Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Light, rapid, and grassy

When I read Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language", one idea that seemed to me impractical in my part of the world but lovely nevertheless was to replace residential streets with what amounted to grassy cart tracks that could reduce and slow traffic and greenify a neighbourhood.  Kind of a bio-Woonerf.  Something like this might not work in a typical wet and muddy Ontario November, but it's an incredible idea for a green context for an LRT.  What's wrong with us in North America?  Why aren't we doing this kind of thing here?

Wayfinding hack

I can't condone this at all.  No.  Not at all....

Architecture with a point

It used to be, when I saw dramatic plans to entirely re-make a city according to some sweeping, futuristic vision, I'd raise a "never happen" eyebrow and move on.  But with some of the incredible  developments over the last few years (Beijing Olympics, Dubai, Shanghai), all bets are off.  Here's a description of such a proposal for Ansan City in South Korea.  Two things intrigue me greatly.  First, the proposal from the firm INABA for the building as wayfinding beacon shown below:

In case it isn't obvious, the idea here is that the lines of the building serve as a gigantic compass to define the cardinal directions of the landscape.  Big buildings often serve as convenient landmarks (CN Tower, Empire State Building) but introducing this kind of asymmetry takes things one step beyond.

Another part of the proposal, which perhaps makes such wayfinding aids more important, is a kind modular design (BIG and mass studies), that allows units to wax and wane in size and to change in organization according to need.
As a scientist interested in how the shape of space influences behaviour and feeling, the proposal fascinates me.  But if I were a potential resident, I wonder how this kind of fluid organization might unsettle me.  Also, in the image just above I wonder how the Corbusian combination of high density, wide roadways, and the underbuilding green space might work out in practice.  The pictured low density of cars and the heavily used green walkway: is that a pipedream?  How much of a difference does culture make?  In North America, I'd wonder if this is another Pruitt-Igoe in the making.  Would South Korea be different?

Wayfinding renaissance

It's truly a delight to see legendary wayfinder, Nainoa Thompson, of the Polynesian Voyaging Society continuing with his quest to keep the ancient seafaring methods of the Pacific Islanders alive.  Thompson will set out without any modern navigational instruments in a vessel something like the one pictured above in an attempt to travel from Hawaii to Kirbati, a round trip of about 2,000 miles.  The point?  To celebrate a remarkable heritage, to help to retain an ancient set of skills and perhaps most of all to remind us of a time when being somewhere could mean only actually being there, no matter how difficult the getting there might be. 
For me, one of the most enjoyable parts of writing my book was the opportunity to read about the methods and exploits of practitioners of these traditional seafaring methods. 

I heart my webkinz

Ok, I'm coming out.  I've got a Webkinz.  His name is Koko.  He's a cuddly silverback gorilla.  But it's an academic interest.  No, really.  My fall into deep gorilla love began about two weeks ago, when a sharp young architect I know scolded me for failing to connect with the interests of my NetGen children.  I've watched my kids play in Webkinz world on our computer for a long time now, mostly just looking on from afar, being mildly annoyed at the sounds coming out of the arcade, but (the shame) not really paying much attention to the thing other than glancing over the rules of engagement to convince myself that it is safe for them.

Backing up-- Webkinz are fuzzy little stuffies with a twist -- with each critter comes a year's worth of access to a virtual world with real estate, an economy, social networks (albeit limited ones).  Kids (and, as it turns out, Very Big Kids) can log in, visit, chat with buddies, play games, do jobs to earn money, furnish their rooms, buy real estate, and much more.  

After my meeting with my architecture friend, I came home filled with new questions for my children, four of whom showed me their Webkinz worlds and explained things to me. The younger ones even handed over their passwords so that I could go in late at night and earn some Kinz dollars for them on the surprisingly engaging games.

Last week I celebrated my birthday and one of my children, with a smile big enough to swallow the whole room, handed me a bag full of gorilla.  And I have to tell you that Mr. Theoretician has been having a ball with him.  It's now gone slightly beyond just enjoying the games to feeling a slight bit of filial concern for my stuffie gorilla.  I don't like when I don't know where he is.  And when I hold him in my hand and my son holds one of his growing collection in his hand, we play together, surrendering ourselves to a goofy imaginary world that the virtual world connection makes more compelling in a way that I don't understand yet.  

It's a vastly different context to the kinds of cyber-real connections I've been writing about for the past few days, but it is definitely related.  Our ability to use technology to build virtual places and to make orderly connections between them and our real places is opening new possibilities for play as well as for more serious pursuits.  I'd love to tell you more, but Koko needs another banana.

Annotating space with augmented reality

Following my discovery of QR tags, I'm continuing to wander down the road of bleeding edge technological developments that will influence not only the way that we find our way through space but also how we connect with locations and the things that they contain.  With the advent of cheap and accurate GPS and accelerometry and the continued development of sophisticated mobile computing for the everyday user, the possibilities are quite staggering.  As if I wasn't excited enough yesterday by the development of an entire store full of QR tagged merchandise related to my forthcoming book, I now discover the remarkable Enkin:

Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.

