Building the Meta-City

By Mark Rolston - October 27, 2011

The modern city is becoming a pointer system, the new URL, for tomorrow's hybrid digital-physical environment. Today's Facebook will be complemented by tomorrow's Placebook. Explosive innovation and adoption of computing, mobile devices and rich sources of data are changing our cities: where we live, work, and play. It's about us, and how computing in the context of our cities is changing how we live.

In this video from the PICNIC 2011 conference in Amsterdam, an annual idea exchange that takes place each spring, Mark Rolston takes a glimpse into a coming world where computing isn't just with us, but surrounds us and uses the context of our environment to empower us in more natural, yet powerful ways. According to Rolston, a digital landscape overlays our physical world and is expanding to offer ever-richer experiences that complement—and in emerging cases, replace—the physical experience.

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An autoupdating workspace?

A couple of influences this week evoked once again my great interest in how to conceive of a workplace that is continuously updated and enriched by the actions and adaptations of its users.

There were, of course, the many reflections on the culture that Steve Jobs developed at Apple. I found interest in a video we’ve referenced before with this specific observation about the Apple design culture – Every time you present the user with a non-essential decision to make, you have failed as a designer.

It is easy to appreciate the meaning of this in the experience of Apple’s products, and in its retail environments. In architecture in other places, it conjures up Mies van der Rohe, Tadao Ando, Louis Kahn, and others. The work of each is beautiful in its sparseness, in its precision, in its critical attributes, in its reduction. It is also easy to imagine how these environments would be seen as disappointments to those who were not their direct commissioners.

The notion that google was developed as a blank platform with an “autoupdater” that progressively enriched the platform is a great inspirational concept, too. An app gets progressively more valuable as the experience of thousands or millions informs its designers, providing the insights for its progressive development and enrichment.

Buildings learn, it seems, but rarely cumulatively. And in between the experience of the users of a building and its learning potential is an authoritarian structure charged with control and armed with the limiting tools of standards. Its role is unidirectional by intention, but even when embracing an interest in more progressive approaches it is under-resourced to effectively and accurately receive and respond to information coming from the direction of the occupier/user. The user is, of course, also under-resourced, without tools or opportunities to experiment or implement what they perceive to be better approaches to environments that might help them do their jobs better.

Designers are unintentional disappointments, as well. That is, the desire for recognition from peers, and for appreciation from users, frequently generates fully-loaded designs perceived as rich environments for their purpose but stripping the user of opportunity for authorship.

Is it possible, in then, to develop a workplace infrastructure in which the initial commission can be the minimally awesome product, and in which the users have resources and authority to make progressive adaptations based on a commitment to purpose and a goal of performance and the insights from ongoing experience?

What do you think?

Jim Meredith

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• architecture
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City-dwellers know that we are constantly bombarded with graphic messages. It’s the “white noise” of urban living. Most of us tune it out like the omnipresent sound of traffic and pedestrian chatter.

This 2006 award-winning film, made by Netherlands-based Studio Smack for Museum de Beyerd in Breda, has become a classic. Like an x-ray, the film “Kapitaal” zeroes in only on the graphic stimuli encountered by an “unseen commuter” waiting on a platform for the train, riding the subway and walking through the city. Everything but the graphic information is reduced to black silhouettes. Signage, logos, ads, train timetables, graffiti, posters and packaging labels stand out in stark white contrast. There is no voiceover commentary, just the claustrophobic visual assault pressing in from every direction. It begs the question: How much do people really notice in a world of information overload? How can designers and advertisers avoid adding to the visual clutter and give the public something they really want to see?