MEDIACITY: notebook

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES SUMMIT
THE FUTURESONIC 2006 CONFERENCE
MANCHESTER UK
20-23 JULY 2006


Opening event Thursday 20th July, 4.30pm
Conference Friday 21st & Saturday 22nd July, 10am-5pm
Delegate Pass 45 GBP
http://10.futuresonic.com/tickets.html

Futuresonic 2006, Manchester's urban festival of electronic music and arts, celebrates its 10th anniversary with the launch of a major new conference strand, the Social Technologies Summit, bringing together leading figures to explore "a whole new way of doing things in the air".

SUMMIT PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:

Masaki Fujihata, last.fm, Regine Debatty (www.we-make-money-not-art.com), Steve Coast (openstreetmap.org), Share NYC (http://share.dj/share/), Toshio Iwai (Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS), Matt Webb, Richard Peckham (Galileo/Astrium), Inke Arns, Stephen Kovats, Tom Carden, Atau Tanaka, Jose Luis de Vicente, Stanislav Roudavski, Steve Benford, Rob Van Kranenburg, James Wallbank, Ben Russell, Drew Hemment.

Plus talks and presentations by festival artists including...

Zachary Lieberman, Simon Pope, Michelle Teran, Jen Southern, Pete Gomes, Open Music Archive, Owl Project, Pete Hindle, Sven Koenig, Victor Gama, mimoSa, Bandung Center for New Media Arts, and many more.

The central theme of synch 2006 is the concept of “link”.

This concept implies the way in which new technologies of information and communication support the linkage among people, irrespective of their topologies, for communicating and collaborating in creative ways. This linkages support the creation of online communities, collaborative work teams, virtual enterprises, and even virtual states. Remotely located individuals need to use these links for recreational, communication, creative purposes or for acting at a socio-political level.

Synch wishes to explore this concept through the work of artists from around the world.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Publisher: Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
ISSN: 0302-9743
Subject: Computer Science
Volume 1370 / 1998
Title: Cooperative Buildings. Integrating Information, Organization, and Architecture: First International Workshop, CoBuild'98, Darmstadt, Germany, February 1998. Proceedings
Editors: N.A. Streitz, S. Konomi, H.-J. Burkhardt (Eds.):
This content is free Book Frontmatter


The Invisible Interface: Increasing the Power of the Environment through Calm Technology (1)
Mark Weiser


Working Place for the Knowledge Economy (2)
John Worthington


Roomware for Cooperative Buildings: Integrated Design of Architectural Spaces and Information Spaces (4)
Norbert A. Streitz, J rg Gei ler, Torsten Holmer


Ambient Displays: Turning Architectural Space into an Interface between People and Digital Information (22)
Craig Wisneski, Hiroshi Ishii, Andrew Dahley, Matt Gorbet, Scott Brave, Brygg Ullmer, Paul Yarin


Multiple-Computer User Interfaces: A Cooperative Environment Consisting of Multiple Digital Devices (33)
Jun Rekimoto


A Prototype Intelligent Environment (41)
Michael H. Coen


A Room of Your Own: What Do We Learn about Support of Teamwork from Assessing Teams in Dedicated Project Rooms? (53)
Lisa M. Covi, Judith S. Olson, Elena Rocco, William J. Miller, Paul Allie


Experience in Building a Cooperative Distributed Organization: Lessons for Cooperative Buildings (66)
Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Simon Kaplan, Sara Parsowith


The Kumamoto-Kyoto-MIT Collaborative Project: A Case Study of the Design Studio of the Future (80)
Susan Yee, William J. Mitchell, Ryusuke Naka, Mitsuo Morozumi, Sigeyuki Yamaguchi


Adaptive Rooms, Virtual Collaboration and Cognitive Workflow (94)
David Kirsh


The Metaphor of Virtual Rooms in the Cooperative Learning Environment CLear (107)
Hans-R diger Pfister, Christian Schuckmann, Jennifer Beck-Wilson, Martin Wessner


Integrated Architecture of Electronic Mall Systems - How Strategies, Processes and Organizations Influence Information System Design (114)
Kai Bender


An Agent-based Telecooperation Framework (122)
Albrecht Schmidt, Alexander Specker, Gerhard Partsch, Michael Weber, Siegfried H ck


The Co-operative Evolution of Buildings and Cities (130)
John Frazer


The Timeless Way: Making Living Cooperative Buildings with Design Patterns (142)
Lyn Pemberton and Richard N. Griffiths


Sustainability of New Work Practises and Building Concepts (154)
Niklaus Kohler


Cooperative Buildings - The Case of office VISION (163)
Ivar Moltke and Hans H. K. Andersen


Future@Work: An Experimental Exhibit Investigating Integrated Workplace Design (177)
Robert Hunt, Andrea Vanecko, Steven Poltrock


