I’ve just read on the urban omnibus about a project at the intersection of space and discourse: how one will tag buildings the same way one tags posts, pictures or videos online? … when the “online” practice moves to the physical world…

Cassim Shepard writes “On the web, we tag images, or describe them with language elements, for purposes of communal organization, identification, sharing. But the communal part of that practice is, by nature, limited to the common experience of those who understand the chosen label. In architecture, it is no different: parallel vocabularies often do not intersect. Much of the communication impasse between the different stakeholders in physical design processes is attributable to the narrowness of these vocabularies. And the exasperation different user groups feel when “their” language is misunderstood or unheeded is equal on all sides.”

An attempt for building a shared vocabulary, a common interpretation but that presupposes that the definitions of the tags (the labels) are understood and shared… I would argue that there is never a complete shared understanding and that this shared understanding is constantly renegotiated and in a sense that negotiation process can take place during the physical design process while online we might end up following a complete path that the one we thought we would…

To explore these differences in interpretations, “architect and information designer Kadambari Baxi has started a game of tag. She has chosen a series of recently completed, visually striking buildings and invited architects, an architecture writer and passersby to assign them a list of word associations that correspond to the built project.” The Urban omnibus offers you to play tag with 3 photos on their website.

al

In the spirit of Paris Invisible (see February 6), here is another attempt to provide a “thick description” of interactions in public spaces.

A while ago, Yasmine posted about an interesting project “Touching the city”  by her friend Alexandra Ginsberg is showing her work done in collaboration with Oliver Froome-Lewis (see June 19, 2007):

Touching the City is a design research unit that explores the ways in which we interact with the city. Observing the private life of small public spaces, we consider and exchange views on their potential and make proposals for their transformation.

One of my students forwarded me this link “Abstract City”

a lego city created by Christoph Nieman, a NY Times illustrator who just moved to Berlin:

space, mobility (mental and physical) and of course evocative “objects” - his madeleines - and also technology (the blog) as a way to share with others.

thanks Lane for the link.

al

……So it is with more than a little sense of mission that she talks about bringing together the different strands of activity in the building. “I’ve always had this interest in meeting places and social spaces. This place is an interesting interface between patients and doctors and scientists. When I worked on the subject of genetics I was fascinated by the scientists – often they work in a bubble and, of course, there’s no reason why they should be directly involved in patient care. But everyone has so much to learn from each other.”

In the building this is reflected in many ways. There are shared entrances and social spaces. There is just one café, with furniture designed by Donachie using timber and craftsmanship sourced just a matter of miles away. At the centre of the building’s courtyard, Donachie has helped create a garden and built The Disc, a huge concrete circle which acts as a focal point, seating area and picnic spot. It has the capacity to warm up, using the waste heat from the centre’s labs and refrigeration units.”

and here’s the link: http://living.scotsman.com/visual-arts/Arts-Review-Artists-doing-the.4861951.jp

Reading  Yasmine Abbas’ Thursday post (Jan 29) on Neo-Nomad, I discovered two architectural projects that I find really interesting and which also resonate with previous discussions about Kolb’s and Alexander’s work.

Pachube by the architect, Usman Haque. Here are few quotes from a long interview:

My focus as an architect has always been to consider what I’ve called the “software” of space (sounds, smell, light, temperature, electromagnetic fields, social relationships, etc.) rather than the “hardware” (floors, walls, roof, etc.) as it has traditionally been considered. The image (above) really sums up why I think this is important.

Pachube is: “A web service that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world, facilitating interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.“

One of the strands of thought Pachube evolved out-which was one of the starting point of this conversation:

” the geographical non-specificity of architecture these days as people live their lives in constant connection with people in remote spaces”

Yasmine mentioned the project New Babylon by  the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys as an inspiration to Pachube. Usman also refers explicitly to New Babylon, which is a visionary architectural proposal for a future society.

Thanks Yasmine for these two pointers!

al

Marc Hansen suggested me to look up Sprawling places by David Kolb.

There is a book and a website: http://www.dkolb.org/sprawlingplaces/index.html. I’ve started exploring the online version of the book and there are many interesting ideas, photos and narratives.

The main questions addressed in the book are: “Are contemporary places as bad as some critics claim? Are we building “non-places”? Are we imprisoned in a universal Disneyland?”

Kolb argues against some of the current criticisms which describe “contemporary places as inauthentic or unreal or totally commodified”. He argues that instead of just criticizing current places, one should try to understand the process and looking for new possibilities (e.g.  Do our new kinds of places make room for new kinds of community?).

