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
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 comeshome! 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.
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.
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.
Emergenza was presented at the Internet Festival 2012 in Pisa, as an installation and a performance dealing with the future scenarios of our cities, as enabled by the wide and ubiquitous accessibility of digital technologies and networks.
Human polyphonies for digital-analog cities.
Our planet is a continuous conversation between people, information systems, sensors, digital ecosystems, social networks, objects, natural ecosystems, processes and organizations who use ubiquitous technologies to read and write their points of view on the world, under the form of content, data, information, and to freely recombine them, associate, aggregate and use them, to produce knowledge, wisdom and economies.
This scenario completely and radically transforms our perception of public and private spaces, of citizenship, of intellectual property and copyright, of sustainability, privacy, anonymity, transparency.
The ways in which we work, learn, produce, establish relationships, feel emotions, have fun, and in which we coordinate ourselves and collaborate with each other have already radically changed.
EMERGENZA is an interactive narrative, creating suggestion and emotion, engaging people in this scenario, as applied to the city of Pisa by imagining it into a near future, but using the data, information and tools which are ready and available today, now.
A human-centered smart city which becomes a sustainable place, active, polyphonic, free, resilient, recombinant, emergent.
The title of the project refers to both the “emergent” characteristics of the phenomena which take place in this kind of scenario, and to the “emergency” brought on by the possible dangers and uncertainties of these technological approaches.
Both aspects are analyzed in positive, constructive ways.
The installation
The installation uses three real time visualizations to show the scenario proposed by Emergenza.
Emergenza at Internet Festival, the map
The first visualization is a map showing, in real time, all the public social network activity (facebook, twitter, instagram harvested) classified using natural language analysis (as seen in the VersuS project), to highlight the ways in which people use social networks to discuss city governance, the environment, emotions, relations and desires. (two specific categories are also shown, describing in realtime the ways in which people use social networks to take part in the festival and also how they participate to the Pixity action, taking place during the festival).
This is the kind of system we use to analyze the digital public discussions which take place in cities, to realize the systems which can be used to create new tools for city governance, urban planning and human relation which operate on peer-to-peer strategies.
This below is the second visualization of the installation:
Emergenze at Internet Festival, the world
The second visualization is very simple and minimal, and it shows the places which, in real time, are publicly using social network in some ways to interact with the city (of Pisa).
It shows something which we might imagine as being the instantaneous public relations (or influence) established by the city of Pisa with the rest of the world.
Lines connect places which are interacting with the city of Pisa (by talking about the city, by interacting with some of its users…) and colors show the topic domains of these connections (green is environment, blue is commerce, orange is information or updates, etc.).
This is the kind of visualization we use to analyze the influence of a city in respect to other planetary locations, being able to identify opportunities for relationships, collaborations, and the themes which they relate to.
This below is the third visualization composing the installation:
Emergenze at Internet Festival, the circle of relations
The last visualization shows the relationships among city dwellers established in real time using social networks.
Each slice on the circle is a social network user. If a line connects two users, it means that they interacted in some way (e.g.: they publicly messaged each other, or one retweeted a message, or a comment was made, etc).
We use this kind of visualization to observe the emergence of communities and spontaneous collaborations among citizens/dwellers, and to identify emergent trends, and to recognize opportunities for collaborations and participatory project design.
The performance
The Emergenza performance was created as a pragmatical experience of this kind of near-future scenario.
To do this, we decided to use an oxymoron: in the future we describe typical television formats such as the “news show” will radically change, if not completely disappear (at least in the way we know them).
We decided to produce a format of a News Show from the future called “Pisa real-time: the news from now“. The format is completely polyphonic, meaning that it is not a standard news show as we’re used to: all news come by interpreting the digital information which is constantly produced by citizens using social networks.
(the images shown below are screenshots of the graphics used during the performance, organized as an on-stage TV show)
So, instead of the weather forecast, there is the emotional forecast of the city.
Emotional forecast in Emergenze Performance
Here the emotional expressions are used to create emotional maps of the city much in the same way in which weather forecasts in TV show the presence of clouds, wind and rain, and are used to show the emotional trends which might be appearing in the city, trying to expose important information about the city’s lifestyle.
Then there are the real time user-generated news about the city governance.
Emergenza performance, real time user generated city governance news
In this case, social network activity is interpreted to understand how people discuss city governance relevant themes, such as opinions about public budgets, choice of representatives, city maintenance issues, trash, etc.
All information is shown also as coming outside of the city boundaries, as in this vision the city does not end where the administrative borders are. In the case of Pisa, many comments about the conditions of the public spaces of the city came from tourist reports who had just been in the city.
