Symbolism/utility spectrum

Because space is shared and owned, there tends to be a bias towards utilitarian (street signs etc), owner orientated and commercial imagery. Tagging, other forms of graffiti and murals mostly fall outside these categories and get suppressed. Location aware devices would allow subjective and selectively viewable augmentation of environments and give people the freedom to mark, demarcate and annotate spaces based on criteria beyond those dictated by commercial, utilitarian and owner orientated interests.

Utility arguments have led recently to the marginalisation even of architects; with engineers arguing (usually on economic grounds) that structures can be built (by them) purely following principles of utility.

Human beings don't use the buildings they live and work in just to symbolically demarcate spaces, they are used to get out of the rain, or to regulate temperature.

If meaning shifts from the structures themselves to devices, it still leaves a lot of structures...

A fraction of the infrastructure and buildings in human environments are primarily symbolic, but given that most buildings do encode a lot of information beyond their utility, it represents a real shift to have what they encode fall into the hands of individuals and communities.

Fragmentation and subjective idealism (utopian, distopian, inevitable)

In the UK there used to be just 3 TV channels, limited sources of popular culture and news..

now with the explosion in content, and the diverse sources of that content, society fragments and the wider community has fewer and fewer persistent common cultural reference points

the number of possible subjective realities multiplies..

So far, in media terms, this has largely been confined to what music you listen to, what films you watch, where you get your news. When you go outside what you see is much the same as what everyone else sees, the same street signs, the same adverts, the same shop fronts..

But what If real space is overlaid with layers of invisible symbolism. What if what you see is determined by what the intersection of your extended community and your interests dictate, as well as what is really there.

Your view of the space and other people is supplemented by additional subjective annotation and symbolism (electronic equivalents of the information communicated by signs, clothing, physical demarcation, shop fronts).

Social fragmentation extends as the technology reaches in to define the whole experience of the space in subjective terms (a dystopian, utopian, or inevitable outcome depending on your point of view).

There's nothing new about subjective filtering of space and people, but externalising the idea and undermining the apparently fixed nature of the built environment erodes notions of common experience and common reference points.

real life

A lot of people live in a house on a street

They might have a good circle of friends

But they don't know that many people on their street

Parallel to that street are many other streets

They don't know many of the people on the other streets

Further there is very little (that is socially acceptable) that they can do to get to know more of the people on their street or on the other streets.

If they're bored they have no way to find the other bored people, if they need to borrow something they have a very narrow range of people to ask, and they can't ask everybody on all the streets.

If they lose a cat, they have to go around sticking photocopied photos of the cat to trees.

In short their interface to their local community is really bad (even if they have a copy of the local paper).

Maybe they go to the local coffee shop and while they're standing in the queue they notice someone who looks interesting. What are the chances that they are going to say anything?

And that's the place they live.

What about when they're somewhere they don't live

..then the problem is even worse. Even with a benign guide like the lonely planet, they're restricted to reasonably reliable commercial interactions. No way to reach out to the local community except through extreme bravery, alcohol or accident.

Without a lonely planet they're stuck with neon hotel signs and mcdonalds and guesswork.

Cities have scaled up so that more and more people live in them, but the people in them are further apart than ever. Idealised close communities can only be found on TV shows, corporate campuses and in the compounds of religious cults.

Which is not to say that nobody has a life, just that there are big and very real boundaries (walls, doors curtains, streets and social convention) to making sense of your local environment and extending the life you have ended up with.

Conventional points of contact are very blunt, scary and primitive, notice boards at the gym, ads in the local paper, getting drunk, dating agencies, going to martial arts or meditation classes.. (the internet counterparts of these are just as scary, if not more so).

Solving the interface problem would mean making space more immediately familiar and usable and introducing people who wanted to be introduced.

New ways to relate to each other and leverage and extend the possibilities for local community

Leveraging the latent potential from parallel rows of silent houses:

- a playground control system (for making better use of the square of tarmac that is the playground)

- spontaneous help/disorder system (amish collective house building, pushing broken cars, organising riots).

- a boredom finding and resolving system

- coordinating laundry

hitch hiking is practically dead but there are more cars going where you want to go than ever

there are millions of spare rooms and empty houses and millions of people who wouldn't mind you spending the night if they had reason to trust you and you were interesting, or you could pay them, or you had something to exchange

..you could find yourself driving cars that aren't yours, living in empty houses that aren't yours..

40% of food used is wasted in the US, people don't share

there might be a parking space when you need one, but you can't ask the people who can see it even though you might pay to know what they know

There are opportunities to help and to be helped, to exchange or share, that the bluntness of our current social interfaces exclude.