Connecting Qualities of Social Use with Spatial Qualities (191)
R diger Lainer and Ina Wagner


Law Enforcement of Working Space Requirements in Office Buildings - The Policy of the Labour Inspectorate in the Netherlands (204)
Rob H. Hagen


Organizing Space in Time - Discovering Existing Resources (208)
Karin Joeckle, Monika Schneiders, Thomas Sieverts, Marianne Koch, Hartmut Chodura


A Room Management System (219)
Christian Falkowski


The Dwelling as a Place for Work (230)
Stefan Junestrand and Konrad Tollmar


Understanding Technology in Domestic Environments: Lessons for Cooperative Buildings (248)
John Hughes, Jon O'Brien, Tom Rodden

images
The close relationship between design and urbanity are to be at the center of this year’s DESIGNMAI : the central theme is DESIGNCITY. Design is seen as an increasingly important factor in the location and structure of our urban landscape. In Berlin these links are extremely clear, last but not least therefore in January 2006 Berlin was appointed as “City of Design” by the UNESCO.

Invitation from Berlin's Mayor:
These days, Berlin has become the centre of a creative new beginning. Where once the wall transsected the city, we now see redeveloped quarters brimming with life. Berlin’s new centre experiences a singular wave of creation. The city stands for inventiveness and a pronounced willingness to experiment, for subculture and diversity, for nonconformism and fresh approaches. With this unique mix, Berlin manages to attract creatives of all shapes and guises. Among the city’s East/West flavour, hip cafes and groundbreaking scene they discover an environment that evidently inspires them more than anywhere else. In short: Berlin is well on its way to establish itself as a hot international capital of style.

TRANSIT LOUNGE An evolving intervention in the heart of Berlin
Feb-April 2007

For 4 months from February 2007, a space in Berlin will be given over to the TRANSIT LOUNGE – a continuous installation-intervention on the topic of transit. The work will provide a platform for Australian and German architects and artists from across all disciplines, to collaborate on a single project and explore issues including disorientation, displacement, anonymity globalisation and non-places.

We are calling for expressions of interest from artists, musicians, architects and writers wanting to participate in the creation and destruction of this new-media ‘merzbau’. The residency will cover a 1-month period for each artist We expect participating artists to create a new work, take part in meetings, talks and workshops and write statements on the website journal to discuss themes and concepts with overseas peers.

Whilst artists will have to provide their own travel to Berlin, basic accommodation and a studio space will be supplied.The curators will organise “Open Studio Exhibitions”, talks and workshops. We are currently in the process of applying for funding from a variety of sources, and it is hoped that a small living allowance will be able to be given to participating artists. All possible assistance will be given to artists for funding applications.

For more information visit www.transitlounge.org, or please contact
Katie Hepworth or Miriam Mlecek at transit@transitlounge.org

Cityware - Urban Design and Pervasive Systems
The goal of Cityware is to develop theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape. While architecture has shaped the built environment to satisfy urban dwellers aesthetically and to accommodate their functional needs such as face-to-face interactions and travel, pervasive systems shape electronically mediated interactions in urban space, including use of both fixed and mobile displays and wireless communication. A major issue is space and its relationship with behaviour: how do we design the space created by fusing electronically created interaction space with architecturally created physical space? Another major issue is infrastructure: how do we provide interaction and interoperability that scales up to city-scale pervasive systems, while ensuring that they function appropriately and merge aesthetically with urban spaces, materials, forms and uses?

Cityware is a multidisciplinary research project, integrating the disciplines of architecture and urban design, human-computer interaction and distributed systems. Cityware is funded through the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s WINES programme, with support from the Cityware industrial partners. Cityware began in October 2005 and runs until March 2009.

About Cityware
Building pervasive systems requires a new way of thinking about the design and use of ICT systems and how they interweave with the built environment. In urban areas we have the greatest opportunities and the strongest demands to design and build pervasive systems, yet urban design has not featured strongly in pervasive systems research. We have no fundamental theory, knowledge base, principled methods or tools for designing and building pervasive systems as integral elements of the urban landscape. We are interested in designing not just the architectural space in which people move and behave and interact but also the interaction spaces for information and services which they discover and use and which support their movements, behaviours and interactions within architectural space. To design these new integrated systems, we need to extend and adapt our understanding and practice of urban design.

