I spent the day at Imperial College Business School as part of a Design London and Living Labs Global event to bring together the tech and public sectors to talk about connected cities and to launch the Living Labs Global report Connected Cities Handbook - "a book about opportunity and frustration" (Sasha Haselmayer)

The day was a mix of talks (mine is here), discussion sessions and elevator pitches: a great poem from TfL (on Design London website soon) and itiner.pl real time traffic info looked interesting (on living labs global showcase site). Below are my notes and points of interest.

Nick Leon - introduced Connected Cities education programme, an initiative between Design London at the RCA and Imperial College London and Living Labs global. The 3 day course introduces mechanisms for service providers to take ideas from concept to living lab to market place. Subjects covered include: well connected cities, transforming public services, the city as a system of systems, from idea to pilot to early market, true public private partnerships for innovation, innovation and new business models.

Dominique Laousse - RATP / Prospective and Innovative Design - "The mobility cocktail" how to make sense of the ubiquity of the mobile both from human ethology and urban ecology. Chronosapiens, promiscuity of the crowd, beta-city, wikipolis, metapolis. Trains, trams, buses in RATP for 30% of travelers it is their primary place to read - do we design for this? project Future en Seine - Re-enchant every day trips - leaving a trace, a narrative. project Musetrek - re-discover trip pleasure - info on stations? projects Social freight - with MIT - low cost delivery of small packages by existing travellers for elders, workers, ....

Andrew Davies & Lars Frederiksen - Innovation Mgt and Sustainable Cities
Case study of work with Arup on learnings from developing an eco city - Dongtan - shifting from industrial age to ecological age approach.

Erkko Autio - Prof. Qinetiq EPSRC Chair in tech transfer and entrepreneurship.
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor - mapping relationship between early stage entrepreneurship against GDP - interesting clusters of geographic regions.
"Entrepreneurship happens in cities"

Panel discussion.
Stephen Dodson DC10Plus
Victoria Thornton Open House London
Micael Gustafsson Oresund IT

Questions and observations floating around the room at the end of the day.
What is the most successful application of technology in the fabric of the city?
We need brave CIO's who are prepared to push technology to solve problems?
Why is there a mismatch between the concepts being shown in the demos / elevator pitches and what we see in our local cities?
Are the leaders in local authorities empowered, accountable to their constituents, capable of delivering the kinds of systems being pitched.

Photos of the day are on flickr

We recently finished the last leg of a great project we had been working on for the World Economic Forum. Our task was to create an online presence for the SlimCity knowledge cards we had produced in 2009. The aim was to make the cards accessible to a broader audience than those at the SlimCity workshops. As such, all the cards are accessible via the SlimCity website where they can be read online, browse the relationships between the cards, download a pdf version or leave comments on the themes raised by the cards.

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Arup has been a knowledge partner of the World Economic Forum's SlimCity initiative which is just coming to a close. SlimCity provided a global, risk-free platform where cities and the private sector could exchange best practices to deliver resource efficiency at the city level. One of SlimCity's major deliverables was the SlimCity Knowledge Cards, researched and produced by Arup (managed in our team by Marcus Morrell).

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The cards, which follow a similar format to the Drivers of Change cards, were targeted primarily at City Mayors as well as CEOs from relevant sectors. They differ from Arup's Drivers of Change cards in that they offer practical solutions to many of the problems facing cities, rather than raise questions and issues. In compiling the cards, Arup's researchers selected content on the basis that any Mayor could ask the question "Could we do this in our city?" The were given access to the Forum's membership and network and carried out in depth-in interviews in addition to desk research.

DG INFSO (Information Society and Media Directorate-General of the European Commission) is exploring the idea of pilot projects on "Open innovation for future Internet-enabled services in "smart cities". Their recent communication "A Strategy for ICT R&D and Innovation in Europe: Raising the Game" recommended that "the CIP will support SMEs piloting highly innovative technologies, and the development of open platforms for user-driven innovation".

As such under the "Competitiveness and innovation programme" (CIP), theme 4 "CIP ICT PSP" will probably consist of 5 pilot projects to be funded on internet based technologies and services in the city. At least one will have a focus on use of RFID technologies. Call expected Q1/2010 deadline Q2, info day Jan 2010. More at http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp/

Making a strategic move from islands of services to common open platforms requires investment beyond the scope of a single application developer or city. It is important that cities connect, share and identify common best practice through pathfinder projects that can drive the development of common open platforms. User-driven open innovation methodologies or ecosystems such as the Living Labs are being proposed to nurture this process.