The proposition is that there is latent potential in the system that cannot be utilised without changing or augmenting the system.

The barrier that stops these kinds of transactions taking place..

..is that there is no efficient way to broadcast a request selectively to a trusted group of people you don't know inside a set geographical radius.

..you could solve this tragedy of the commons through a combination of location aware devices, a trust system and a system that could filter and coordinate need.

Common property (common to small self-defining groups rather than universally and arbitrarilly shared) could work if you could solve the trust problem, the filter problem, the location awareness problem and build an interface.

the wealthy tend to share stuff among themselves (because they trust the other wealthy people).

New ways to formalise the sharing and exchange of non-monetised latent value

[In many countries sex is implicitly or explicitly, illegally or legally for sale..]

A sandwich shop is not the only place you can get a sandwich, but a sandwich shop is a specialised source of sandwiches. It's externally marked, and visible and identifiable as a sandwich shop, it's designed to be open and entered by people, and the sandwiches are priced to clarify the nature of the transaction. Convention dictates and supports the efficient transfer of sandwiches from sandwich vendor to customer.

So convention, visibility, efficiency (through specialisation and centralisation), dictate that when you want a sandwich and you aren't near your kitchen, you probably need to find a sandwich shop.

So you need to find a row of shops and then find the shop that sells the sandwiches.

..alternatively you could state what you were seeking (in this case a sandwich) selectively broadcast your request (perhaps to a local subset of a community with which you are aligned), state the range of exchange possibilities you would consider (information, work or money, conversation, things).

The range of responses might include automated directions to the local sandwich shop, or a note telling you to knock on the door of the house across the road (if you would be prepared to take some laundry to the Laundromat in exchange for a sandwich).

Despite there efficiency, shops, money and 20th century convention have a limiting effect: on the range of formal exchanges that are possible, the people who can take part in those exchanges, and where those exchanges can take place.

The problem with barter systems is that they require an incredible level of serendipity, both parties have to have something the other party is prepared to accept if the transaction is to be successful. Which is why cash is such a useful neutral point of exchange. The simultaneous need problem is surmounted by the neutrality of cash.

Physical markets were the traditional way of making the required serendipity more likely to occur.

The ultimate evolutionary outcome was that you would specialise in geese, bring your geese to the geese seller, exchange your geese for some coins and then go and buy some chairs with the coins (and the chair seller would buy some chickens with your coins, converting your coins into chickens).

But life is getting more interesting and if you are able to efficiently extend the range of possible exchanges, exchange locations, and people to exchange with, then why not?

So you get a sandwich without walking further, at the same time meeting someone from your extended community (the system handling at least the greater part of the trust issue), and make the exchange in terms that might be more favourable to you than handing over money (or perhaps your money circulates within your community rather than outside of it).

You can know what other possibilities exist.

moving from a web model to a pursuit/transaction/externalised identity model

This idea of broadcasting need is part of what has been called the 'pursuit' model. If you have a mobile device, beyond its direct communication function, you probably want it to help solve your immediate problems and to help you fulfil your immediate needs.

To take this idea further you could use some kind of externalised identity that can give a respondent a context for your request (community allegiances for instance), and a formal way for each party to measure the trustworthiness of the other.

Building trust systems, externalising identity, and matching requests to possible respondents are extremely difficult problems. But they are problems that people are working on solving.

Huge numbers of people are walking round with mobile phones, that is, wireless digital devices that already know roughly where they are (and these devices are getting rapidly more capable). Most of these devices are struggling to fit in with the web model when clearly the screens are too small and the tiny keypads inadequate for traditional web surfing.

The web is already in some sense an exchange, a way to get information from one entity or person to another. The problem is to build a more efficient exchange.

The web lacks the concept of identity. You may have an email address, or a phone number, both of which in some sense function as a persistent extension of you, (collecting and facilitating the exchange of messages), but they do not facilitate more sophisticated transactions on your behalf. They differ very little from the function of the mat below your letterbox. You may have a web page, but an individual's (as opposed to a corporate or organisational) webpage is usually a fairly static entity, a symbol, rather than a transaction mediating entity.

The point is that your internet identity is not a coherent, functioning, device independent manifestation of you, it does not formally embody your trustworthiness, it does not formally record your community affiliations, it does not communicate your needs or solicit opportunities to fulfil the needs of others on your behalf.

The web model can work pretty well if you have the time and the skill to find what you want, but the constraints of mobile devices both require, inspire, and offer an opportunity to develop, more efficient, individual-centric, and spatially linked exchanges.

