• Flickr: Your worst railway stations

  Small group pool of “Your worst railway stations” for BBC news group, posted by public Flickr members.

  tags: flickr, railway_stations, spaces, public_infrastructure, design, bbc

• From Social Butterfly to Urban Citizen: A HCSNet Workshop on Social and Mobile Technology to Support Civic Engagement | HCSNet

  “This workshop brings together people from a diverse range of disciplines to discuss social and mobile technologies and how they can be studied, designed and developed further to support local participation and civic engagement in urban environments.”

  Link to conference program (w/ presenter abstracts): http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/files2/program_v2mf.pdf

  tags: mobile_technology, mobile_city, urban_design, adam_greenfield

• “How can architects relate to digital media?” TMC keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’ – The Mobile City » Blog Archive »

  “The main question architects should ask themselves is how new media technologies alter the social processes behind spatial interventions?”

  QUOTE:
  Suppose an architect or planner is involved in designing some public space, say a park. Who are the stakeholders involved and what are their interests? What activities might take place there? What qualities should that public place have? The client, a local municipality, will want to combine a pleasant public service with some level of institutional control to prevent loitering, pollution, etc. The public may want a place were they can relax, but some also want a place to work and meet. The planner must find a position vis-a-vis the public’s wish for leisure and connectivity (e.g. by installing benches, free wireless internet, and electricity), institutional control (e.g. by somehow limiting access to wireless infrastructure, installing CCTV cameras, or uncomfortable benches that cannot be used long), and stimulating the public character of the park (e.g. by discouraging individual media consumption altogether).

  Moreover, the stakeholders do not solely consist of the municipality and a heterogeneous public, but also of the wireless internet provider, the technical repair staff, the security agency monitoring the park behind screens, and even theaters, cafés and shops in the vicinity that might be affected by the media-consumption and online buying habits of the now-connected public. Similarly, free wireless internet may shift the intended activities of the park from being a local public meeting place for co-existence towards a place for individualized networking on a potentially global scale. This in turn influences the quality of a park as a specific public setting. If people use Twitter and Facebook to post that they are in the park, will they be more likely to meet acquaintances or strangers there? Moreover, the representation and quality of the park may be largely outside of the planner’s hands when people upload and share their experiences of that place online.

  tags: mobile_city, planning, urban_design, architecture, michiel_de_lange, media

• apophenia: spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective

  “The problem with a public-facing Twitter stream in events like this is that it FORCES the audience to pay attention the backchannel. So even audience members who want to focus on the content get distracted. Most folks can’t multitask that well. And even if I had been slower and less dense, my talks are notoriously too content-filled to make multi-tasking possible for the multi-tasking challenged. This is precisely why I use very simplistic slides that evokes images for the visual types in the room without adding another layer of content. But the Twitter stream fundamentally adds another layer of content that the audience can’t ignore, that I can’t control. And that I cannot even see. “

  tags: web2.0, danah_boyd, twitter, backchannel, audience, participation, multitasking

• Civic Ventures :: Civic Ventures Overview

  “About Civic Ventures
  Civic Ventures is leading the call to engage millions of baby boomers as a vital workforce for change. Through an inventive program portfolio, original research, strategic alliances, and the power of people´s own life stories, Civic Ventures demonstrates the value of experience in solving serious social problems – from education to the environment and health care to homelessness. Founded in 1998 by social entrepreneur and author Marc Freedman, Civic Ventures works to define the second half of adult life as a time of individual and social renewal. ”

  “Helping society achieve the greatest return on experience.”

  tags: civic_ventures, boomerism, ageing, social_capital, society, investment

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 12|13|09 at 10:30 pm. Filed under: links.

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