Pilots are being proposed that would combine all three of the following synergistic elements: 1) user-driven open innovation, 2) connected smart cities, and 3) Internet-based services.

Ideas around the following themes are of interest:

• smart living: participatory urban planning and co-design of spaces
• green digital agenda: master-plans for digital infrastructure to enable low carbon, e.g. energy production, environmental monitoring, buildings and facility management, traffic and transport ('Urban Information Architecture' or CIM in Arup)
• The citizen in transformation: citizen as an active co-producer, as
• well as consumer, of content and services, e.g. wellbeing, health, inclusion and participative democracy

The only pity is that it will be five large scale (10mil Euro each?) projects rather than one hundred 50k Euro projects. Just think of the diversity of urban informatic / internet of things prototypes you could build around Europe with that finance...

Still if you have any project ideas you would like to pursue around the theme of user centred / urban design led applications that the future internet may be able to support then please get in touch. They EC are keen for these projects to be urban design 'pulled' rather than technology 'pushed'.

Brussels 16.11.09

Spent an interesting day at Curve, Leicester speaking to the Amplified Leicester (@AmplifiedLeic #ampleic) crowd via an invite from Sue Thomas @suethomas.

The aim of their project is to:

Amplified Leicester is a city-wide experiment designed to grow the innovation capacity of Leicester by networking key connectors across the city's disparate and diverse communities in an incentivised participatory project enabled by social media. Our objectives are to:

• Develop a transferable model for amplifying a diverse city's grassroots innovation capacity through connecting diverse communities through key individuals
• Provide practical examples of how collaborative technologies can be exploited in a city context

They were keen to get an insight into how Arup approach thinking about the future so I introduced Arup, our approach to foresight, innovation and research, and the Drivers of Change research. The presentation is on slideshare.

At the end of the session I asked each participant to try and list out some of the drivers which they think will affect Leicester / their lives. Copies of the cards are on flickr with some highlights below:

• homes designed for 2.3 kids
• is there enough work for everyone
• reduced public - funding doing more with less
• breakdown / change in "the family"
• constant quest for growth
• combining cultures and cohesion
• data security
• less professionalism
• credit crunch
• aviation and the extended Leicester family

As a note to self, had a couple of interesting chats over cakes on how the cards / research tools had been used in schools and the community. Quite a few teachers have asked about using the cards in schools - might be an idea to set up a schools group on the ning site to share how schools have been using the cards - would be great if others could share how they have / would like to use the cards with kids at different ages. Sharon was thinking of using them in a school project linking a Leicester school to one in India... On the latter re community there was an interesting discussion about how "tag cloud" like tools could be used to canvass opinion from the local community in addition to the traditional community meetings by the Police.

Was a pleasent surprise to be speaking the excellent Curve Theatre in Leicester (an Arup job with architect Rafael Vinoly). I had read about the "inside out" theme but was impressed with how well it had been done. The 32 tonne acoustic shutters around the stage were raised when I was there meaning that you really could see all the inner workings of the theatre. Excellent. More photos are on flickr.

Interesting SENSEI quarterly meeting at Telenor in Oslo. The WP5 guys spent most of the week hacking in the reception of the Radisson where wifi was good and ports were open to get the demo working for the plenary on Thursday. The pan European testbed is starting to take shape with islands of sensor networks in Norway (2 in the plenary room using two different sensor platforms), Finland (Sensinode) and Romania (where the primary Sensei platform is hosted).

Had some interesting discussions on the proposed field trials - three have been proposed to date including:

1] environmental monitoring using mobile sensor nodes fixed to buses in Belgrade (EYU)

2] workplace monitoring using room access, comfort data, booking information (TID)

3] sports / environmental monitoring in the customisabale environment at eXperience Lab (UTwente)

In the pipeline is to create a SENSEI wrapper to connect the current Arup sensor network data. I need to also throw in a couple of actuatable devices in there. Need to explore possibilities of connecting to and from SENSEI platform via Pachube. Second Life was also mentioned as an interesting platform to test the horizontalisation theme. If we can create a connection between SENSEI applications and objects in SL then we have a virtual mechanism to test multiple uses of SENSEI data.

