Senseable cities

Developers have created real-time control systems in various engineering applications, dramatically increasing systems’ efficiency by saving energy, regulating the dynamics, and increasing robustness and disturbance tolerance.
But can a city function as a real-time control system? MIT’s WikiCity project aims to find out.
A real-time control system has four key components:
• an entity to be controlled in an uncertain environment,
• sensors that can acquire information about the entity’s state in real time,
• intelligence that can evaluate system performance against desired outcomes, and
• physical actuators that can act on the system to realize the control strategy.
A city could fit the first two definitions. For example, the Real Time Rome project (http://senseable.mit.edu/realtimerome) uses cell phones and GPS devices to collect the movement patterns of people and transportation systems and their
spatial and social use of streets and neighborhoods.
But how could we actuate the city? Although it already contains several classes of actuators, such as traffic lights and
remotely updated street signs, its inhabitants are a much more flexible actuator.
Consequently, we’re creating a platform for storing and exchanging location- and time-sensitive data, making such data accessible to users through mobile devices, Web interfaces, and physical interface objects. This platform
lets people become distributed intelligent actuators, pursuing individual interests in cooperation and competition with others and thus becoming prime actors in improving urban systems’ efficiency.
For more information, contact Francesco
Calabrese at fcalabre@mit.edu or see http://senseable.mit.edu/wikicity.

From Urban Computing and Mobile Devices (IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2007)

Interior Landscaping

Trends in Interior Landscaping, as foreseen by Li Edelkoort:

• Gardening green
• Landscaping spaces
• Sowing ideas

Digital and real

“One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we
distinguish the digital from the real.” —William Gibson in a Rolling Stone interview, November 7, 2007

After a lunch with a friend

He suggested that truth should be considered an emotion. Interesting thought, Francesco.

Constructionism

Constructionism is based on two different senses of “construction.” It is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information “poured” into their heads. Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, or robots).

http://learning.media.mit.edu/projects.html

From Clean Up the World

I’m just watching ‘Clean Up the World – Lo sviluppo insostenibile’, a documentary showed on National Geographic Channel and these are some interesting estimates:

• on average, each of us makes 100.000 friends during his/her lifetime
• each of us eats 100.000 chocolate bars
• in every single moment of the day, more than 7% out of the entire earth population is drunk

Interaction and anthropology

Interaction: in massively parallel microworlds theory the patterns that rules of a system are not planned by some centralized authority but are determined by local interactions among decentralized components.

Interaction: since knowledge theories have suggested that cultures are not pure, but mixed, combined, the very important ethnographic moment is the interaction among radically different cultures.

Extracts from The Children’s Machine

The most important skill determining a person’s life pattern has already become the ability to learn new skills, to take in new concepts, to access new situations, to deal with the unexpected.
The kind of knowledge children most need is the knowledge that will help them get more knowledge. This is why we need to develop mathetics. I would use the term mathetics to a course on the “art of learning”

Rules to solve problems (taken from Polya’s work):

- Before doing anything else, spend a little time trying to think of other problems that are similar to one in hand.
- Students often fail to solve a problem because they insist on trying to solve the whole problem all at once; in many cases they would have an easier time of it if they were to recognize that parts of the problem can be solved separately and later put together to deal with the whole.
- It is not using the rule that solves the problem; it is thinking about the problem that fosters learning. Spend more time with the problems.

One of my central mathetic tenet is that the construction that takes place “in the head” (ndr cognitive maps construction) often happens especially felicitously when it is supported by a construction of a more public sort “in the world” – a sand castle, a Lego house or a corporation, a computer program, a poem, a theory of the universe.

Mathetics is also connected to the term bricolage. The basic tenets of bricolage as a methodology for intellectual activity are: Use what you’ve got, improvise, make do. And for the true bricoleur the tools in the bag will have been selected over a long time by a process determined by more than pragmatic utiity. These mental tools will be as well worn and confortable as the physical tools of the traveling tinker.; they will give a sense of the familiar, of being at ease with oneself.

..by defending a strategy of deliberately designing a program that would be only vaguley right but capable of being redirected, instead of shooting for being precisely right on the first shot and risking a complete mis. The same thought underlies Voltaire’s maxim “the best is the ennemy of good”.

I defined bricolage as a style of organizing work that can be described as negotiational rather than planned in advance.

Machine offers children a transition
between preschool learning and true literacy in a way that is more personal, more negotiational, more gradual, and so less precarious than the abrupt transition we now ask children to make as they move from learning through direct experience to using printed word as the source of important information.

Some important learning happens in conditions very different from School: Babies learn to talk without curriculum or formal lessons; people develop skill at hobbies without teachers; social behavior is picked up other than through classroom instruction.

It was Piaget who coined the oft-quoted line that play is child’s work. But no one in that environment was looking at the other half of this pithy aphorism: the idea that work (at least serious intellectual work) might be the adult’s play. We thought of children as “little scientists” but did not think much about the complementary idea of viewing scientists as “big children”.

Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But in School knowledge more often is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.

Warren McCulloch: heterarchy, which suggets a system in which each element is equally ruled bt all others.

Turning science into “used knowledge” has epistemological implications, because it allows richer ways to think about knowledge than a true/false epistemology based on authority.

What is typical of emergently programmed systems is that deviations from what was expected do not cause the whole to collapse but provoke adaptive responses.

Papert, 1994

The concept of experience in anthropological research

Interesting definition about the concept of experience in the anthropological research from the the late period of Cultural Studies: “I nuovi orientamenti definiscono la propria ricerca come una pratica di interpretazione di azioni di altri che l’osservatore stesso delimita permettendone la testualizzazione. L’intervento dell’osservatore è in primo piano e ritorna il concetto di esperienza come esperienza dell’osservatore nella sua relazione attiva con l’osservatore e dela responsabilità che si assume nella costruzione della realtà che osserva.” (Grandi, 1992: 138).

Soundtrack as theme park?

Can soundtracks from Hollywood movies be considered the ‘theme parks’ of music?