I’ll post more tomorrow on the specific issues of virtual space and what Kolb calls “social grammars”.

Thanks Mark for a very interesting reference. If you have time to share more thoughts with us on Kolb’s work, or more references, please do so.
al

“The words between the Spaces: Buildings and Language” is the title of a book by Thomas Markus and Deborah Cameron, an architect and a linguist, where they argue that language shapes our understanding of the built environment.

In their first chapter, they argue that while architecture is usually seen as a visual rather than verbal activity, in fact architects’ work is both visual and verbal. “Making a building is a collaborative process which involves continual dialogue - wit clients, with colleagues, with other professionals like engineers and landscapers, with building contractors. Cuff aptly describes what goes on in these interactions as “constructing a word-and-sketch building” (1992:97). She also makes clear how much written language is produced in any architectural project” (Markus and Cameron, p.1).

We’d like to welcome two new contributors who accepted our invitation to join our conversation:

• Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design at MOMA. Paola’s experience in architecture and design, and her reflections on design as art (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paola_antonelli_treats_design_as_art.html), on space and technology makes her a perfect contributor to our conversation. The exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind she curated at MOMA last year dealt with many of the themes discussed on this blog. We are also looking forward to her insights on multidisciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists, social scientists, designers and architects.
• Maciej Fiszer, visual artist, stage designer and scenographer. We are curious to hear more about his work on space and our interpretation / perception of space. Moreover, we are very interested in hearing about his collaboration with choreographers, theater directors and anthropologists. He also provided us very useful feedback when we started exploring different materials and ideas for the maze. 

Check the Who’s who page for more information.Cheers,   Aileen and al 

Happy new year!

 I came back yesterday from the Chiapas in Mexico and would like to share with you some thoughts I had about public space and plazas (squares) during this trip.We spent several days in San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city at 2100 m above the sea level, with about 80, 000 inhabitants. Walking in this small city, I could not help thinking of Alexander’s book, the Pattern Language (see the post of November 12 for a few quotes) and his observations about the role of public spaces in cities.

“A town needs public squares; they are the largest, most public rooms, that the town has. But when they are too large, they look and feel deserted” (Alexander, 1977, p. 311)

Spending some time in San Cristobal made me aware of the social nature of public spaces: a public space is a space, where people meet, interact and socialize.

I have often thought of a city as having one central “plaza” - square - where people meet and chat in the tradition of the Greek agora. Indeed, when you arrive in San Cristobal, you often go to the “main” square in front of the cathedral, where a lot of the vendors are, and a lot of the tourists too - but also a lot of the inhabitants of the city. People stand, sit and / or chat. Children run around, play tag or soccer. Friends meet and chat. After one day, I noticed that this main plaza was “connected” (they are adjacent; only a street separate them) to a second plaza with a park, in front on the city hall. On this square, there is a kiosk (what Alexander calls a “public outdoor room”) with a coffee shop and a stage where groups can play.In fact, there is a third plaza, behind the city hall, somewhat enclosed by arches - making it more “private”, less noticeable. Here you see small groups (3-4 people max) sitting on the stairs or on benches. Although one can go through the plaza, and although some people do, less people go through it. It seems that people who come there are looking for some privacy and more calm.

After another day of wandering around the city, I realized that there were many other plazas, where people met and the streets were connectors between these central nodes. The city is built around the plazas and the streets take you from one square to another. Each of these squares have different atmospheres and are located to different “resources” - the cathedral, a church, a covered market, open restaurants.

 A visit to a traditional Maya village, San Juan Chumala, led me to . The village - which has a main square with a market, a kiosk and the church - is in fact the public place for the community of farmers living in the mountains in a region of 80 kilometers around “the village”. Although most of the people don’t live in the village, but are scattered in the mountains around, people feel part of the same village as they go and meet on the market, or go to participate to religious and other public ceremonies. The village and its main square has become the symbol of the community identity. 

 This raised once again my awareness of the importance of space, but also of how space can be invested and interpreted differently: connections of plazas or public spaces, or one village which becomes the public  space and symbol of their identity (inhabitants of the village) for a community of people living in isolated farms in the mountains.

Writing this post, I found interesting that Aileen and I have built the maze of our installation around a “central area”, a square where people can meet. Any thoughts?

Cheers,

 al 

Hello, this post grew as a response to paragraphs 4 and 5 of Al’s post of 6 December. I wanted to comment on how we translate from the physical domain to the virtual domain the question about changes to the environment affecting interactions. And I realised I had more to say than I expected, and decided it was worth trying to set it all out in a post of its own to clarify my ideas and to see if other people find this way of looking at things useful. Then the post grew some more and I split it into two… So here’s the first instalment:

I’d like to try and draw some distinctions that might be helpful in thinking about the different features of online environments that affect the kinds of interactions that take place in virtual space, and how we go about making comparisons with co-located exchanges.

