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Urban Informatics Speech Title Generator

Do you like cities? Do you like architecture? Do you like speaking at conferences? We'd like you to give a talk titled....

We’ve created the Experience History: Berlin 1961-1989 group, to give members the opportunity to share photographic memories of divided Berlin during this period. If you were living or visiting Berlin at that time, this is a wonderful excuse to rediscover your old slides and dust off those photo-filled shoe boxes that are lurking under your bed.

Theme of the symposium was “la ville cartographiée” (the city map), and to give our contribute to the discussion, we were warmly welcome to the ‘Cité des sciences et de l’industrie‘; built in the 19th arrondissement, just beside Parc de la Villette, ‘La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie’ is one of the world’s largest and most visited science museums, and looks as an impressive modern site which offers a wide variety of exhibitions and shows.

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.

Software version numbers should be straightforward to implement. Their sequencing is hardly subtle: version 1.0 is the first production quality release; version 1.1 improves on it, version 1.2 is a little better; and so on until we get to version 2.0, which delivers more substantial changes. Then comes 2.1, then 2.2 ...

As anyone who has tried to implement such a scheme will realise, it can be a surprising source of problems, and although these problems have been tackled by many projects in many organisations there seems to be no consensus on how to reach a solution. To give an example: deriving the version number from the version control system is tempting, but ultimately turns out to be unsatisfactory.

social location games are titles which interact with your location and are sensitive to your surroundings, adapting to where you are. For example, it might mean that, if you are on a boating trip, the system will give you in-game activities that are linked to fishing or water sports.

One of the 8 works I created for the Data Art Show at the Pink Hobo Gallery in Minneapolis.

All these pieces are a pun on the new craze for data visualization. The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well.

But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics.

Since I do not have a problem with aesthetics for their own sake in these pieces I deliberately took the opposite direction. Since I wanted to create something visually interesting I made up my own data which would give me the desired results. All these works are the result of generative algorithms, so all the elements and their connections are actually data and not something I assembled manually in Illustrator.