(click visual to enlarge)

a new series of Processing visuals coming up!

——— the living city – urbagram  Anil Bawa-Vacia———-
- last fm
- analyze cities
- mostly invisible – physical networks there also made up of flows and interactions, of goods and peoples
- where and how to visualize the city?

interaction
- foursquare mapping of NY city
- walkable cell – 7 minutes of walking – the amount of logs in a couple of months. the city as used, not as planned.
- how walkability is important for our understanding of our cities
- how demographic uses a city (e.g. smartphone – users)
- urbanism via a quantitative turn (big data turn
- cities feel fragmented if you cant walk from a to b

boundaries
- invisible boundaries
- national scale
- MIT sensible city lab
- communicational turns – many policy boundaries
- mobile phone data of the UK – very nice! communcaion boundaries analytical and visualization task

flows
- digital traces that we leave
- a flowprint is shown
- complexity science
- you get a sense here of the complexity; you need microscopes – see the city as one thing
- flowprint prototype made in Processing
- london oyster network visualized (really nice visuals)
- construct the routes that people took
- if you these trips together, you get a bigger picture – big data again (2 million samples)
- also, a bike-chart is shown – bike flows
- a relational-space development chart is shown
- result: a phase-space
- complex and knowable but not predictable

see urbagram website

sammy niemala – nordkapp talk in three phases:

- right now
- near future
- future

- example : display objects in Helsinki. It is a touch-screen with a touch-screen. It runs on windows.
‘ design for smaller context as well’
- designing urban informatics as a whole is complex. Infra, interface, data platforms, services, databases etc. and how do mobile devices connect to this. Also time becomes important.
- locals they do not need the screens at all, until they learn something new.
- iphone app : shadow cities ; layer upon city. it happens only on your device.
- this also provides psycho-geo info
- concepts of touchpoints ; what is the real use?

the near future: these objects are on their way – mobile phones, pads, urban screens…
- input devices – how o deal with these services
- time; how do you incorporate play in time ; for personal use screens on the street are not really inviting.
- personal space is an argument here. if you incorporate multiple users what happens then?
- the physical space can amplify this problem? Should we even consider having screen with both public, private and commercial data?
- the data points us where? Please consider our environment.
- example of a challenge; informatics in nature; we decided; not there. Peopla are looking for peace here.
- these things should be polite in their appearance and behavior.
- a do you design a system with a personality
- just enough is more (not less is more)
- there is a golden line in between proving information and being polite

the future:
- more human interfaces – anthropomorphism? (should we design this, or not, uncanny valley)
- service avatars live in smaller contexts
- “basal’ “be as smart a a puppy’ ; be intelligent enough.
- example ” car robot’ (it reacts)
- sometimes; low fi can be more polite
- can we make urban screens more in place if they have names and behaviors? nano as great enabler.

norkapp.fi

For an internal PhD day at the University of Twente, I have created this poster. It tries to explain my research at the moment:

Method

- set up webcam

- start Processing prog.

- set pixelsize in prog to 1

- saveFrame when frame is filled.

- press ‘run’

- go about and do your daily stuff

- after an hour or two, watch the result.

A first comparison between two software apps: Processing and Elise. (more to come). In Processing, the trouble I often experience is the missing relation between code and action: between first thinking in code before checking the result visually). In this small experiment, the assignment was to create a circle using repetitive patterns. As you can see in Elise, by simply creating one branch of the LSystem, a direct visual feedback is given on what you have crated. By altering the angle or the number of iteration, patterns start emerging and visuals are born.

Circles in Processing

animated version:

Processing Circles Simple Math from tjerk timan on Vimeo.

code:

(more…)