no2self.net

Question answered:

cityofsound says:

It was a conversation between Matt Jones and I, wherein he sketched out his idea (using your notebook it would seem) about a kind of perspectival layered data landscape, building up from Dopplr and related web services – in the manner of the classic New Yorker cover on ‘the x view of the world’ …

I think.

I’ve been itching to tell you about this for months, ever since Matt last put me up for the night at Hotel Webb and gave me a sneak preview. The other half of the ever-inspirational Schulze & Webb has published the results of his Bendy Maps research and the finished product is even more beautiful and game-changing than I ever imagined.

“Imagine a person standing at a street corner. The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immediate environment. Close buildings are represented normally, and the viewer himself is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands.

As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer’s local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight.”

A map projection that simultaneously places you in your current location and future destination, it offers all the potency of well understood mental wayfinding devices and imagery in one single drawing. The potential, as both a drawing technique for urban design proposals as well as real-time guide for travellers, is huge.

Those well understood devices of course include references to ancient, seminal texts such as Lynchian ideas of nodes, boundaries and paths etc., but in the title of the project itself – ‘Here & There’ – lies another connection to the world of mid-20th century urban design theory explored here in past entries: Gordon Cullen’s Townscape.

From our previous entry:

“Place…is concerned with our reactions to the position of our body in the environment. This is as simple as it appears to be. It means, for instance, that when you go into a room you utter to yourself the unspoken words ‘I am outside IT, I am entering IT, I am in the middle of IT’. At this level of conciousness we are dealing with a range of experience stemming from the major impacts of exposure and enclosure.

…

Arising out of this sense of identity or sympathy with the environment … we discover that no sooner do we postulate a HERE than automatically we must create a THERE, for you cannot have one without the other. Some of the greatest townscape effects are created by a skillful relationship between the two…”

Which you may remember was followed by a some other examples supported by the imagery in Chuck Jones’ Pepe Le Pew cartoons.

You can read more about bendy maps on the S&W blog and order your own copy on the official project page or read more about it in this month’s Wired UK. I’ll certainly be ordering a copy for my wall, but as beautiful as it is I still can’t help dreaming about a version rendered like a letratone covered Cullen sketch or Chuck Jones animation cell.

I hinted at one the projects I’ve been working on in a recent post and followed it up with a presentation at Ecobuild. The full write up is on the new BSD blog and images available at Slideshare, but I should offer an excerpt and some further notes here.

Vision-lozells.org represents my first attempt to get closer to the ideas in Dan Hill’s ‘Personal Well Tempered Environment’ concept and the subsequent notes in my own post, ‘Up On The Roof’. I’ve been collaborating with the guys at Slider Studio to develop the next stage in our investigations into online consultation work; but this time, by developing the platform they created for the self-build market, we’ve moved into the third dimension.

You know what I’m into. I want to start plugging it in to stuff. Getting data from the real world in and out of it. The notes below and the Ecobuild presentation I gave start to describe how we might do that using solutions most of you will know well.

I’ll be spending this weekend at our last public open day for ecoterrace.co.uk, followed by an event with the residents of blurtonvision.co.uk to start our version of the Open Street Map / public data mashup. Unfortunately this means I won’t be able to attend the Homecamp event on Saturday and get more connected with the folks developing exactly the ideas I’m pitching here. However I will be able to come along to the next Be2camp and do my bit to draw connections between the social bits, the media bits and the home bits. Come along and criticize/help.

BIM and Social Media

Axis Design and Slider Studio have created a new tool for Birmingham City Council called YouCanPlan Lozells. Slider’s ESP software has been resigned to suit the challenges of the diverse people and places of community consultation work. The software will be distributed via both CD and online to over 2500 households. It can be used both online and offline to ensure it can be used in any venue, but we hope that the benefits of the online mode means that people using it from home can make the most of both the live updates to proposals in the coming months, as well as using survey and chat tools to tell Birmingham City Council what they think about the designs being proposed by the city’s urban design team.

At its first public test during an event in the local park it was well received. In particular by the local teenagers who instantly took to the interface and chat tools. Making contact and building enthusiasm with the younger generations is often one of the biggest challenges with consultation work so in this case we hope that we’ve created something that will help us hear the voices of the future generations and perhaps bring some parents with them, curious to see what their children are using. Whilst the ability to consult with people from the comfort of their own home is huge step towards a more representative mandate from a neighbourhood, we’ve always described this as a tool to supplement the vital face to face debates that need to go on. With that in mind the software can be used in offline environments and the investment in 3D modelling can be used to produce rapid prototyped physical models that match the software .

What of the future and the implications for BIM? How can this tool help us manage data about a building or street? In its current format the model and software is a framework that can take inputs and changes in a top down fashion from stakeholders whose roles are well understood. It will receive new models and designs of steadily improving detail and can display images and links to other sources of info provided by local authorities and RSLs, but what of the community? How do we build a system that allows data rising from the streets – in a bottom up fashion – to manifest itself in the model and record live information about the neighbourhood. Our experience with web 2.0 tools and consultation work tells us that there are tools available to help us and they come under the title ’social media’. Let’s look at a few examples and then imagine how YouCanPlan could use them to bring BIM, post-occupancy monitoring and community consultation together.

