Category Archives: Research

Here you will find the updates regarding our research projects, including the release of new results, publications or prototypes.

the Co-Creation of the City on a new book

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Just out from press:

Advancing Research Methods with New Technologies:

Advancing digital technologies continue to shape all aspects of our society, with particular impact on the professional research community. These new and exciting developments offer considerable advantages in terms of speed, access connectivity, and economy.

Advancing Research Methods with New Technologies examines the applicability and usefulness of new technologies, as well as the pitfalls of these methods in academic research practices. This book serves as a practical guide for designing and conduction research projects for scientists all of disciplines ranging from graduate students to professors and practitioners.

We have contributed a chapter titled The Co-Creation of the City:

Is it possible to imagine novel forms of urban planning and of public policies regulating the ways in which people use city spaces by listening to citizens’ expressions, emotions, desires, and visions, as they ubiquitously emerge in real-time on social networks and on other sources of digital information? This chapter presents the theoretical and methodological approach, the investigation and research phases, the design and prototyping processes constituting the ConnectiCity initiative, a collaborative, multi-disciplinary series of projects in which artists, scientists, anthropologists, engineers, communicators, architects, and institutions participated to the design of innovative ubiquitous and pervasive systems which were able to transform the ways in which the concepts of urban planning and city-wide decision-making are defined. Novel forms of urban life were imagined, in which cities became the time/space continuum for multiple, stratified layers of information expressing the ideas, goals, visions, emotions, and forms of expression for multiple cultures and backgrounds, producing new opportunities for citizenship: more active, aware, and engaged in the production of urban reality, and in the transformation of city spaces into possibilistic frameworks.

 

the co-creation of the city

the co-creation of the city

Contact us for samples and extracts.

Citation:

Iaconesi, S., & Persico, O. (2013). The Co-Creation of the City. In N. Sappleton (Ed.), Advancing Research Methods with New Technologies (pp. 12-33). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-3918-8.ch002

AOS at 18th International Conference on Urban Planning and Regional Development in the Information Society GeoMultimedia 2013

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AOS will be at REAL CORP 2013, the 18th International Conference on Urban Planning and Regional Development in the Information Society GeoMultimedia 2013.

20-23 May 2013, Rome, Italy

House of Architecture
Piazza Manfredo Fanti, 47, 00185 Roma

Our contribution:

Interweaving the digital and analog lives of cities: urban sensing and user-generated cities

Abstract –

A research process lasting from 2009 to 2012 has conceptualized, designed and implemented multiple tools and strategies to experiment novel forms of technologically-supported urban interaction. The goal of this process has been to understand the rituals which have started to shape contemporary citizens’ perception and performance of urban public and private spaces. An ethnographic approach has been used to gather insights about these emergent rituals, affecting the ways in which people have transformed the ways in which they work, learn, relate, consume, travel and entertain themselves in the city.

With the active collaboration of public administrations, organizations, citizen groups, tourist operators and research teams these practices have been enacted in the cities of Rome, Turin, Trieste, Cosenza, London, Berlin and Hong Kong for variable amounts of time. Engagement and results have been formally gathered, observed, processed and measured, allowing the research team to both explore the current scenario and envision new ones.

Real-time content harvesting from social networks, natural language analysis, geo-referencing/geo-coding/geo-parsing technologies, expert systems and ubiquitous technologies such as smartphones, custom electronic devices and conceptual consumer products have been employed to explore the ways in which people are and will be able to: perceive and understand their urban surroundings; access services and information; co-produce knowledge and distributed intelligence; collaborate in the creation of shared projects and city-governance practices; create and maintain peer-to-peer infrastructures for connectivity, commerce, services and culture.

This paper will present the initial analysis – including previous research taken into account in the fields of urban sensing, citizen science, urban planning, urban infrastructure management, urban environment perception and more –; the methodologies, both shared and project-specific, used to conceive, design, implement the prototypes and to measure their effects; the reports about each project in the aforementioned cities, including their usage on-the-field as well as elements of urban and digital ethnographic observation and user experience analysis; a description of a scenario for further research and for the production of service and product concepts, some of which are already in-progress, in the areas of the arts, culture, tourism and city administration.

