5. Setha Low
On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture
2000
6. Watching and talking
“We started by studying how people use plazas.
We mounted time-lapse cameras overlooking the
plazas and recorded daily patterns. We talked to
people to find where they came from, where they
worked, how frequently they used the place and
what they thought of it. But mostly, we watched
people to see what they did.”
William H. Whyte
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980)
22. Internet traffic
Natalie Jeremijenko
Live WIt consists of an 8 foot piece of plastic
spaghetti that hangs from a small electric
motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is
electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet
cable, so that each bit of information that
goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A
23. Wind
Martin Wattenberg
and Fernanda Viegas
http://hint.fm/wind/
2012
25. “The cartographic conventions of the base map are
an expression of a singular notion of urban space –
one that favors the street over the route, the static
over the temporal, and the formal over the
subjective. As locative media projects are created
that build upon the datum of common base maps,
they are structuring a collaborative notion of space
within this predefined conception of the city.”
Alison Sant
“Redefining the Basemap”
2006
http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/
Vol6_No2_interactive_city_sant.htm
32. Knowing when to stop
America Revealed: Pizza Delivery
PBS America
2012
33. Resources
Experiments in Motion
www.experimentsinmotion.com
pinterest.com/experimotion
www.informationisbeautiful.net
www. flowingdata.com
Editor's Notes
This is going to be pretty casual. Longstanding interest in mobility, movement, motion
Ask how they have been conceptualizing motion
What is moving? People objects animals bitsTime + placeWhat isn’t motion?What else is motion?
Review how to watch motion, in escalating complexity
“movement maps”Observation on a plaza in MexicoThis is the simplest form: she watched and took notes as people moved in a bounded space
Talked about Whyte’s work? This is more complicated
http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/
Show: http://youtu.be/OlIelAWikWQ?t=3sGPS to delivery guys in Manhattan
MappingRepresenting relationships between elements spatially(2) Forming correspondances between one type of data and another: LiveWireNumber of dimensionsTime, location, speed, mood
How does this deal with time? The dotted line =stop-and-go movement of trucks and buses. Arrows = fast-moving traffic, spirals =cars in parking lots. In his plan, Kahn said, he intended "to redefine the use of streets and separate one type of movement from another so that cars, buses, trolleys, trucks, and pedestrians will move and stop more freely, and not get in each other’s way. . . . This system of movement is not designed for speed but for order and convenience. The present mixture of staccato, through, stop and go makes all the streets equally ineffectual." [Louis I. Kahn, "Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia," in Latour, Louis I. Kahn, 29.]
LabanotationHe published this notation first 1928 as "Kinetographie" in the first issue of "Schrifttanz".http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~griesbec/LABANE.HTML
Icons for gesturesThere are lots of libraries – this is one I found randomly online
I think we’ve all seen this before
Ordinary citizens equipped with GPShttp://realtime.waag.org/
Each cab's path is represented by a line. The color of the line depends on the speed of the taxi - red is fast, white is slow.
Borrowed from Exploratorium exhibit title
It consists of an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds.
Beautiful – check out animation online. http://hint.fm/wind/Most interesting as comparative – what Tufte calls “small multiples”What do we expect to get out of this?Consider the varying usefulness of small static multiples vs the dynamic displayQUESTION: WHAT DO WE GET OUT OF BOTH THAT’S DIFFERENT?
Borrowed from Exploratorium exhibit title
Charting literal and non-literal closenessRelation to basemap“These "psychogeographic" maps proposed a fragmented, subjective, and temporal experience of the city as opposed to the seemingly omnipotent perspective of the planimetric map. As mapping is used as a tactic to bring together personal narratives about urban space, the Situationist maps provide a useful example of visualizing a subjective view of the city.” AlisonSantAnother example: the tracemaps we saw, which proceed from human movement and have no relation to Discours Sur Les Passions D'Amour, 1957.“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.[6]”Knabb, Ken, ed. Situationist International Anthology, Berkley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995. pg 50.
Borrowed from Exploratorium exhibit titleTwo examples that help us re-see familiar places and things that we otherwise turn away from
http://vimeo.com/17350218
We forget that people taking things out is a big proportion of how trash cans are used!Highlighting what people want to forget: That homeless people take things out That what we throw away remains That what we throw away tells us a lot about ourselves
There are a lot of reasons why you might want to do this. The question is, what purpose does it serve in your project?I showed two projects that are about visualization, I realized. There are a lot of other purposes. Let’s open it up to discussion about why and how. Show: http://youtu.be/OlIelAWikWQ?t=3sWhat is your project, anyway? What effect do you want it to have in the world?