I wanted to go back to a post Anne-Laure wrote some days ago about drifting along. I agree… not sure we lean more toward the physical space.To me, “Drift” is a word too tied to the aimless wandering of the Situationists. I am not interested in aimless wandering (though you may argue that even in aimlessness there is an aim). To make sense of the eclectic conversation, one necessarily needs to think from the “right brain” (Studies have shown that right brained are global thinkers (instead of left brained who are sequential thinkers) and arrive faster to solutions; they are innovators though may have difficulties to explain why they came to the solution. A quick read for info, a book by Béatrice Millêtre ).Anyway, having a global mind seems to fit our era of overflow of information and channels. I like the word “encompassing” better for that it means to “include comprehensively”; it is “rounded” (has the word “compass” in it), suggests a fluidity, space in-between the things it encompasses; it encompasses the word “passing” which fits the Deleuzian mobile minds (Whom I believe are right brained).What is there to encompass? We are Building Space With Words. It is difficult to encompass how and why we are building a SPACE, which SPACE? WITH, indicating the tool, words, which and what WORDS? In the physical word, building space happens not only through brick and mortar but also through “inhabiting”.Habit-Habitat-Habitude (Habitude is the French word for “habits”; Habit means clothing). So what you wear, how you represent yourself in everyday life (Goffman, 1959) links to rituals and to space making. It is not so different from what happens in the digital world. The WORDS that we blog and exchange, like clothing are also meant to mark a territory, building a (new?) discourse on space and the digital.So what have we been saying?

1. That space making in the digital word isn’t so (it is, but how?) different than space making in the physical world. In fact Anne-Laure mentions rightly the words propinquity and privacy which belong to both worlds.

2. The space we are talking about is multiple:

a. Physical: the installation

b. Digital: the blog

c. Mental: the discourse

3. We build space with words also to advance our knowledge of place making (building) so to suggest spaces/experiences/services that are relevant today.

How to conserve cultural identity through the recording of disappearing languages?

Language is a crucial symbol of cultural identity as well as one of its crucial elements. Yet, there are hundreds of languages which are disappearing as young people leave their villages.

“Of the world’s 7,000 languages, 40 percent are on their way to extinction, with the last fluent speaker of a language dying once every two weeks.”

Two linguists, K. David Harrison and Greg Anderson,aim to stop this disappearition by documenting all these endangered languages. Their project is the topic of a documentary, The Linguists, which is discussed in a Seed’s article.Not only do they travel around the world recording languages in remote areas but they also provide communities with tools to keep trace of their language. Technology becomes a tool to preserve identity and a sense of community. Indeed, it’s not only about recording - keeping a trace - but it’s also about sharing and building relationship:

” The tech tools of recent decades — like text messaging, web pages, chat rooms, and YouTube — are finding use among speakers of indigenous languages, says Anderson. Margaret Noori, a colleague of Anderson’s and a professor of literature and linguistics at the University of Michigan, is part of a network of Native American Ojibwe speakers who have Facebook networks, a website (Ojibwe.net) with easy-to-download language lessons, and who share Ojibwe words with each other using the Zephyr application for iPhone.”

Harrison and Anderson’s project  reminded me of  an article I read a few months ago in the New York Times on an academy in Western India, where students in their early 20’s are documenting oral languages which are disappearing (in that case by writing them down, making dictionaries of languages which have never been traced before).

“If a community has a strong sense of identity and a sense of pride in that identity, it wants to survive and thrive,” Mr. Devy (the founder of this project) said. “The new economy is important. The old culture is equally important.”

It made me think of Bernadette, the refugee from Rwanda living in Denmark that Yasmine met. She was afraid of loosing her language, and her identity. This reminds us of how language shapes our identity, our sense of home and to a certain extent our personal geography.

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Here is an exhibition (Fondation Cartier, Paris, http://fondation.cartier.com/index.php?lang=en&p=2&c=15&linkid=15) I read about a month ago or so. It came back to my mind while reading Yasmine’s quote. Two of our blog’s contributors, Marc Hansen and Ben Rubin have contributed to it.