What emerges is the opportunity to create multi-layered interactive landscapes in urban contexts which allow city dwellers to communicate, collaborate, govern their city, exchange knowledge and information, consume, entertain themselves, produce and distribute services.

AOS at “HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions” with “Real Time Dissent in the City”

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We will be at

The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions
Conference, workshops, exhibition and parallel events
23-25 May 2013
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

with our contributions:

  • Real-time dissent in the city: tools and tactics for contemporary disseminated, dispersed, recombinant movements

    • Abstract –  During years 2011 and 2012 we have created a series of open software platforms which are able to analyse in real-time the content which is produced by users of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, by combining data-harvesting technologies, natural language analysis and geo-location. We have used these technologies in different ways with the objective of trying to understand the various forms in which dissent manifests itself in the scenario of contemporary urban areas, characterized by the progressive availability of accessible ubiquitous technologies such as smartphones and network-enabled devices.

 

  • Re-thinking public space and citizenship through ubiquitous publishing and technologies. The experience of Ubiquitous Pompeii for the Italian Digital Agenda.
    • Abstract – In this paper, we describe the first instances of a family of projects with similar characteristics. Through these projects, we aim to establish contact with urban communities to a) suggest visions for possible forms of city innovation and to b) start co-creative processes for imagining, designing and enacting transformative processes. These co-creative processes involve technologies and innovative methodologies which are able to create knowledge, participation, sustainable and inclusive business models. One of these projects is the Ubiquitous Pompeii where our research and design team developed a city wide process in the city of Pompei in Italy. Ubiquitous Pompeii started by engaging high school students with a series of workshops structured in two phases: a) students’ awareness about the scenarios and opportunities offered by ubiquitous technologies; and b) the acquisition of the skills used to appropriate the technologies and methodologies and to embrace participatory design processes. Students were able to design and develop their visions for the development of their city and its communities, creating services and digital tools. Peer-to-peer learning and collaboration practices played a crucial role. Tools, methodologies and roles have been designed and developed to support the emergence of practices engaging all agencies into a networked process for the creation of the digital future of the city. Institutions and operators play the role of facilitators in what basically is becoming a citywide co- creative process. Along these lines, we have structured a transdisciplinary methodology and a technological toolkit dedicated to cities and urban communities including collaborative ethnography to observe the various stages and processes of the project and discuss its meta-stories with the different actors. The project has been declared as an official best practice for Italy’s Digital Agenda, and as such will be scaled to other cities in the near future, also envisioning wider knowledge sharing and collaboration tools which will be able to interconnect the different communities.
The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions

The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions

Eisenhower Fellowships: a journey through the changing scenarios of leadership, innovation and creativity

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Salvatore Iaconesi will be on his Eisenhower Fellowship to explore the changing scenarios of leadership in the US, and to understand the opportunities for collaboration and exchange among the arts, sciences, humanities, businesses and public policies.

Eisenhower Fellowships

“identifies, empowers and links outstanding leaders from around the world, helping them to achieve consequential outcomes across sectors and borders. EF provides a transformational experience leading to lifetime engagement in a global network, where dialogue and collaboration make the world more prosperous, just and peaceful.”

Art is Open Source, through Salvatore Iaconesi, will be on the fellowship to explore various types of scenarios.

As we know, everything around us is changing at incredible speed.

The ways in which we learn, express, collaborate, work, consume, relate, exchange information, knowledge and wisdom are very different from they were even a few years ago.

Touched by the impact of digital cultures, the world has mutated and continues in this transformation.

This has extreme, radical impacts on human societies and on the ways in which we can imagine shaping our public policies: our perception of private and public spaces has changed, just as much as what we perceive to be legal/illegal, possible/impossible, suggested/forbidden. Just as our visions, imaginaries, opportunities.

