Thesis 15


Everyware acts at the scale of the street and of public space in general.

At present, the most often-pursued applications of everyware at scales beyond the individual building concern wayfinding: knowing where in the world you are and how to get where you're going.

We've become familiar with the idea that dashboard navigation displays using the Global Positioning System (GPS) will help us figure these things out. But GPS is a line-of-sight systemyou need to be visible to at least three satellites currently above the horizon in order for it to triangulate your positionso it doesn't work indoors, in tunnels, or in places where there's lots of built-up density. This makes GPS a fairly poor way of finding your way around places like Manhattan, although it seems to work satisfactorily in lower-density conurbations like Tokyo.

Other systems that might help us find our way around the city have their own problems. Schemes that depend on tracking your various personal devices by using the local cellular network can't offer sufficient precision to really be useful as a stand-alone guide. And while the kinds of sensor grids we've discussed in the context of indoor spaces can be accurate to sub-meter tolerances, it would clearly be wildly impractical to deploy them at the scale of a whole city.

But what if the city itself could help you find your way? In 1971, in a landmark study entitled The Image Of The City, MIT professor and urbanist Kevin Lynch explored a quality of the city he called "legibility." How do people read a city, in other words? What sorts of features support their attempts to figure out where they are, which paths connect them to a given destination, and how best to actually go about getting there?

Lynch identified a few systems that have historically helped us find our way in the city: signage, of course, but also explicit maps, even street numbering conventions. Such systems function best in a city that itself offers distinctly characterized districts, clearly identifiable paths between them, and above all, the kind of highly visible landmarks that allow people to orient themselves from multiple vantage points, such as Manhattan's Empire State Building, Seoul's Namsan Tower, and Berlin's Fernsehturm. Other kinds of landmarks play a role, too: prominent, easy-to-specify placesthe clock in Grand Central Stationwhere arrivals are readily visible to one another.

All of these features are now subject to computational enhancement. Street furniture such as lamp posts, signage, even manhole covers can provide the urban sojourner with smart waypoints; Tokyo's Shinjuku ward is currently tagging some 10,000 lamp posts with RFID panels that give visitors information on nearby public toilets, subway entrances, and other accommodations.

Meanwhile, maps themselves can offer dynamic, real-time information on position and direction, just as their automotive equivalents do. At Lancaster University, in the UK, just such a prototype public navigation systemdubbed GAUDI, for "grid of autonomous displays"helps visitors find their way around campus, using adaptive displays as directional signs.

The system's initial release is intended for use as temporary signage for eventslectures, academic conferences, concerts, and the like. Upon being switched on, each portable GAUDI panel queries the navigational server for its current location. It then displays the name and direction of, and approximate distance to, the selected destination. Moving a GAUDI display from one place to another automatically updates it; an arrow that points left to the destination will reverse when placed on the opposite wall.

Nor is GAUDI limited to a selection of fixed campus landmarks. It can direct visitors to that wide variety of campus events that are regular but subject to frequent changes in locationa professor's office hours, or a meeting that has outgrown the auditorium in which it was originally scheduled.

It's easy to see how something like GAUDI, suitably ruggedized and secured, could transform the experience of citying, especially when combined with other locational and directional indicators carried on the body or integrated into clothing. Taken together, they would render the urban domain legible in a way Kevin Lynch could not have imagined in 1970. In such a place, locations self-identify, notices of congestion immediately generate alternative paths to the destination, and services announce themselves. (Anyone who's ever spent the day on foot in one of Earth's great cities will appreciate the prospect of knowing where the nearest public restroom is, even at what time it was last cleaned.)

Information architect Peter Morville calls such interventions in the city "wayfinding 2.0"an aspect of the emerging informational milieu he thinks of as "ambient findability," in which a combination of pervasive devices, the social application of semantic metadata, and self-identifying objects renders the built environment (and many other things besides) effectively transparent to inquiry.

But as we shall see in some detail, everyware also functions as an extension of power into public space, whether that space be streetscape, commons, station, or stadiumconditioning it, determining who can be there and what services are available to each of them. More deeply still, there are ways in which the deployment of a robust everyware will connect these places with others previously regarded as private. Our very notions of what counts as "public" cannot help but be changed in the aftermath.



Everyware. The dawning age of ubiquitous computing
Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
ISBN: 0321384016
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 124

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