, asked,…

  • Re-making Britain from Above, and beyond

    You might have seen the documentary series “Britain from Above” (if not, go check out its excellent website). It showed us some beautiful computer generated visualisations of GPS data overlayed on a satelite map of great britain. Director Cassain Harrison explained how he had surprisingly little trouble getting access to these sources after he asked…

  • Telecom, transport, and (unequal) time-space compression

    One of the oldest terms to think about the influence of both transport and communication technologies on the experience of time and space is “time-space compression”. This notion expresses the sense that the experience of time passing by is accelerated while the importance of distance diminished. Geographer David Harvey made the term famous, although it…

  • Semantic Wayfinding, mental maps and the keyhole problem of GPS-navigation

    Last week I visited an interesting presentation at Harvard’s Urban Mobilities Group. They had invited Austrian cartographer Georg Gartner who gave a talk about his ‘semantic wayfinding‘ project. Semantic wayfinding is an approach to navigation media that takes human thinking, language and action as a starting point for the design of wayfinding technology and mapping…

  • Cellphone city art

    Found via Textually.org > Engadget Mobile > Make (nice trail): Artist Jorge Colombo (Portugal) made a couple of cityscapes by drawing with his fingers in an application called Brushes on an iPhone. He also posted a short movie showing in speed-up how he created his drawings. You can see all of the drawings on his…