Emergenza Performance, the multicultural city
Also important were the news from the multicultural city, showing the various languages and cultures present in the city, and the ways in which they represented themselves and their urban life using social networks, including the timelines of their online discussions and the relative percentages of their sentiment.
An one other part of the format which raised much interest was the part exposing the perception of security and safety, as expressed by people’s expression on social networks.
Here maps show the locations in which people expressed sense of insecurity and uncertainty.
An interesting surprise was that this kind of analysis proved to be much more intimate than expected, as people were not really discussing about the safety of walking in city streets, but about the safety of their future, jobs and relationships.
To further remark the polyphonic approach, we decided to speak the least possible amount of time during the performance, and we auto-replaced ourselves with messages coming from a series of interesting points of view.
First was the contribution of prof. Alberto Abruzzese:
(extract from “Intervista ad Alberto Abruzzese” by IULM)
Next was prof. Antonio Caronia:
(extract from “Interview with antonio Caronia”, by Alessandro Guerriero for NABANEXT)
Then it was the turn of prof. Massimo Canevacci Ribeiro:
(extract from “F for Fake” created for the book ”REFF. La reinvendione del reale attraverso pratiche di remix, mash up, ricontestualizzazione, reenactment”.”)
And then it was the intervention by Alex Giordano:
(extract from “Alex Giordano” by Internetbenecomune)
And here is a video showing a short speech we gave at the end of the performance (in italian for now) :
We then decided to end the performance asking for a special contribution (in italian):
(realized in collaboration with https://www.eigenlab.org, acting by Alessandro Belsandro Moirano. Directing and editing: Gianmarco Bonavolontà)
Special Thanks
EigenLab, Ilario Gelmetti, Teatro LUX, Adriana De Cesare, Mariangela Della Monica, Edoardo Fleishner and all the Internet Festival staff, all the citizens of the city of Pisa
VersuS is a series of works about the possibility to listen in real-time to the emotions, expressions and information generated by users on social network and using ubiquitous technologies, and to publish them onto the cities which they are related to.
A scenario emerges according to which it becomes possible to realize information landscapes which are ubiquitously accessible and which change our experience or urban spaces.
These projects also suggest the possibility to use these methodologies and technologies to promote novel forms of participatory practices in urban spaces, for decision-making, policy-making and urban planning and design.
the video “Berlin_WantsToBeHere.mov” shows a full day of the city of Berlin as captured through social media sites (Facebook, Twitter,Instagram, Google+). Message captured show when people used social networks to express that they wanted to be in the place they were in.
the video “RomaRiot.mov” shows a full day of the city of Rome as captured through social media sites (Facebook, Twitter,Instagram, Google+). The video shows the city’s digital life during the violent riot of October 15th 2011.
the video “Rome_aDayInTheLife.mov” shows a full day of the city of Rome as captured through social media sites (Facebook, Twitter,Instagram, Google+). The video shows a full day of the digital life of the city, in its completeness, with its cycles, patterns and routines.
the video “Turin_Love.mov” shows a full day of the city of Turin as captured through social media sites (Facebook, Twitter,Instagram, Google+). The video shows 2012′s Valentine’s day as seen through social networks, with people talking about love, making fun about love and arguing because maybe their partner forgot that it was Valentine’s Day.
the video “Turin_Traffic.mov” shows a full day of the city of Turin as captured through social media sites (Facebook, Twitter,Instagram, Google+). The video shows the full digital life of the city as people use social networks to speak about traffic: being stuck in traffic jams, suggesting traffic information or alternative routes, describing accidents and, in general, providing an idea on how much people use social networks in real-time to talk about mobility.
The first day we met the city and regional institutions (with many thanks to the counselors Fabio Omero and Elena Marchigiani who were with us for the whole day filled with presentations and talks, and who also have been a pleasant, informing presence during the next days of the workshop), who presented us with the global scenario of the city of Trieste and its region: a city dedicated to wellness and better life, capable of uniting the beauty of its multi-cultural history (the nearby international border and its beautiful histories of permeability and cultural remix was ever present and a beautiful source of narratives and of peculiar points of view) to the wealth of traditions, of food, wines, nature and innovation.
Trieste was painted as a “city with no single center“, a city which does not benefit from a massive, single attraction which could be used as driver for turism and development (e.g.: a colosseum), but a city with hundreds of different centers, based on experiences and well-being, on the hundreds of cultural associations, citizen groups, on the beautiful seaside, on the parks, castles, belvedere and spots for relaxed socialization, ready to be reinvented to re-conceptualize the city’s tourism and daily life.