Pachube, developed by architect Usman Haque, is a service that aims to broker data for you. It takes information from physical objects that can record things, tidies it up, then spits out the results in a number of useful formats that you can plug into (or point at) another location. The simplest example is electricity meters. I have a meter at my office recording the number of kW used. It sends the info to Pachube allowing me to access it from anywhere and do anything with it. A number of visualisation methods have already been created by others, allowing me to either simply display the info online or feed it into other tools such as the AMEE carbon emissions calculator, letting me know how many tonnes (gulp!) of carbon I’m churning out.

Another social media tool that takes simple inputs and creates powerful outputs is Twitter. Unless you’ve been living under a particularly analogue rock lately, you’ll have probably heard of this web site. Twitter simply wants you to tell it what you’re doing. No, really, that’s it. Just tell it what you’re doing and do it within 140 characters. I’ve been using it for a couple of years for keeping in touch with like-minded architects and bloggers and more recently using it as a tool for dispatching the lyrics of one of my favourite bands one line at a time. Others, like Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, have found ways to use it for recording more than just bon mots and satirical one liners. By plugging it into all the activities around the house Andy has found a way to make his home twitter. A live feed of building information as devices switch on, doors open and phones ring.

Mapping is an important part of information modelling; the data is most useful when tied accurately to location. However, mapping can be a prohibitive field as commercial restrictions can often make extensive availaibility and re-use of map information costly. Open Street Map allows us to avoid this problem by providing up to date maps that are completely free to use and adapt. The wikipedia of mapping, Open Street Map is by the people and for the people, created by volunteers with GPS devices all over the world. Its open source nature allows us to look at ways of combining the info with other tools such as phonecam sites like moblog.co.uk or flickr.com. Marking the position of a photo – an option increasingly done automatically by some phone models – allows us to track the latest events and activities in a neighbourhood visually. This has been succesfully developed, alongside other services such as planning alerts and transport links, by Tom Chance and Thomas Wood and their interactive map of Sutton.

Tools like these will turn platforms like YouCanPlan into a virtual environment augmented by reality. By allowing the model to plug into other information modelling systems the buildings will convey live information about the current state of a house or street or neighbourhood. The data shown in the model will help local authorties record and assess public information, and the residents will be able to keep in touch with the activities of friends and family and show landlords and local authorities what the most pressing issues are right now. The recording and public display of energy information for a household introduces the possibility of encouraged energy saving through competition. Who has saved the most money in the street this week? Who has created the most carbon?

The successful reduction of carbon emissions in the built environment to meet the targets of 2050 is entirely dependent on an improvement in performance informed by regular post-occupancy monitoring. BIM can continue to play a vital role in this process beyond the completion of the construction and there are powerful social media tools available to help make it happen. A creative approach to the field and an open mind to the power of open data formats will help the profession to share knowledge and avoid the usual debates about interoperability. We need to improve the communication between the designers and users throughout the life of the building, not just as we hand over the keys.

Birmingham City Council launched a major new project today. I spent the afternoon with Director of Housing, Elaine Elkington and Councilor John Lines at the opening of our passive solar experiment in Kings Heath. This marks the beginning of 3 years of post-occupancy monitoring we’ll be doing in collaboration with the guys at Hockerton Housing.

This is one of the projects I presented at Ecobuild – slides available at Slideshare.

Oh, and I hear there was some announcement about a new library.

A little early to judge from such a small amount of information – 3 images released so far – but from the looks of this sketch it would seem that the fate of the existing John Madin designed building has been decided. You can’t normally see the museum’s clock tower on the horizon from here.

The tussle of architectural periods between the three buildings on the square, hinted at by Mecanoo’s Francine Houben in the video, somehow reminds me of the John Cleese and Two Ronnies sketch.

Although being literally grounded through its reach down into the very soil of the city, the sunken amphitheatre proposed does help it avoid feeling like little more than a beauty competition line up. You want me to be open to the people of Birmingham? Here’s my lower intestine. Perhaps the way to a buildings heart is through its stomach.

Should you find yourself at Ecobuild tomorrow afternoon, be sure to stop by the Thames Lounge and say hello. I’ll be there from 1pm, starting with a talk on passive solar for the ‘Making Sustainable Affordable’ session followed by another on BIM and social media for the ‘Information Modelling for Greener Buildings’ seminar.

I’m particularly looking forward to the latter of the two as I’m hoping it will give me the chance to bring some be2camp ideas to a more mainstream (?) crowd.

See you tomorrow.

Happy birthday blog, you just turned 5 years old.