Imagine it. You're out on the street in a new city, hopelessly lost. Pull out your camera phone and point it at the closest building. The fun here would be that not only could the device tell you where you are (which a simple GPS device could already handle easily), but it could be used to provide annotation. A simple application would be something like a cyber-walking tour, but much more fun could be had by embedding something like this within an extended augmented reality game. Location-based games are already nicely underway in some quarters, but this seems like a way to jack up the graphics content of such games to make a more compelling hybrid of the real and the virtual.

Cyber-geotagging

Plans for some fun activities connected with the launch of my book are now beginning to ramp up, so I've been spending a fair bit of my time this week poking my nose into some new (to me) tech areas.  I've been looking for excuses to spend time with the avalanche of new interest and applications relating to geo-tagging and GPS for some time now, and my chance, happily has come.  I've even managed to astonish some of my tech-savvy children with my new found expertise-- something that doesn't happen every day.

Much more to come on this in the days ahead, but my most interesting find of the day has been the QR code.  Somewhere in the back closets of my muddled brain, I knew about these things, but I had no idea that they were a. so easy to generate, b. so easy to read, and c. so potentially powerful as a means of connecting real places to the cyberlandscape.  So here's a quick primer:

1.  If you have a camera phone with a web browser, start by going here

www.i-nigma.mobi

to download a nifty piece of software that will allow you to read QR codes.  Test by reading this:

Just run the software, point your camera at this image, and amaze your friends.  If you'd like to generate your own QR codes, it's just as easy.  Go here:

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Can you see how much fun could be had with this?  For some reason this simple technology for joining the mobile web to real world objects seems uncommon here, yet is more widely used in other parts of the world.

Many thanks to my friend Richard, who is leading me, not so much kicking and screaming, into cool new hardware and software territory these days. 

 

Rats of Manhattan

This is a quirky idea, but one that has also occurred to me, and connects with the work of one of my graduate students:

 

The image comes from a report by David Eilam of Tel Aviv University in which he unleashed rats in different kinds of "urban plans".  The one on the left is a Manhattan grid and the one on the right, as he describes it, resembles the layout of an irregular city like New Orleans.  Eilam shows that rats in both cities do the same amount of walking, but the Manhattan rats cover more territory.  I'm not sure how seriously to take his argument that this kind of setup could be used by urban planners as a design tool, though some similar work in our lab is motivated by our desire to show that certain types of principles used in architecture and planning are so deeply rooted in our biology that one can show them in different kinds of animals (with key differences related to the lifestyle of the animal involved).

Now what Eilam needs to do is to build some nice little subways and LRTs to see how movement at a wide range of speeds influences the mix.  You think I'm kidding.  You should see my lab.

Wayfinding in Toronto's PATH system.

Residents of Toronto know about the rich system of underground pedestrian thoroughfares known as the PATH system, and given the frigid forecast for the week ahead, many will be glad to use it.  Even seasoned veterans know how difficult it can be to keep one's bearings in the PATH, though, because there's no correlation between the layout of the subterranean network and what lies above.  That's why this proposal to connect the great outdoors with the tunnel system is such a clever idea.  The large convex glass "oculi" will afford pedestrians with almost panoramic views of the sights above ground, and should be an effective wayfinding aid.  The windows will have the added advantage of throwing a lot of natural light into the PATH.  As an experimentalist, I can think of all kinds of nefarious ways to mess with these oculi to test various theories of wayfinding, but I think that would be, um, somewhat counter to the objectives.  If these portals to the sky come into existence, it would even be great to do a simple pre-post study to see what effect they have on how well people can find their way.  Hmmm.  If only there were a psychologist in the building.

The art of being lost

We're in for a very interesting year.  To put it mildly.  The world's economy is being shaken to its foundations.  I don't think we've come to terms with all of the reasons for this yet.  Fingers of blame are pointed at politicians and investment bankers, and there's some justification for that, but there's a greater mystery: what have we become that we were so willing to mortgage our own future, our children's future, and our grandchildren's future for the sake of an avalanche of underpriced plastic toys, cheap electronics, and gigantic amusement parks for homes that, deep down, we know just don't make us happy?  

There will never be a better time for us to think about what we've become, think hard, and think outside the box.  Indeed, there may never be another time to do this.  Artists of all stripes can make a real contribution to this difficult and painful exercise.  I hope theatre like this is the thin edge of a wedge.  We're all lost in the woods, like the Hansel and Gretel of old.  But now the woods look very different.  Because of the cocoon of modern technology we've built for ourselves everything is happening at once and all in the same place.  So how can we ever feel lost?  Because being everywhere feels exactly the same as being nowhere, and being everywhen feels the same as having just run out of time.