Native LandStop EjectNov. 21, 2008 > March 15, 2009

Raymond Depardon and I both came around to this same question: what is left of this world, of our native land, of the history of what so far is the only habitable planet?” Paul VirilioWhile the world has reached a critical moment in its history, where the environment conditions what humans do and what they will become, the exhibition Native Land, Stop Eject proposes a reflection on the notions of being rooted and uprooted, as well as related questions of identity. Whereas Raymond Depardon gives a voice to those who wish to live on their land but are threatened with exile, Paul Virilio examines and challenges the very idea of sedentariness in the face of the unprecedented migrations taking place in the contemporary world. Paul Virilio´s concepts are given form in a design by the artists and architeDiller Scofidio + Renfro, as well as Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rubin. The exhibition is, therefore, a confrontation. It is at once a contradictory and complementary dialogue between filmmaker and photographer, Raymond Depardon, and urbanist and philosopher, Paul Virilio. Depardon´s work has often explored native lands, and, particularly, the world of farmers, giving value to speaking and listening. His capacity to combine both the political and the poetic is clear to anyone familiar with his work. Through his writing, Paul Virilio has spent much of his time working on notions of speed, exodus, the disappearance of geographic space, and the pollution of distances.

Two quotes that illustrate the dialogue:

“Let us listen to these people, be they Chipaya, Yanomami, or Afar. Let us listen to these people and give them a chance to speak, so we can hear them express themselves in their language, with their own way of speaking, their own facial expressions.”Raymond Depardon 

“The nature of being sedentary and nomadic has changed. […] Sedentary people are at home wherever they go. With their cell phones or laptops, [they are] as comfortable in an elevator or on a plane as in a high-speed train. This is the sedentary person. The nomad, on the other hand, is someone who is never at home, anywhere. ”Paul Virilio 

Sometime ago, I started investigating a visualization of the three types of mobilities that I had identified: mental, physical and digital mobilities.  At that time my explanation was that “when place changes, the social network multiplies, shrinks, evolves, so is the feeling of belonging. Sometimes belonging stays strongly linked to the place of departure (grows even, if we “long in belonging”)… It also explains the notion of displacement, physical and mental, and how digital networks participate to it.” The thinking has matured since… Lately, as I was presenting my neo-nomad research at the CIID, the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design, I showed a similar version of the sketch. I explained it a little more clearly:
1. Mobilities, mental physical are intertwined.
2. Mobilities that align (vertical or oblique) represent a balanced state (the feeling of being grounded or belonging)
3. Mobilities that do not align (when the physical displacement is disproportionate) represent an unbalanced state (the feeling of NOT being grounded or NOT belonging).
For example refugees are forced to leave their home—travel physically—while mentally longing for the place left behind.  Some use tools and technologies (photographs, video tapes, emails, social networking…) to connect to their homeland, share information about the two spaces connected digitally. Technology helps in balancing the stretched relationship between forced physical mobility and mental mobility.
As another example, when absorbed by the screen and virtual environment (Thinking of Sherry Turkle), other subjects of preoccupation such as physical health problems may arise, and other strategies are taken into consideration to reach a balanced state.
4. It is the RELATIONSHIP between mobilities, and not the mobilities individually that become a topic of investigation (It is because there is a stretch, that there is matter to discuss). The stretch corresponds to a theoretical field of investigation.
5. You can draw a diagram for different kinds of nomads.

www.haque.co.uk/index.phpTheir work is described thus-’The domain of architecture has been transformed by developments in interaction research, wearable computing, mobile connectivity, people-centered design, contextual awareness, RFID systems and ubiquitous computing. These technologies alter our understanding of space and change the way we relate to each other. We no longer think of architecture as static and immutable; instead we see it as dynamic, responsive and conversant.’

