Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, Urban Computing and its Discontents (pdf)
Discourse Communities
– vocabularies/concepts/conventions specific to a given community
– membership
– not just communication but also indicating a sense of belonging
– we are all members of multiple discourse communities
ex. Architectural discourse community: “construction documents,” “truss,” “poché,” “entourage”
– writing for a popular audience vs. writing for an academic community — compare Clive Thompson’s “Location Location Location” to “Urban Computing and Its Discontents”
academic discourse: symposium, taxonomy
GROUP PROJECT
– Discuss the discourse community of “Urban Computing and Its Discontents”
– Who wrote this? (more than their names: where do they work? what kind of work do they do?)
– how would you describe this discourse community?
– what are some key terms and concepts that define urban computing as discussed in this essay?
– Each group should identify 5 terms used in the essay that express important concepts related to urban ubiquitous computing
– Each person in the group should take one of those terms and write at least a paragraph that quotes from the book and discusses the way in which that term is used.
Group 1
Maritza
Michael
George
Chris
Group 2
Anthony
Luis
Jair
Eric
Group 3
Demir
Eric
Theo
Group 4
Jiayi
Alan
Joaquin
David Castro
Group 5
Erika
Sandy
Victor
Magda
McLuhan — “Every extension is also an amputation.”
– become more dependent on technology, less dependent on native senses
– blind man/cane
– surveillance
And be sure to share your findings with us! : . )
Thanks very much for checking in, Adam! Our class enjoyed your work and will be posting paragraphs about key concepts in your dialogue with Mark Shepard soon. Please feel free to respond to our posts in the comments. And if you have any other readings you think we should check out, please let us know.
My chosen term was “graceful degradation.” Graceful Degradation means that if a system were too shut down, it would not shut down completely, but instead run slower or on less power. Adam Greenfield uses the example of complicated (and very expensive) sunshade irises that never worked properly. But even though they did not work, the irises continued to look “indubitably, surpassingly lovely.” This term stuck out to me because it seems interesting that a system, or anything in that matter, can fail and yet continue to work properly, but at a declined rate.
In the pamphlet “Urban Computing and its Discontents” Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard discuss the history and issue of imbuing technology into a city and its citizens.Greenfield began by answering with a quote by Marshall McLuhan saying “Every extension is also an amputation”, he continued to say how convenient it is to travel with devices like in car GPS and sites like Hopstop which give you cues as to where to go. Unfortunately what happens when that same technology fails, here is where the term “lynchian” comes in. He wonders what will happen to those who grew accustomed to these guides. Will the city still be travelable to those who only know these commodities? All in all I believe this term is to try and critique the city’s add on based on its urban coherence and its logical placement but also to weight it against its cons, in this case the city being un travelable.
The term that I have chosen to discuss in accordance with the article is “urbanism”. Urbanism is the study of the physical needs of urban societies such as cities. In the article urbanism is discussed through certain individuals’ experiences with new technologies. Mark Shepard, the co-author of the article, is one of these individuals. He is an artist, architect and researcher. His experience with urbanism is one that is intertwined with his research. As it states in the article,”his research investigates the impact of mobile and pervasive technologies on architecture and urbanism.” The article discusses the effects of technologies on urban communities and the effects are very obvious as the technologies become easily available.
In the book Urban Computing Adam Greenfield talks about what would happen when augmented reality interacted with and built on the city along with other rough components such as Geotagging, mobile social networking, municipal Wi-Fi. Augmented reality combines real and virtual into an interactive real time register in 3D. A perfect example would be the iPhone because of the hundreds of applications that exploit augmented reality. Games are very popular but also navigational applications also take advantage of this, such as “LocFinder” which has the augmented reality compass which uses the iPhone camera to show you the compass directions and the direction of your target location in the real world. Other examples are the “yellow first down line seen in television broadcasts of American football games, and the colored trail showing location and direction of the puck in TV broadcasts of hockey games,” which according to Wikipedia are the most known examples of augmented reality.
In “ Urban Computing and its Discontents” by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, Greenfield discusses the importance of ambient informatics and what it means. From what I understood, ambient informatics refers to the idea that information that was once only attainable by a computer will now be everywhere. The use of mobile technology has allowed us to have endless amount of data at our fingertips. This data will, and is becoming ubiquitous. As Greenfield described, this information is “like air.” Greenfield uses a great example of how he used his i-phone in order to find a restaurant that he could not remember the location of. By doing so, he avoided the time in actually looking for the restaurant. Just imagine how this situation would have unraveled if he didn’t have his i-phone. Not as smoothly that’s for sure.
Urban Computing is a emerged label for mobile and pervasive computing situated within urban context for researchers. Its also a site of energy feeling of study that focuses on the use of technology environment like cities, parks, forest, and suburbs. To learn more about these environment with technology that we can use and study about a change in our world. With urban computing its also makes the environment beyond home and office , so we can take it anywhere we go or be with it .
What Is Ubiquitous? Ubiquitous is a term refering to something that is omnipresent or everywhere. Computing technology is ubiquitous in todays world meaning that is everywhere. Think back a few hundred years ago. Technology was much less. Todays Computing technology is so advanced that it is being used in almost all careers including architecture. Todays young architects based many of their designs on an world of computing technology. Urban computing is all connected somehow to computing technology which is also ubiquitous. Relating Technology on society has had a tremendous impact. For example ” locative media” is a term used reffering to digital media that has computing software which is able to locate you around the world. As computing technology expands more and more, we see how it affects our surrounding and the way we live our lives.
In “ Urban Computing and its Discontents” by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, Greenfield they discuss many aspects uf urbancomputing. the term that i have chosen is ‘locative media’. “Locative Media has been aplllied to many smart phones. One way these applications have been apllied is on the very well known iphone. The iphone uses this technology to locate restaurants and other well known landmarks around the city/neighborhood.”locative Media is the process of storing and gathering information and providing aacess to it. This term is used in the reading as a ground line for architects. Now that the information is available future architects can apply this information they know to the way new buildings will be contructed
It is very hard to describe Informational Inputs, but according to Adam Greenfield in “Urban Computing And It’s Discontents” those are “form of sensors operating on a variety of channels”. Informational Inputs are sensors that transmit the information throughout the city in forms of bilboards and advertisements. They are becoming very common in our environment