We are in a situation in which giving answers has become not only very difficult, but also not very interesting. What is interesting, today, is to understand what the fundamental questions are, and to create open spaces for discussion, and for their continuous, iterative, participative assessment.

Many signals exist around us that can help to observe – just like anthropologists, ethnographers and cultural geographers – the ways in which things are changing in human societies. These signals can be collected in large quantities and observed according to a series of different approaches: for business, science, art, research, culture, commerce, policies…

We can also imagine collecting these signals to enact some form of forecast.

Possibly the most interesting thing which we can do is to take these signals into account to observe our present and what it says about our near-future, to see which new daily rituals they describe, new ways of doing things, new habits, new things that we have learned to give for granted, or that we have forgotten about.

And to use these observations to create things, be them objects, products, services, processes: real ones, possibly under the form of live prototypes that can be used to inspire further, materialized observations about our near-future.

Some call if Design Fiction, some call it near-future design: what is certain is that it is a practice that needs the contribution of the artist just as the ones of the scientist; of the engineer and the poet; of the businessman and the designer; of the anthropologist and the architect; of the technologist and the politician. In a joint effort to understand, create and leverage the layers of meaning emerging from our human societies.

This is what we will do during this Eisenhower Fellowship, collecting the experiences of leaders throughout the USA, suggesting change and creating the opportunities for exchange and collaboration for a better understanding of our present and of what will come up next.

Eisenhower Fellowships

Eisenhower Fellowships

 

A Course on Fabbing and Nanotechnologies at ISIA Design Florence

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Art is Open Source will be holding this year’s course in Multi Platform Digital Design (Progettazione Digitale Multi-Piattaforma, in Italian) at ISIA Design in Florence.
This year’s course will be focused on the themes of Digital Fabrication, Nanotechnologies and on the shifts in paradigms for production, about which we will imagine, design and enact different scenarios for the near future.
ISIA course 2013

ISIA course 2013

Sites such as http://www.thingiverse.com/ and http://www.shapeways.com/ have become rather common. This fact suggests a radical shift in the ways the paradigms of productions are (and can be) perceived, and brings up a whole series of fundamental issues which will become the commonplace for the (near) future of design.
What is certain is that precursors of these processes, such as the guys from http://www.fluid-forms.com/, have changed the ways in which, now, we are able to perceive objects and the ways in which we design and produce them.
Fluid Forms is a good example for this. When starting out, back in 2005, the concept of a widely accessible role of the Creative Coder operating in a virtual Design Space to design objects which could be physically produced/sold was not something many people had a chance to deal with.
For example, Fluid Forms’ Design Spaces allowed coders/designers to create software-generated objects using a number of information sources, APIs and data.
For example you, given a latitude/longitude pair of geographical coordinates, you could Google Maps to find the streets and landscape in that location and use this geometrical information to produce the design of a jewel, or a clock, or of something else. The object was, then, put on sale and users could specify their own set of coordinates (e.g.: of a place that was particularly meaningful for them) and produce their own, generative object.
This has been a steady trend ever since, and, progressively, we are starting to find it rather easy to identify objects with software.
Objects can be produced directly starting from the 3D files that describe them, and this changes the whole scenarios and the supply chains that were traditionally found in design and production:
  • 3D files (and programs to generate them) are exchanged and used to produce the objects (through 3D printing, for example)
  • files can be freely modified, reproduced, copied, redistributed etc

This obviously determines a radical change in the ways in which we traditionally perceive intellectual property when we deal with physical objects.