Recent research has addressed some aspects of pervasive systems in urban contexts but has rarely considered the design of pervasive systems as an integrated facet of urban design. When architecture has been considered in relation to pervasive technologies, it has typically been focused on the relatively small-scale architecture of individual buildings or even rooms and has at times been used vaguely as a term simply reflecting the notion of built physical space. Our work includes architecture at the scale of individual buildings and rooms but focuses strongly on urban design at the scale of cities. Our previous research has revealed how, through its structuring of space, urban design plays a critical role in the construction of society and social behaviours. Our space syntax research analyses cities as systems of space created by the physical artefacts of architecture and urban design in order to understand how the spatial structure of the city is related to its function. Pedestrian and vehicular movement, land use, social and economic performance, crime and many other aspects of function have been investigated using space syntax. Space syntax has also been used extensively as a design tool, for example in the Broadgate development around London’s Liverpool Street station.

From the human factors perspective, developing successful city-scale systems requires significant advances in areas such as interface design, context awareness and service discovery, to help people manage the demands on their attention and make the best use of their limited ability to descry what they want or need from this new combination of physical cityscape and digital services. From a distributed systems perspective, city-scale pervasive systems will require a fresh approach to many of the classical distributed systems issues such as communication, fault-tolerance and security. Classical solutions such as caching, multicasting and peer-to-peer sharing will require adaptation to take into account pervasive technologies (e.g. sensors, ad hoc mobile networks, limited processing and storage devices) while newer approaches, such as those in autonomic computing, may offer some solutions.

A systematic approach to designing the urban environment as an integrated system of physical architecture and pervasive technologies demands a coming together of the disciplines of Architecture and Computer Science. Key to this interdisciplinary integration is the concept of space, by which we mean not only physical location or volume but also the social protocols, conventions and values attached to a particular physical spaces. In previous work, we have contrasted architectural spaces and the interaction spaces created by artefacts such as computing and communications devices. We have proposed a categorisation of spaces, architectural and interaction, into three main groups: public, social and private. The integration of architectural and interaction spaces raises crucial issues of security and privacy. For example, instances of theft may be the result of ATMs situated in public spaces failing to create a private interaction space for an interaction involving crucial private information such as the user’s PIN. Previous research has focused largely on technical solutions for enforcing the privacy of data held within the system and securing interactions between devices. But this does not adequately address issues of trust in the security and privacy of interactions between people and the information and services. In considering the design of space as the integrated design of architectural space and interaction space, we need to bring together the research and practice of urban design and Human-Computer Interaction, while another Computer Science discipline, Distributed Systems, is essential to this integration. HCI and DS have tended to be separate research communities but successful Cityware cannot be designed with this division. In a system of heterogeneous devices, diverse users and varying network provision, the design and implementation of Cityware require significant advances in research and practice across a range of themes that have both HCI and DS aspects. These include context awareness; service discovery; trust, security and privacy; and the physical, psychological and social impacts of pervasive systems. Solving these problems is made even more complex, both from an HCI and a DS perspective, by the challenges of scaling up from lab based examples to a city-scale operational system.

The Cityware project integrates the disciplines of Architecture, Human-Computer Interaction and Distributed Systems, building on our previous work to develop principles, tools and techniques for designing, implementing and evaluating city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of urban design. Cityware addresses the challenges of scaling up the design and implementation of pervasive systems to long-term, city-scale systems and evaluating these systems and their relationships with urban space and society through both targeted and longitudinal studies.

Security, privacy and trust
In Cityware we envisage a world in which users interact with electronic applications and services embedded in urban environments. Those interactions potentially involve threats against the users' privacy and security -- threats which are a potential barrier to use. Our objectives are to understand those threats and implement practical mechanisms to defend users against them, while finding a satisfactory trade-off against other aspects of the users’ urban lives, including convenience and social acceptability. An important aspect of that trade-off is the trust that users do or do not place in the physical world and the electronic services around them.
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Designing space
This theme investigates the impact of pervasive technologies on the spatial environment in urban space, both within and outside buildings. As a theory of society as modified by the spatial environment, we will develop space syntax to respond to novel pervasive modes of communication, transaction and exchange implied by pervasive technologies. This will be achieved in Cityware by means of a continuous process of analysis of empirical data on people's use of and relationship with the urban spatial environment as this is affected by the intervention of pervasive technologies.
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Context awareness and service discovery
Advances in pervasive computing infrastructures have the potential to dramatically broaden the role of computing in the everyday lives of people with a greater proliferation of personal wireless devices and with wireless devices starting to be embedded in the urban landscape. The challenges of pervasive computing will not only be about building pervasive environments, they will also be about the omnipresent information which pervasive applications and infrastructures will need to capture, process and distribute behind the scenes. This theme addresses the challenge of designing pervasive applications and services that seamlessly interact with each other across Cityware interaction spaces.
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User engagement
Understanding the psychological, physical and social impact of technology on peoples’ lives is crucial for designing and deploying successful pervasive systems. In the Cityware project we will be working closely with users throughout the project to explore the impact of pervasive systems on the lifestyles of the city of Bath.
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