This analysis was supported by the regional counselors for Turism, who described a rapidly developing sector, but who also wished to highlight how the region had been focusing on a multiplicity of different turisms (from turism to turisms) which could combine the necessities of large operators (e.g.: large congresses and tour operators) to the ones of the hundreds of different niches, aiming at realizing experiences for non-conventional turists, for amateurs, lovers, sport freaks and more.
ex-opp
The next two days we were taken for a walking tour of the many paradoxes of the city of Trieste by the Manifetso2020association, taking us from the ex-OPP, the old asylum which is now one of the possible objectives of a new era of city projects, with its beautiful spaces up the hills and unused buildings full of history, down to the old port, where
the Old Portteh ex Port
an incredible number of practically abandoned buildings, clear example of industrial archaeology, are ready to host events, projects, fairs, concerts, exhibits and shows.
All the while we have been able to experience the peculiarities of the city, such as the characteristic ways in which the go to the beach, along the coastal roads of the Barcola with the typical Topolini buildings.
the workshop space
Having explored the city and its peculiarities, we set forth to confront with our task: the re-design of Trieste’s urban communication.
To do this, we followed a co-creative approach, in which many stages of expression merged into shared, collaborative sessions during which the overall project emerged.
Our high-level objective:
layout the Information Architecture of the city
design a solution which would bring benefit to tourism(s) and to the daily lives of the citizens
design the navigation system of the city, in both its static and dynamic elements
use ubiquitous technologies to create bridges between digital and analog realities, opening up the city to digital information, to social networks and to the emergence of user-generated content
QUESTIONS
How do you use a city without a center?
How is it possible to optimize, promote, develop, engineer or architect, in formal, manageable ways, a place with so many interpretations and with an identity which is disseminated among people, groups, associations, organizations, places and times?
Who are the city’s dwellers?
What do they desire? What do they want to do? Which experiences do they want to live?
How do they search and find the services they need to satisfy their day-to-day needs?
Where and how do they want to act?
Who do they want to meet?
How are their conversations made? How are their relations structured?
Which experiences do they dream about? Which ones do they not yet know they want?
Which information do they need when they are far?
Which ones while they are arriving in Trieste?
Which ones when they arrive?
Which information do they need when they stop in the city for one minute, one hour, one day, one month of for the rest of their life, for tourism, life, work, family, desire, emotions, passions, or science?
How can you navigate the city from the middle of a white square, or from a desert park atop the city, or from the walls of a castle, or from the spaces of an enormous grey building, or from the sidewalk at the port, or from a large avenue which traverses buildings of industrial archeology?
How is the navigation system of the city made? How can it make information readable, visible and accessible?
How can you transform Trieste into a semantic city?
How is the Information Architecture of the city of Trieste made?
Information Architecture
This was probably the most relevant diagram we used during the workshop.
data, information, knowledge,wisdom
The idea of bringing it to life by designing a novel system of urban communication and information has proven to be a challenging task.
Most urban signage do not go beyond the level of information: they assemble data about locations, opening times, types of venues etc to create signs which show useful information in the most readable, accessible way.
What we imagined for the city of Trieste was quite different.
We imagined using the opportunities offered by technologies and networks to go beyond information and to achieve knowledge and wisdom.
For example, city signage could be the portal for emergent publishing processes which would benefit from the constant production of content and commentaries by citizens and tourists on social networks: dedicated systems could be used to find patterns in people’s expressions and behaviors, thus producing usable knowledge which could be made accessible there, from the sign.
Obviously, technologies would be required to access these kinds of signs, too. And, thus, specific focus was dedicated to the issues of Digital Divide and Digital Inclusion, imagining ways in which people who did not own devices such as smartphones or did not know how to use them, could benefit from the same functionalities.
What we aimed for was a complete navigation system for the city.
navigation systems (orielly)
The idea was also to use signage to enact the semantic city, in which the semantic relationships between venues, services, events and opportunities would be visible, readable and accessible.
The City as a Platform
Trieste is: the place for opportunity; of indetermination and, thus, possibility; of the small, comfortable, diffused; relational, colloquial; precise and complex; planned, functional and organized; the place of boundaries and of their permeability; of free contamination and of locked drawers.
According to these interpretations, Trieste is a natural platform for human expression, just like the Network.
The Network is not a Technology, but a place for expression, for relation, for communication and possibility.
It’s a place where no spectators exist: in the Network everyone is a performer.
Choosing, connecting, looking, conversing, recognizing and interacting: everything in the Network becomes construction.