Also discussed in the field trial session was the issue of horizontalisation. A key goal of the SENSEI architecture is to facilitate the ability for nodes within islands of sensors networks to be re-used by multiple applications. It would be interesting to do an Architecture School project during one of the field trials where all the sensors / actuators being generated for the field trial are accessible for a group of designers to re-purpose / re-imagine the kinds of services that such data could create. Get in touch if you are interested and have a bunch of students...

The photo at the top of the post is of the Telenor buildings in Fornebu, Oslo. I was impressed with the art around the building - striking to me was the digital facade when i arrived which advised that i "think differently" and "be kind to others". The buiding long facade installation was created in 2002 by Jenny Holzer. I also loved the Daniel Buren columns and the large glass mosaic:

More photos on flickr

Just back from a beautifully sunny Brighton attending dConstruct 2009. The blurb says: "dConstruct 09 brings together leading thinkers from the fields of ubiquitous computing, interface design, gaming and mobile to explore the challenges of designing for tomorrow." Great low cost conference, sold out, great speakers, in a great venue. Below is a summary of observations during the day.

First up was Adam Greenfield talking about "Elements of a Networked Urbanism". Lots of interesting pairs now >> new got me thinking about how the digital layer may manifest itself in our cities. Of particular interest were information that:

expires >> persists - as we create geolocated information that is stored in the temporal ether history will persist - both at a public and personal level.

wayfinding >> wayshowing - typically signs are located statically (even if they have dynamic content). Mobile mapping is already creating the personal "showing" devices of the new.

objects >> services, vehicle >> mobility, ownership >> using, I can understand the Spotify example and the StreetCar one (although i have never used the latter), but I like to own my Triumph, do I need to? Not sure. Do i want to? Yes. I think there is more to ownership than functional need. When i look at my young son he is desperate to own toys - not just play with them but he wants to take them back to his cave. How will we release our desire to own?

Schelling >> shoaling - rather than the static mtg points (under the clock at Grand Central) a move towards dynamic, social networked "i am here" gatherings.

community >> network - you don't necessary want to know everything about your neighbours, ignorance can make community friendships easier, in the virtual space you connect to those who have similar affinities to you more easily, in a way that you cannot in cities. You cannot necessarily overlay online social space to the physical cities - if we did would it look like the suburbs?

consumer >> constituent - in the new we are equal co creators - what will this mean in the urban environments we are desiging?

Second up were Mike Migurski and Ben Cerveny from Stamen on the theme of "Let's See What We Can See (Everybody Online And Looking Good)" Great walk through of some their projects which i had seen but not analysed before.

Ever felt alone sitting by yourself on a telecon call? moveon.org was a project where they mapped large numbers of people listening into conference call based meetings to give people a feeling of participation since they can "see" others on a map.

For sfmoma artscope, they were given a 6000 strong art collection and asked to create an interactive web based browsing interface. One key aim was to get the zeitgeist view. They used pan, zoom, tile metaphors of mapping. Each image of artwork is rendered as a tile with top left showing first bottom right showing most recent.

One of my favourite nebisms was "dimensional synesthesia" - taking the temporal time line of the collection and transposing it into the spatial. Visualisation being used to stimulate a different way to look at the data. One for me to explore with our internal R&D / innovation projects website (6 years of data 2000+ projects)

Also great to get a first hand demo of the hurricane tracker web app which i had read about but not really looked at. On the meta view of the hurricane tracker "the individual instances when taken together allow us to understand the whole piece" another nice nebism on *sculpture in possibility space*.

The final speaker of the day was Russell Davies (Materialising and Dematerialising A Web of Data. (Or What We've Learned From Printing The Internet Out)) who i have heard much about but never heard. A great, funny speaker who uses props on stage - excellent! Best quote was one he made at Guardian conference re Stuff we read in 2008 "we have broken your business, now we want your machines" Take away message was that we need to think more about how we embed the web in the world around us (and not just try to put the world into the web).

Other comments that i liked included:

Brian Fling (What's Next? How mobile is changing design) "twitter the product is not a website it is an api" the result of mobile is that the future of web is not about a single website but about designing for different contexts. Mobile - portable, personal and ubiquitously connected.

Robin Hunicke (Loving Your Player with Juicy Feedback) on making your app juicy (fun, playful, engaging - more bouba less kiki) and introduced the MDA framework to me (mechanics dynamics aesthetics) examples of juiciness included: prius energy display, armchair revolutionary website, wii, iphone

August de los Reyes (Experience and the Emotion Commotion) supporting use of MDA but in an industrial design perspective. Also his great prickles and goo clip - http://www.neticons.net/prickles

books to search out:
The emotion machine - Marvin Minsky (via August)
The nature of technology - Brian Arthur (via Russell)
Digital Fabrications - Lisa Iwamoto (via Adam)

Just back from my first TED. Have watched the videos over the past couple of years and have heard first hand accounts from past participants, so was looking forward to living it in real time.