Recent work by Claudia Conduto, The Space In-Between (http://claudiaconduto.blogspot.com/), explores the notion of space and how it is changed by transformations in our ways of living and by the fact that we are increasingly more global. Claudia is questioning the notion of “home” as the “place where we live”, the “place where we belong”. Her focus is on our perception of space, the emotions related to it as we feel we belong or not…   While there is always a sky above our head, how similar, how different is the sky while we are in Brussels, Singapore, Lisbon, or New York? al

Hi, I found this article really fascinating as it puts in perspective all the discussions and articles about virtual work, virtual space and new forms of working and interacting. We might be able to work from home, work at distance, virtually, across time and geographies, many different technologies are developed to support these distributed interactions. Yet, social interactions and physical environments still matter and people look for shared spaces offering them social interactions, the “human moment”. This does not mean that we should not work at distance, interact online, but it might highlight what these virtual spaces need to afford so that people can interact and build a sense of community or shared identity.

Laura Forlano (cited in the NY article below) examined in her dissertation mobile virtual work practices in the media and information technology industries. As part of her doctoral work she did a very interesting ethnographic study of people working from cafes and parks.

Here is the article that you can also find at

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/business/businessspecial2/20cowork.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=businessspecial2

 ”They’re working on their Own, Just side by Side” by Dan Frost, NY Times, Feb 20, 2008