In previous posts, Anne-Laure has mentioned examples of how the physical space in which an interaction occurs can change how people engage with each other. Take for instance her research on the photocopier room, where the kinds of things that affect exchanges and how the room is used might include whether it is at the end of a corridor or on a common landing, whether there are other machines there, whether people have other reasons to be there, how private or public the space is, etc.

Then we ask the question, What are the equivalent cues in an online environment?

One example Al discusses is a case where the different styles of two respondents to a question [one open and friendly and one more brief and direct] elicit different kinds of reply [discursive and chatty or dry and minimalist, respectively] from the same person.

Now, clearly the style and type of discourse used in online forums have an effect on interactions. In fact, style and type of discourse have an effect on face-to-face exchanges too, along with many other cues like tone of voice, facial expression, body language, etc. I want to call these kinds of features of exchanges that affect interactions, whether online or face-to-face, interpersonal cues, and will return to them later.

First, though, I want to consider features of the online environment that I will call architectural cues, which may affect virtual interactions in ways that seem to me to be more directly comparable with the sorts of cues discussed for the physical world in the examples of the photocopy room or museum.

For while it is true that when we interact online we are “Building space with words”, we are not doing so in a vacuum but within a space that is to some extent defined and shaped by the constraints and format of the software programme and blog template that we’re using. These features can affect interactions in the same way that location, size, other activities etc. affect interactions in the copier room.

If the blog is our “room”, here are some examples of the kinds of architectural cues it contains that I think affect interactions and can be manipulated to create different sorts of exchanges. This is just an initial list with some immediate observations. I hope as you read this you will think of more examples and instances of your own experiences online of how features of a blog have shaped your interactions with it and other users, and add them in the comments:

Links

- Whether a blog has sidebar links to other sites of interest relevant to its readers can affect usage and interactions directly and indirectly. Links to external sites make the blog not just a destination in its own right, but a gateway to other resources, a portal, an information filter. [Compare, whether a copier room is at the end of a corridor, or only has one machine in it, or whether it’s used by people from different floors or departments of an organisation.] Extra links mean there are more reasons to visit a blog, and varied links can ensure people from different backgrounds want to look at them or add to them, which increases the number of disciplines potential contributors come from.

- If the links are static and remain the same, eventually people may bookmark them and visit external sites directly without going through the blog. If the links change regularly [quick hits, or news related links with a particular slant, etc.] then the blog itself becomes the only place where that particular set of pieces of information is available, and the first place you’d look to find out certain kinds of things, which adds to the sense of community.

Comment options

- Ease of commenting affects exchanges, whether you comment at all, how you comment and what you say. Factors like whether you have to log in, whether you have to leave a name or are allowed to comment anonymously, whether you have a unique identifier so that you can maintain your online character without being impersonated. Or whether word verification or comment moderation is enabled [often on Blogger for instance I’ve seen people comment on the word verification sequence itself if there seems to be a random connection between the word that the letters sound like and the subject of the post or of their comment].

- Within comments, it may make a difference how easy it is to use html tags to make what you say clearer; whether for instance there is a blockquote tag that allows you to cite the section of the text that you are responding to so that you can focus on that part specifically and cut down on having to paraphrase what someone else said, or point to a certain paragraph or line to pick it out. [In practice where this feature is available comments  look more like when people do email replies by writing answers to individual points directly underneath the relevant bit of text which is more conversational than a whole load of text at the top of the message.]

Feeds

- Options of notification of updates can affect interactions, speeding up responses, alerting readers to new content, making them feel more connected to other users of the space across different timezones.

- The ease with which you can track which threads have been commented on, and by who [as we have in this Wordpress blog] facilitates joining in conversations rather than having to trail through old posts to see if anyone has said anything on a previous entry. A new widget on Blogger has a rolling headlines or recently updated feature that allows sidebar links to show titles of new posts and when they were put up, which gives you a sense of what is happening in the online community you are part of and what are the hot topics at any point in time.

More generally, it occurs to me that it might be worth talking to people who design blogging software to see what type of interfaces they are developing and what has been particularly successful in facilitating online interactions and what the current big stumbling blocks are perceived to be. All of this should give us more ideas about the features of online environments that help or hinder our interactions.

Part 2 to follow shortly. Sorry this is long. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Cheers, milena.