We organised a workshop in parallel to the TED U(niversity) sessions. The new Drivers of Change cards were one of the gifts given to the 700 participants and the aim of the workshop was to introduce people to the cards and how they could be used to help people generate ideas worth spreading. The feedback on the day was excellent and we have several people to follow up with post event. The results of the TED group voting are on the DoC voting application with details of the voting and photos on flickr.

Thanks to the TED guys for showing the results of the Drivers of Change workshop votes on the main stage at TED Global. Bruno gave an excellent overview of the results and mentioned the pointer to the open voting set at vote.driversofchange.com/ted-global-2009/

I went native at TED and reverted to pen and moleskine so below are a few notes which act as reminders for things i want to chat to people about and talks that i want to come back to when they are online. They are listed time linear since that is how my moleskine works.

Stefan Sagmeister - two things stuck in my mind - the very cool Casa da Musica dynamic identity, take a look at Brand New's explanation and his approach to the seven year (itch) sabbatical which he justifies by describing how he is pulling forward 5 years worth of retirement and interspersing it in yearly blocks (the sabbaticals) into his work life. Great idea - but how to reintegrate with clients upon our return?

Gordon Brown was surprise speaker and has generated much discussion in the media (and at the event). His talk was very polished, he made the woman next to me cry, and he got a standing ovation. He also got slated for insincerity and auditioning for his next job. Either way "the power to communicate across borders" enabled by the photograph and the increasingly convergent phenomena of the internet in making these stories told in real time was an interesting theme.

Evan Grant, seeing the sound of nature as patterns in the sand - excellent talk, well worth watching again when on-line. He introduced me to Cymatics and had my mind racing with applications I want to try.

Rory Sutherland - an ad man at Ogilvy, he usually speaks at "TED Evil". A fun presentation to watch - he suggests that engineers should not have spent 6 billion to build CTRL to reduce journey times but should have invested in making the journey so enjoyable that people would not notice the time they spent on the train. His suggestions included using the 6 billion to pay for super models to serve free champagne to all! Great story about the new Diamond Shreddies.

Mathieu Lehanneur - showed a great piece of product design where a kids asthma device inflates over night so that the kid has to take his medicine in the morning to "look after" the inhaler.

Rebecca Saxe - fires a magnetic pulse into her brain to deactivate a group of neurons that controls her moral perspective of other peoples actions. The Pentagon are calling but she is not taking their calls...

Henry Markram - "the drugs developed today are largely emperical" he is building a model of the brain so that they can start to simualate how the brain works. Need to watch this one again to figure out how this "actually" works and am interested in the implications for the Artificial Intelligence community.

It was good to see Manual Lima presenting visualcomplexity and Candy Chan had an interesting talk on community information architecture experiments - unseen conversations in neighbourhoods - worth a look for those interested in urban information systems.

One of the really inspirational talks for me was 89 year old Elaine Morgan making a compelling case for questioning facts that we assume to be correct. She wants the academic world to reconsider the aquatic ape theory.

Another great Urban Info project was the Mannahatta Project presented by Eric Sanderson. They have geo referenced historical data of 17th century Manhattan to bring into focus the ecology today and "plan for the urban ecosystem of the future". Great presentation, bought the book.

Architect to watch Bjarke Ingels showed two great projects which stuck in my mind - Danish pavillion for the Shanghai expo (they are flying out the mermaid) and a local housing development that creates a little mountain in the flat landscape - note to self, pick up a copy of YES IS MORE / AN ARCHICOMIC ON ARCHITECTURAL EVOLUTION (ISBN 8799298805).

Itay Talgam - what kind of leader are you? - an excellent presentation using clips of conductors showing different styles of leadership. It needs the visuals to explain - one to watch on video.

ones i need to watch again are:
Loretta Napoleoni
Misha Glenny
Parag Khanna

Came across this whilst doing some convergence research. Fantastic.

"Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He take runs the "Daily News", a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn't afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand."