Here’s an interesting article on static caravan parks:

Trailers have long interested Morrish. He likes the simplicity of long, narrow, free-standing structures. Light and breezes come in from either side. If ceilings are pushed to 10 feet or higher, small rooms can feel much larger. And since most walls are exterior walls, the possibilities of adjacent gardens and indoor/outdoor spaces are many.

He had no quarrel, really, with the new urbanist movement. But stacking homes above retail shops along transit corridors can’t happen everywhere. Besides, there’s a “formula” to new urban design that doesn’t appeal to Morrish’s eclectic tastes.

And you thought I was kidding when I cited the caravan as fertile ground for housing ideas.

More from Morrish:

His new book, “Growing Urban Habitats, Seeking a New Housing Development Model,” will be out in June. It begins with a proposal to refashion an aging trailer park in Charlottesville, Va., and ends with a design that interlaces long, narrow structures that are affordable, sustainable and well-suited to the valley just below Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate.

“The project is fairly dense, but it doesn’t just stack units up into the air.”

Ok, point taken. I was exagerating for impact. Yet my drawing does rather neatly sum up the problem. Ask an architect about the opportunities for prefabricated housing and trailer park living and they’ll turn it into a building problem. A Rubik’s cube challenge of Lego-like simplicity.

As I said in the flickr comments for the image above, over at Axis we keep having conversations about housing models that get the balance right between independence and community/neighbourhood and we always end up at trailer parks. When those conversations turn into a live project we need to remember that this is a landscape problem, an infrastructure problem, a state vs. private, freehold/leasehold land ownership, territory problem. Not a building problem that’s solved with a crisp, cutaway axonometric.

Despite being unsuccessful in the Show Us A Better Way bid, I’m busy hatching plans to develop the neighbourhood activity map that I pitched for, thanks to the help of Tom Chance from Bioregional who I met at be2camp. I also need help from the Open Street Map community though to commence the cartography. Cloudmade put me in touch with Andy Robinson from the local group and he invited me to the next meeting – at the pub.

It’s a dirty job etc. My timing was perfect, as I discovered they were hours away from officially announcing the completion of the Birmingham map – the first English city to do so.

I distinctly remember the launch of openstreetmap.org. I also distinctly remember thinking it was a crazy idea, despite the fact that other examples like Wikipedia were beginning to make a difference. Mapping the whole world? By hand? Nuts.

I can’t remember the last time I was so pleased to have been so utterly wrong. Here’s a beautiful video showing exactly how wrong I was in full technicolour.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

“It’s very satisfying to see a complete city mapped in OpenStreetMap. Four years ago when this project was created we were looking at a blank screen and most commentators thought we were crazy.” said Andy Robinson, secretary of the OpenStreetMap Foundation and a prolific mapper in the West Midlands.

Quite. There’s also a video available on the group’s Mappa Mercia site of Andy and his fellow mappers drawing their traces all over our city during the last two years.

So now we have a map. What do we do with it? Anything we damn well want of course, which is precisely the point. The possibilities for community driven cartography explorations are endless. Anecdotal, human, personal and empowering marks to be made over a map that boasts a greater accuracy than any other online or satnav maps.

I look forward to deploying it, adding to it and promoting it. I’m going to start with the reason I was talking about @podnosh in the tweet from the pub – it’s time we included it in one of the other innovative online communities we have here in Brum: the Social Media Surgery.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession—a hive occupied by generations of bees. In America, the houses seem privately ours, even when we have not built them up, in pine two-by-fours and four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood, from a poured-concrete foundation. Houses are, as Newland Archer sensed, our fate. The houses we build in our fiction need not conform to a floor plan—indeed, the reader’s capacity for visualizing spatial relations is feeble—but they must conform to a life plan, feeding the characters’ senses whenever these turn outward, confirming social place with their walls and accoutrements, echoing in authentic matter the spiritual pattern the author intends to trace. A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. Every novelist becomes, to a degree, an architect—castles in air!—and a novel itself is, of course, a kind of dwelling, whose spaces open and constrict, foster display or concealment, and resonate from room to room.

John Updike on fictional houses. Found, about 5 links deep through twitter and web, here: Architectural Digest

Deep joy(sts), originally uploaded by eversion.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Walsall Art Gallery is
wonderful. A delight waiting at every turn.

I found another one… Po-mo blast off!

Inside, Charles Moore reviews Jenck’s ‘The Language of Post-Modern Architecture’:

Whatever it’s called, it is probably more useful to to consider how to do it. Here I think Jencks prescription for a ‘radical eclecticism’ is incomplete. His concept of ‘multivalence’ seems to be entirely to do with architecture as communication – simply a matter of horizontal connections. And although the richness and variety of that communication – as proposed by Jencks – is far greater than that we’ve lately been offered, what seems to be missing is the way we feel about buildings – how light animates them and the breezes flow through them, and how they engage our bodies and give us a sense of where we are and cause our spirits to soar, as perhaps the spaces themselves soar.

Moving from the simple horizontal connections to the spaces that make our spirits soar is, I think, where Russell Davies is heading with his new schtick. Read on.