Anything we do becomes a creation of maps of relations, tastes, meanings, affinities.
From consumers to cultural producers, disseminated in time and space, and connected by transforming links, multiple and emergent.
The Network has defined its models to deal with this expressive and creative modality.
The model of the Long Tail, defined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, has been able to effectively describe the economic life of this reality.
Here, a high frequency and amplitude population is followed by a low frequency/amplitude one.
Using the Amazon.com website as a typical example, the market is composed by a distribution of agents in which few publications selling millions of copies sit side-by-side with millions of other publications selling only a few (or even one) of them.
Far from classical business models, mainly dedicated to promoting few best-seller products and to the substantial exclusion of niches, the Long Tail is a polyphonic marketplace, which is able to valorize (and monetize) in extreme ways the productions of the smaller operators and to engage cultural niches.
Operators such as Amazon.com get as much as 60% of their profits from the possibility to simultaneously access hundreds of thousands of niche markets.
In this scenario operators become platforms for expression used by small actors, cultural producers, re-combiners, remixers, micro-curators of niche markets, fetishes and specialities, to diffuse and distribute their own vision.
The Long Tail is an ecosystem in its fullest definition: every actor contributes to the balance and well-being of the environment, performing its life-style and relations.
How is a Long Tail City made?
We offered a vision of the city of Trieste as a City-Platform, able to offering spaces, times, functionalities and opportunities to all the actors of the Long Tail – for tourism and citizenship–.
A city which is able to promote both the strategies and policies of large operators, and the ones of niche operators who, from within the city and from the diffusion of the Network, can invent, design, develop, communicate, offer and manage their product and services, referring to the passions, desires, visions, relations and imaginaries of their natural audiences.
A City Platform which can offer tools to operators of any size, and to transform people in performers: tourist performers; citizen performers; consumer performers; desiring and willing to live the experiences of the city and to give back their emotions, comments, rankings, orientations, suggestions, relations.
A City Platform in which data and information, brought into the ecosystem by private and public operators as well as by citizens and tourists, interweave producing knowledge and wisdom.
A City Platform in which recombining the city resources all actors of the Long Tail can express themselves: from large operators and the possibility to create supply chains and organization; to niche operators and the possibility to interconnect the resources of the city to express themselves and create fluxus and convergence.
the ecosystem
Operators are able to publish all of their initiatives into the ecosystem: every published element – hotels, initiatives, events, restaurants… – is associated to a series of information and meta-data, allowing for its classification into the Information Architecture of the city.
Operators can describe the relations running between elements, thus creating the semantic city.
Each element is automatically associated to a sign, a unique marker that allows identifying it (two different elements will have different markers), and to access Augmented Reality content through it, and the element’s digital data, in real-time.
The marker is a generative visual sign which embeds the main information elements: the title, location, timeframe and classification.
On the other side of the diagram, people (citizens, residents, tourists) benefit from different ways with which to navigate the city.
Some of them allow them to navigate among all available elements: in semantic ways, surfing the information architecture, or pseudo-random ways.
Some other ways allow people to limit their scope. Every user can, in fact, personalize his/her own experience of the city and the ecosystem: explicitly, by configuring tastes and desires; implicitly, by using and taking part to the ecosystem, establishing affinities and differences which can be used semi-algorithmically as filters to suggest matches and possible interests.
Once an experience is over, people can enrich the ecosystem by publishing experiences, rankings, feedbacks, emotions, images and videos.
Operators can benefit from a dashboard mode through which they can observe the life of the city, thus being able to equalize parameters to optimize experiences and people’s engagement.
Urban Ecosystem
Of the many things proposed during the workshop, three have seemed to us as being outstanding:
the idea of the moving center
the open source city and the development kit
the generative visual identity
Trieste Moving Center
The city of Trieste does not have a widely recognized landmark (such as the Colosseum in Rome) which can be immediately associated as its city center.
Furthermore, much of its richness is disseminated across its territory, and distributed throughout its historical center and its peripheries, which host architectures, parks and occasions for traditions, entertainment, good food and peculiar experiences.
The idea of creating a fixed centre did not obviously match this city configuration.
This is the reason why we chose to describe a moving center.
the City Wall
A movable landmark represents in real-time the life of the ecosystem of the city of Trieste. A visual map and a geographical map sit side by side and can be interacted with by touch and gestures to navigate the events, services, concerts, curiosities as well as the user-generated information.
A monument to the digital life of the city.