Had a really interesting evening at the at abrahams event hosted by Arup on the theme of "collaborleaders". at abrahams is curated by abrahams and Claire Curtice Publicists with this event chaired by Sophie Howarth from the School of Life. The evening highlights were Philip Sheppard playing an impromptu cello solo and then later joining Steve Lodder and John Etheridge to show how three musicians can come together and improvise a piece of music - collaboration at its best. The video below is a bit shakey - i had to improvise ;-) but watch how the three are continually watching each other - to quote one of the general observations from the evening "the non verbal communication amongst the collaborators was visible".

atabrahams impromptu collaboration from Duncan Wilson on Vimeo.

Other highlights included:

re the cello "it's a Banks probably made near here in 1750" i wonder which of todays tools we will be using in 2250

re workshops - can you be forced to collaborate or do have to want to collaborate?

re architect and designer - "the collaboration only involved about 4 hours of working together with each other" but then many hours of the teams working together towards the finished product

re can it be built - "not yes you can, but yes we can"

re the ego in the collaboration - the economist does not have signed articles it is a team effort by the editing staff.

and finally... a poem by Roger McGough for the egotistical collaborator

The Leader

I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee I'm the leader
I'm the leader

OK what shall we do?

The World Economic Forum on Africa are using our Drivers of Change voting application to solicit public opinion prior to the event on the challenges African countries need to be the most prepared for in the coming year. The highest ranked Drivers of Change will be used in a session during the event. 1200 votes had been cast by with one week to go before the public vote closes on Thursday 11th.

A global call to action and an invitation to urban dwellers to describe through photography the places and things they love about their cities, and those that they could do without.

Cutnpastecities launched this week out of the foresight team at Arup. The brief is to capture through photography what you really like in a city, what makes it tick, and what you would like to see more of in the future. They can be spaces or services, aspects of everyday life or temporary events. Alternatively, describe something that should be removed from the city, a building you could do without, a service that just doesn't work. These are a CUT. Things you like are a PASTE.

The project will culminate with an exhibition of curated insights, stories and speculations based on the images.

To get started all you need is a photo you have taken with a few keywords that highlight what is special about that place or aspect of the city, along with a description of what you would CUT or PASTE.

How do I submit a photo?

If you are a Flickr user add them to the cutnpastecities group. Or if email is easier then just send them to photo@cutnpastecities.com with the following information:

* is it a CUT or a PASTE?
* what you like or dislike, specifically
* add some tags that describe the content of the photo
* describe the location (address or city or geocode, adding to the map)

Any rules?

The photo must be one that you have taken, and one that we can use with your permission. The photo remains your intellectual property; cutnpaste cities will credit you as you wish. Any size and resolution is accepted.

To keep track of progress visit the flickr group or http://www.cutnpastecities.com/

I spent the weekend at the Yahoo Hackday last week. As Crave puts it

"The idea behind it was simple: you've got exactly 24 hours to hack together the most interesting, innovative, useful or fun piece of software or hardware, using developer tools from Yahoo, or anyone else for that matter. "

David Filo opened the event, I learnt alot about the Yahoo API's available - a great way for them to show me what i could be using... and thought the talk by Rasmus Lerdorf on hacking with PHP was great.

Next steps - how to organise a hackday at Arup for the virtual design, BIM, GIS and intranet communities...

Thanks to David at Oracle and Roland and David at Nesta for taking the time to get together a bunch of corporate bods who are tasked in some form with trying to nurture innovation in their respective organisations. The group is still reasonable embryonic with a few different agendas becoming clear. I am keen to catch up with others to discuss what Arup are doing and to learn about the approaches and lessons learnt in other corporate contexts. At the other end of the spectrum the group were also keen to pool resources on identifying SME's start-ups who they should be investing in "it takes too long to use normal networking techniques to monitor and assess all the new start-up out there..." Not quite sure how the latter applies in my environment yet, but one to watch.

Inevitably a couple of ideas to pursue came out of the session. Great chat with Chris Parker from Ordnance Survey. Talked about the possibility for some open innovation activity around their new OS open space API, their GeoVation project ["GeoVation will let government, business, community and individuals work together to develop ideas that benefit society, make money or both."] and an upcoming hackday that may be of interest to the Arup GIS community.

Of interest via Kelvin Pitman, Director of Open Innovation at Crown Technology, was their "problems we want solving" section of their website.

Spent a really interesting morning at one of the Arup Design Schools - thanks to Richard and Richard for the invite! Notes from the event were tweeted but i only tagged the last one, photos are on flickr and the slides are on slideshare.