Filtering, reputation, trust systems and infomediaries

the deep irony is that even as people are packed ever more closely together the gap between them widens.

People have spent the last 40 years devoting more and more time sitting in front of computer monitors and tv screens simulating community and ignoring the people living next door and down the street.

blocks of flats, estates, streets of people who only get to realise that they might get along, or be able to help each other, when something goes wrong.

filtering

You can filter who you talk to by speaking in a specific forum,. Leaving a notice on a notice board in a climbing wall means that only climbers get to see the notice. Leaving a note next to all the notes taped to a particular bus shelter near 110th at Broadway nyc near Columbia university means that you narrow down the range of people who see the note.

~ anonymity

There need to be good grounds for sanctioning meeting people you don't know.

Real life filters include the anononymity conferred by front doors, walls, curtains and cars. Convention dictates that outside of a narrow range of transactions (commercial, educational, crisis...) people for the most part don't talk to people they don't know.

Real life filters tend to be quite blunt tools, but people prefer tend to prefer blunt filters to no filters. The kinds of people who try to break through these filters tend to confirm the need for them.

Filtering is a problem, and it is not confined to local communities but all kinds of communities. Email filtering attempts to remove junk mail. Joining an online discussion group focused on a specific subject is a kind of filtering in itself, but within those groups it is often possible to block out the voices of participants you don't want to hear.

Filtering is a problem aligned to trust. We mostly choose to interact with people we are both interested in and trust not to make our lives harder. A good filtering system with a trust component would make it possible to find more people who fit this criteria, locally or at a distance.

formalising trust

A workable trust system could be built around traditional measures of trust

..friend of a friend, similar views, taste and or buying habits, education, community affiliations, financial status, employer, reputation.

Even with an effective trust system in place, in interpersonal relationships it still only serves as a guide and lowers the barrier, maybe making a face to face meeting more likely to be worthwhile or safe, it still comes down to the reality of the actual meeting to determine the reality behind those grounds for trust

Trust is a difficult problem" Jan Hauser, Sun microsystems

infomediaries

A system which requires information about you to be broadcast is unlikely to be acceptable.

The solution is a trusted intermediary, a third party that handles filtering without revealing personal details.

There has been a recent explosion in dating agencies, and while they handle a very specific problem, they are a model for mediating between parties without directly revealing personal information.

A community agency built on similar principles but handling a much wider range of interactions would be interesting.

This could be a further iteration on 'craigs list' in san francisco which already functions as a kind of community agency, a digital equivalent of a community notice board, tied to the space only indirectly, but still capable of making things happen that would not otherwise happen.

Recently craigs list made the national news after a girl posted a note about a 'gorgeous guy' she kept seeing at the bus stop on her way to work. The result was that each morning more and more people turned up at the bus stop to see the 'gorgeous guy'. The boy, who was increasingly aware of something strange going on, only became aware of the extent of his local celebrity when a friend of his worked out what was going on and told him.

A range of new, sophisticated and interesting, ways of mediating transactions and finding and interacting with people are becoming available, and location awareness adds another dimension to the possibilities.

[random meetings generator]

architects and their machines for living in

Architects and planners have designed buildings, housing projects, and whole communities, and then tightly packing those places with people who don't know each other, and doing so without being able to build sophisticated interfaces and information systems for those communities.

Cities are arguably so complicated and house so many people that we may actually need technology and augmentation to be effective and happy in them.

The most help that has been offered so far has been video surveillance, a dark form of augmentation, which assumes you can change people by watching them.

A more pragmatic and people friendly approach is a location aware one. In Brighton in the UK and San Francisco in the US bus shelters now tell you when the next bus is coming (because they know where the bus is). This small thing will save souls, there is nothing worse than waiting hours for a bus that may or not ever come, it makes you feel so out of control.

..Corbusier and his machines for living in, Paolo Soleri and his arcologies and Archigram and the walking cities, all look like (and in the case of Corbusier actually are) nightmare scenarios, and the only thing that could make them happier places to live (given that tightly packed 'modern' alienated communities have become a reality) would be better interfaces to real and local spaces. This is a troubling thought given that it is dark to propose more technological innovation as a solution to the problems that technological innovation has brought forth.

But if lost old age pensioners on a difficult housing estate could communicate with each other and coordinate their actions and their voice, it might make a difference to them.

With hindsight and foresight it seems inevitable that housing projects couldn't work without information systems, and those information systems haven't been built yet.

..and I want to know where my keys are and where I left my wallet, I want to be able to call them and ask them where they are. I want solutions to very ordinary, localised, spatially linked problems.