The landmark can be moved around the city: from time to time the administration chooses in which neighborhood to place it, fostering development of all the territories which make up the city, and establishing opportunities for novel events, paths throughout the city, unexpected traversals and, in general, having a tool which can be used to shift the focus of attention in the city together with the strategies for local and community development.
The landmark represents the life of the city: citizens living nearby it can benefit from the shifted focus of attention and, on top of that, feel their neighborhood valued and appreciated.
The movable center of the city opens up architecture and urbanism, turning it into an open, participatory flow.
The idea of the Experience Spots goes further in this direction.
Experience Spots are low-cost devices which implement micro-sensorial experiences which are disseminated throughout the city.
Designed as small boxes which are easily attached in most places, Experience Spots show minimal information like a certain environmental parameter, the density of presence in a certain spot of the city, or the speed of the Bora wind in the sidewalk along the sea. Or they can offer opportunities for minimal forms of interaction: a microphone into which to speak to leave a message to the next city dweller; a speaker from which to listen to the sound of another part of the city; a USB key sticking out of a wall onto which to leave sounds, videos or secret messages to other citizens; a real-time, city wide intercom, from which to communicate with other citizens somewhere else in the city; a single button creating some peculiar audio/visual effect; a minimal information visualization.
Experience Spots create a disseminated narrative of interactive experiences throughout the city: each one of them is made from a low cost device which is controlled by a street-computer which interconnects them to the city-cloud and to the rest of the ecosystem.
Experience Spots are also the most evident manifestation of the Open Source soul of the city. The city administration sells Experience Spots Development Kits for a few euros: artists, designers, entrepreneurs, engineers are invited to use them to invent and realize novel experiences, business, services which can use the city as a platform. Each new service can be added to the ecosystem, thus transforming the whole city into a Open Source platform for expression, creativity and sustainable, participatory, inclusive business.
All these characterizations are condensed and synthesized in the generative visual identity.
the generative visual identity
The visual identity proposed for the city of Trieste is generative and directly connected to the idea of the ecosystem.
Each element of the ecosystem benefits from a different, unique logo.
These generative logos are like databases, as each of their visual components is directly obtained from the information components of the element of the ecosystem:
the geographical location of the element determines the position of the white polygon in the top part of the logo (with the top rectangle being mapped to the geographical bounding box of the city of Trieste);
the geographical altitude of the element determines the polygon’s rotation;
the classification in the City’s Information Architecture (class, sub-class) of the element determines the background colors for the top and bottom part;
the shape of the curve separating the top and bottom part is determined by the unique title and slogan associated to the element;
the time dimension of the element (from, to, recurring…) determines the sequence and sizes of the circles at the bottom of the logo.
The visual characteristics of these generative logos allow them to be printed out and be included into the communication and visual materials of the events/initiatives/hotels/etcetera, allowing them to have certified visual proof of their belonging to the city ecosystem.
Furthermore, their graphic characteristics allow them to be used as identifying markers: through a simple app developed during the workshop, they have been read as fiducial markers allowing a smartphone to read them to obtain all the relevant, on-marker information by simply taking a picture of them, as well as to associate the information about the event that was generated in real-time by people, such as reviews, images, videos, comments and more.
The next step of generative visuals, bringing the digital world onto the urban physical one.
Credits
Tutors:
Salvatore Iaconesi, Simone Paternich – ISIA Firenze
Students:
Mirko Balducci (ISIA Firenze), Lucia Del Zotto (ISIA Urbino), Daniele Dominici (ISIA Firenze), Marta Maldini (ISIA Urbino), Guido Marchesini (ISIA Firenze), Marina Metaxa (Architettura Trieste), Mattia Mezzabotta (ISIA Firenze), Peter Mišic (Università di Nova Gorica), Elena Penni (ISIA Firenze), Lorenzo Pentassuglia (Architettura Trieste), Francesco Puccinelli (ISIA Firenze), Stefania Tonello (ISIA Urbino), Francesca Toso (IUAV Venezia), Sara Ubaldini (ISIA Firenze), Diego Umari (Architettura Trieste)
Many thanks to:
Marco Barbariol, Stefano Maria Bettega, Cristina Caris, Alessandro Gaetano, Guerrino Lanci, Maniftso2020, Elena Marchigiani, Claudia Marcon, Alessandra Marin, Silvia Masetti, Piero Miceu, Fabio Omero, Ugo Padulosi, Oriana Persico, Alberto Sdegno, Federica Seganti, Edi Sommariva, Marco Svara, Adriano Venudo, Tania Zoffoli, The Hub Trieste and hotel Filoxenia and the whole city for the warm welcome
