PUBLIC MARKS with search environment

Copenhagen designers GamFratesi have designed a prototype desk with a cave-like shield on top to create an intimate working environment.

What data can we wring out of the rural environment that might prove of use to it’s residents and visitors? What embedded processes should have APIs opened up to the wider community?

you said: “Especially given the by-now-clichéd recognition that we’ve decisively become an urban species”

It is indeed very interesting to think about urban systems design given there was a major move toward cities. That said I have the feeling that this move comes with, at least, three issues:

1. access to the “thought” urban environment,

2. the space left where 50% of the population is still living,

3. the space of this growth

There are many areas in the world where the growth of the cities is made by people without access or a limited access to the thought urban environment. Poor people living in slums or just in a space which is not part of the work of urban planner per say. In a recent exhibition about slums I went, it was very interesting to see that the organic structure of the slums was making possible for the individuals to create a rich and meaningful space, driving sometimes to less criminality than more traditional areas of the city. The slum is a forced collective creative space for survival.

The rest of the population, the 50% living in deserted areas are the forgotten of this story. It’s indeed more “fun”, interesting for researchers, sociologists to observe and think about the density in urban space (richness of interactions) more than the low level of activities in the “countryside”. Though there are equal challenges there in terms of design and space organization, access to services, etc.

Finally, is it really cities which are growing? What we call urban space often relates to the city center, but I have the feeling that the growth is happening in the in-between space (suburbs), which is again a complete disaster in terms of design, even more so in rich countries. The private space is becoming a space of non-creativity, dead areas of non activities. Someone, who wants to start a small business in between two buildings on the grass of a random suburb of a rich city, will not last for very long. Complete different dynamic than the slum where unregulated areas give the opportunity of creative solutions for surviving or living.

Developing Flowdock, a real-time environment allowing teams to work together seamlessly, we needed a database able to scale horizontally for huge amount of write operations. Cassandra’s data model and performance characteristics made it a perfect fit for our needs.

A significant weakness of HTTP in my view is its dependence on the MIME standard for media type identification and on the related iana registry. This registry is a limited bottleneck that does not have the capacity to deal with the media type definition requirements of individual enterprises or domains. Machine-centric environments rely in a higher level of semantics than the human-centric environment of the Web. In order for machines to effectively exploit information, every unique schema of information needs to be standardised in a media type and for those media types to be individually identified. The number of media types grows as machines become more dominant in a distributed computing environment and as the number of distinct environments increases.

MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities) is a publication of research and visions; research into territories, which can be concrete or abstract, but always put into question. Map is not a magazine (it only has two pages) and is not a book (it is issued twice a year). Map presents itself as a folded poster (A1) where information is immediate, dense and objective in one side, and architectural and subjective on the other. Map is a guide to potential actions in the built environment, a folded encyclopedia of the possible, a topography of ideas, or a poster on the wall.

After my last video about using a barcode scanner to add and search books in your library, I was feeling pretty happy. Bar code scanners are pretty cheap–mine cost about $65. But then Google released the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) and it turns out that you don’t even need a bar code scanner. Instead, you can use an Android phone such as the G1.

Just as a proof-of-concept, here’s a barcode scanner written in six lines of Python code:

Processing for the Web is a proposed Mozilla-sponsored initiative to create a complete and robust port of the Java-based Processing language and environment (popular for art, design, and visualization applications) to the open web, using standard technologies such as JavaScript, Canvas, etc.

The Big Board is a real-time collaborative environment for mapping. Users open “conference rooms” on a shared map, and join conversations in these conference rooms, much like in a regular teleconferencing application. However, instead of sharing faces and powerpoints and speech over the wire, users draw on and add content to a shared map or very large image.

We very much believe that the practical geo-engineering

OpenProcessing is an online community platform devoted to sharing and discussing Processing sketches in a collaborative, open-source environment.

It starts by including citizen to elicit and describe the local dynamics and needs to feed the data analysis process of their city. They can create their own point of view with the ability to observe and capture their environment. This potential to capture, observe and replay the city echoes very well with the recent interest of some architects, urban planners and designers in unconventional data sources (e.g. beyond traditional surveys). But how does it integrate into the current practice? Is there a spot for some vernacularism? How can urban scouts and urban safaris communicate with practitioners and decision makers?

NEBULA is a Cloud Computing environment developed at NASA Ames Research Center, integrating a set of open-source components into a seamless, self-service platform. It provides high-capacity computing, storage and network connectivity, and uses a virtualized, scalable approach to achieve cost and energy efficiencies.

The fully-integrated nature of the NEBULA components provides for extremely rapid development of policy-compliant and secure web applications, fosters and encourages code reuse, and improves the coherence and cohesiveness of NASA's collaborative web applications. It is used for Education and Public Outreach, for collaboration and public input, and also for mission support.

Built from the ground up around principles of transparency and public collaboration, NEBULA is also an open-source project. NEBULA is built on the NEBULA platform.