Contemplating his career path a couple of years ago, a young computer programmer named Brad Neuberg faced a modern predicament. “It seemed I could either have a job, which would give me structure and community,” he said, “or I could be freelance and have freedom and independence. Why couldn’t I have both?”As someone used to hacking out solutions, Mr. Neuberg took action. He created a word — coworking, eliminating the hyphen — and rented space in a building, starting a movement.While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas.“It’s nourishing on a fundamental level,” said John Vlahides, the executive editor of 71miles.com, a travel site covering Northern California, who rents a desk for $175 a month at one of Mr. Neuberg’s original sites, the Hat Factory. “And if you’re not nourished, how can you be creative?”Coworking sites are up and running from Argentina to Australia and many places in between, although a wiki site on coworking shows that most are in the United States. While some have grown-up-sounding names, most seem connected somewhere between the communalism of the 1960s and the whimsy of the dot-com days of the ’90s, like the Hive Cooperative in Denver, Office Nomads in Seattle, Nutopia Workspace in Lower Manhattan and Independents Hall in Philadelphia.The coworkers, armed with Wi-Fi laptops and cellphones, are in some ways offering a techie twist on the age-old practice of artists or writers teaming up to rent studio space.Most coworkers say they were drawn to the spaces for the same reasons that inspired Mr. Neuberg: they like working independently, but they are less effective when sitting home alone.“Even people who are antisocial feel a need to be around other people for at least part of the day while they’re working,” said Laura Forlano, a visiting fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who has studied people working in communal offices and cafes.Coworking comes in many flavors. The Hat Factory in San Francisco is a live-work loft that’s home to three technology workers who open up during the day to other people. Some companies, like Citizen Agency, a San Francisco Internet consulting firm that has done the most to evangelize coworking, have an open-door policy, in which people rent desks but others are free to drop in and use the Wi-Fi or the conference room.Some companies rent out desks to the nomadic workers, hoping some of their Internet mojo will rub off. Yet others have started coworking spaces as businesses unto themselves, like a community version of the corporate business centers operated by the Regus Group.Tara Hunt, a co-owner of Citizen Agency, which calls its office Citizen Space, has listed (in a blog, of course) some principles of coworking. They include collaboration, openness, community, sustainability and accessibility.Many of the ideas come from the open-source software movement, in which people share their work freely with little regard for financial gain. Taking a nod from that movement, the people involved in coworking share their experiences and ideas on a Web site, coworking.pbwiki.com.Despite such ideals, the arrangement does not always work perfectly. Thor Muller, the chief executive of Get Satisfaction, a San Francisco start-up, said he had opened his offices to friends to come in and work. One day, a friend started aggressively recruiting Satisfaction’s employees for his own start-up, and he was banned from the office.“There should be honor among start-ups,” Mr. Muller said, still rankled.Ms. Hunt and Chris Messina, her partner in Citizen Agency, said they have had to make sure that people respect their space and leave it clean.“Someone wanted to bring her dog in, and we had to say, ‘That actually doesn’t work for us,’ ” Ms. Hunt said. And Mr. Vlahides at the Hat Factory griped about “some humorless European guys” who sat at the common table and talked loudly on their cellphones instead of going outside. Citizen Space lets people drop in without paying, but if someone uses the space regularly, the group asks the person to pay for a key. For $350 a month, a worker can rent a desk and get a key to Citizen Space for 24-hour access. For $250 a month, you get only a key. The space has seven desks, a large table for drop-ins, a private conference room, whiteboards and other office amenities — some less typical, like beer and wine.Ms. Hunt and Mr. Messina say they don’t make a profit on the space. “We could get our own office with 800 square feet and spend the same money,” Mr. Messina said, “or we can be here, and have a space where people can come and work and have meet-ups that serve the community, and it gives us the opportunity to meet some fascinating people.”Mr. Messina and Ms. Hunt are so passionate about coworking that they even sell their technology customers on it. While consulting with a San Francisco bag maker, Timbuk2, they persuaded the company to create some coworking desks in its offices, attracting technology folks to help stimulate ideas.Other coworking spaces are set up as businesses. Roman Gelfer, a former equities trader, and Sasha Vasilyuk, a writer, started Sandbox Suites in San Francisco last October, renting out 4,300 square feet on three floors. Their rates start at $135 for a once-a-week drop-in slot and go up to $495 a month for a private desk.“If you build a space from the ground up for coworking and networking as well, you could do a better job, and I definitely believe it’s a great business,” Mr. Gelfer said.Still, he allows free events in the space, like hackathons — weekends in which programmers get together and build, say, Facebook applications.The Hat Factory has a more informal feel. One might call it messy. The lore is that the room, in an industrial loft, once belonged to a woman who made hats. It’s now occupied by a Web video producer, a guy who runs a Web video start-up called Viddyou and a Yahoo employee. About seven others work in the space, which is open during daytime business hours.The Hat Factory vibe is more like a dorm than an office, with Mr. Vlahides throwing candy across the floor to tease the resident cat, and bedsheets hanging from the ceiling.A coworking site in Brighton and Hove, England, called the Werks, is an example of how the networked world can spread an idea across borders. James McCarthy, a founder, had left his job in information technology at American Express and with a partner rented a 6,000-square-foot building that once belonged to Barclays Bank.They rent to artists, software developers and designers, among others, with hopes of someday being profitable but also allowing free drop-ins to spread the word.Similarly, Fernando Maclen in Buenos Aires had read online accounts of Citizen Space and a coworking space in Vancouver, British Columbia, and for a college class wrote a paper about how he would create a coworking site.“In less than three months, I made my business plan (based on the experiences posted by the coworking group) and asked my parents for financial support,” he said in an e-mail message.Mr. Maclen’s space in Buenos Aires is now half full with eight workers, but he said that his own small design studio had benefited “200 percent” from the arrangement.“We, as a design firm, have our own projects, but we outsource parts of them, very often to designers inside the coworking space,” he said. “They do the same with us. We complement each other. The speed is incredible. We don’t waste time with endless phone calls or IM chats, we simply walk to the office next door and there they are.”The coworking wiki page lists many countries where people would like to start sites, or work in one if someone else would get it going.People who are coworking feel a bond to other coworkers.One day last month, a technology worker from Montreal, Duncan Ward, set up his laptop at Citizen Space in San Francisco. “I just came to town for a week to do some networking for my start-up,” he said. He had heard of the site from a friend who was setting up a coworking site in Montreal.As for Mr. Neuberg, who started the movement, he is no longer coworking, although he still promotes it. Like many other talented programmers , he took a job at Google.  al