Imagine a scenario:

  • Ikea enters the 3D Printing market
  • You go to the Ikea store, you buy your 3D Printer, your supply of base materials (usually resins of some sort) and you go back home
  • you connect to the Ikea website, browse the 3D printable products, choose one and download it
  • it is a 3D file
  • you feed it to the 3D Printer and there you have it: your fresh-printed brand new Ikea Ashtray
  • then you send the file to one of your friends, as she has a 3D Printer, as well
  • your friend takes the 3D file, opens it in an editor, makes some changes to it (“here, with this added curve it looks just wonderful!”) and prints it out
  • then she puts the file up on Thingiverse, where everyone may download it, print it, etc

Whose copyright (if any) is it? Ikea’s? The original purchaser’s? His friend’s? The downloaders’? And so on…

Nothing we’re used (yet) to thinking about when we speak about physical objects.

Tendentially: the factory comes home!  Meaning that production will progressively disperse, become disseminated across a number of different scenarios in which digital files will be distributed in peer-to-peer ways across a number of small production facilities (even single households) in which they will be use to produce objects, and where they will also be modified and redistributed.

And companies such as http://www.makerbot.com/, http://objet.com/ , http://cubify.com/cube/ , and http://futurecnc.code.arc.cmu.edu/ (and a lot more, lately) are making wide efforts to making sure that this will happen.

The outcomes of this tendency are practically infinite. Here are some examples:
A 3D vending machine:
A 3D printed skull prosthesis:
A smart phone application that works as a 3D scanner:
A doodler, a 3D Pen:
A 3D printed home:
Obviously, these practices raise quite a few interesting issues for discussion, as well:
  • at ecological and environmental level:
    • where do the raw materials come from?
    • are they sustainable?
    • how do you dispose of them?
    • could the possibility to 3D print anything bring on phenomenons of over-production?
    • etc…
  • at social level:
    • will be become new forms of stay-home consuming (producing) machines?
    • will we ever get out of our house? :)
    • will we be the target of the strategies of global strategies that will see us really busy with bringing up printing/modifying/commenting businesses for operators, and progressively loose contact with traditional markets and the world outside?
  • at ethical level:
    • what if i 3D print a rifle? or a bomb?

Obviously, some of these issues are exaggerated, for the sake of clarity, and some of them have already (partial) answers. But we’ll learn about them along the way, during the course.

The advent of nano-technologies allows these processes to radicalize even more.
For example, the nanotech factory-in-a-box scenarios allow for the disappearance of the limitations found in current 3D printers about the materials which can be used to produce the objects (mostly resins of some sort) and their achievable quality: the possibility to assemble more complex molecules starting from simpler ones theoretically allows to produce objects in any material, and the nano-scale of the production would allow for unmatched precision and quality.
Or as with the possibility to produce objects that are “alive”, or that relate with the human body at some level (e.g.: organs, eyes, prosthesis…): as with anything that could be in such tight relationship with our bodies and identities, these scenarios provide both great hopes and fears for the future. (e.g.: imagine if i nano-printed a replacement for my diseased liver using a service which is able to remotely stop it from working if I’m not able to pay their monthly fee…).
Or at the level of being able to produce objects which can chemically, mechanically and organically activate themselves, even in “intelligent” ways, to take actions of some sort. (from t-shirts which spontaneously change color, up to hordes of nano-robots which are able to use the materials around them to build skyscrapers)
Or HIV-curing nano-robots, nano-energy mechanisms which produce energy using waste etcetera.

What will happen during the course:

We will learn about the scenarios of fabbing and nanotechnologies, and will prepare and use tools which will enable us to observe their processes, evolutions, events: we will establish a sort of observatory unto the state-of-the-arts and to catch the signals which will use to infer the future scenarios.
Then we will discuss and design scenarios for the near/far future. Be them far of near, scary or hopeful, positive or negative, we will make works of design fiction that will explore these scenarios.
And then we will create transmedia narratives for these projects.
Have we designed a service which people use for replacement organs for a monthly fee? A peer-to-peer market of 3D printed molecular cuisine? A peer-to-peer production system to produce nano-energy from waste? A 3D printing service to replicate our pets?
We will make them as true as possible by producing websites, apps, prototypes, fakes, installations, performances, street advertisements, guerrilla marketing campaigns and more.