Science of the City: reportaje de La Malla Tendències. Buena y sintética explicación del proyecto, su proceso y sus resultados hasta ahora.
Science of the City: reportatge de La Malla Tendències.Cona i sintètica explicació del projecte, el seu procés i els seus resultats fins ara
On of these little amazing technologies and concepts that pop up at MIT from time to time. (via @bruce)
Laura Forlano, talks of several topics in this interview, but she warns us about how easy is to get trapped by media folk explanations of the new sociotechnical relationships brought about by technology.
Essentially if you look at mainstream press or popular notions about technology, there is a lot of mythology and hype, and so it is really important to have good research that can help us to create better concepts. In particular those are concepts that bridge both social and technical types of discussions and also both technical and spatial. […]
If you look up the word ‘anytime, anywhere’ and the way it’s been used historically, it’s been tied to any innovations going back hundreds of years… I think it’s doing us a disservice as academics to constantly use that kind of language — we do — and I think if you haven’t studied mobile technology or situated spatial…contextual ways in which people use technology, you tend to revert to that as a default.
Releyendo un viejo artículo de Manuel Castells “¿Ingenieros o antropólogos?” me pregunto si no estará apuntando en una dirección incorrecta o remarcando un dicotomía nada deseable.
Lo digo porque diseñar desde el conocimiento real de la tecnología (no un conocimiento distante) hace que se entiendan mejor conexiones con esos usuarios que, según Castells, innovan a base de inventar nuevos usos a las tecnologías que, según Castells, sólo inventan los ingenieros.
Es conocida, efectivamente, la presencia de antropólogos en Intel, pero me parece mucho más sugestivos un perfil como este de Google:
Un perfil en que ya no se distingue donde empieza el tecnólogo y donde acaba el antropólogo. Que no es lo que nos dice Castells que hace falta (pero es que él no es tecnólogo, claro ;-) ).
Dicho con todo el respeto desde mi humilde experiencia de tecnólogo, visiting researcher en un departamento de Sociología, sufridor y colaborador de antropólogos y senior fellow en un departamento de diseño de otra universidad.
P.S.: Supongo que Castells conoce el peso en la creación de tecnologías de Intel, Nokia o Alcaltel de los respectivos labs donde trabajan juntos sociólogos, antropólogos, tecnólogos y perfiles mixtos más híbridos de la pobre dicotomía que propone.
Big announcements these days:
Harvard urges its academics to prefer the open access model.
MIT and Harvard go for an online open access model of learning for millions.
Big actors, big moves. The perspective from a second rate university as ours is can be threatening. Let me share my experience with the waves that this type of moves had sent to the academic world.
The last academic course I had the experience of teaching an AI course at my university to a class where half of the students had successfully gone through Stanford’s well-known AI course. This course is taught, among others, by one of the authors of “AI a Modern Approach” Peter Norvig. This is the text that we used for the last years as a reference book for our AI courses. Norvig happens to be also the Director of Research at no other place than Google.
Of course I could get into the traditional rant against USA dominance through networks, corporate power within the university, etc, etc, etc. And clearly we are in the middle of a very bold (I would say crude) move from our own government to discredit public universities and weaken a system that took ages to bring to decent teaching and research standards. Some would say that our own government would be happy to “open up” and “outsource” the system to foreign prestigious universities. Sure this is a fantasy ;-)
But, then, last course, for the first time, I could free some of my students’ and my time from the basics of the discipline. My students already knew them. Moreover and the topics that Norvig taught were essentially the same that we had been using always for the first part of our course.
The good thing? Now, I have more time to share with my students my own insights from my own research and from the projects that our research group is working on.
Of course, visibility goes to the Big Names in the Gobal University System. However,if you have done your homework (research, teaching) than you are really bringing something different into the same system.
For me it is clear that Ivy League + Research universities in the Amercian understand the strategic logic of a connected world. Within a network, nodes that start from a higher reputation level, have a clear advantage, and tend to dominate the game. At the same time, whoever can offer some diversity and expertise is not completely at a loss. And this is something that less powerful actors (like our national university system) are not even taking into account when discussing “the necessary reforms of our university system”.
Which is bad.
Crowdfunding can be an incredible engine of opportunity and change. We still are learning how it works and how it can work better for alternative economic development paths.
For this reason I found interesting these two references.
In Design Observer, Alexandra Lange, analyzes how Kickstarter is useful (or not) for anything other that commercial products or very specific types of urban interventions. She compares a couple of proposals in Kickstarter that address urban spaces and then remarks:
Look at the differences between the LowLine and the unsuccessful $4200 effort to fund a new ping-pong table for Gulick Park, also on the Lower East Side. The first is physical, practical, and achievable. If you are part of the physical community, you would be able to see the fruits of your donation within months. The second is seed money for seed money
and she concludes:
So, save your money. If you want to fund urbanism on Kickstarter, think small. For the big picture, a park, a pool or a playing field, maybe a new social media platform will emerge, ready to walk you through the meetings and legislative hiccups, with fundraising for photocopying as well as fiber-optics. If that’s not satisfying enough, maybe you should go offline and to your community board meeting. Participate in participatory budgeting. Stop starting at that gizmo and look at what your local park needs. Maybe it is a plastic bubble. Maybe it is a ping pong table. The park is going to require a lot more doing than $5 and “Great idea!”
The second reference (in Spanish) comes from one of the promoters of Goteo a crowdfunding platform for the commons (“Algunas preguntas sobre por qué no todos los proyectos están funcionando en Goteo”, “Some questions about why not all projects are working in Goteo”).
The comments are as worth as the post itself but, interestingly enough, some of the reasons in both overlap with the ones identified by Alexandra Lange: it is difficult for people to see the return (at individual and community level) of projects oriented towards urban intervention. Although most of the commenters connect this to “culture” factors specific to Spain, the post from Design Observer (coming from half world away) may point to something else. Also there are some very valuable comments on transparency in the design of platforms and processes that are worth it.
There has been some discussion about the effects of digital technologies on human relationships. Bowling Alone, Alone Together and other publications connect with classics of the effect of media on society such as, the Lonely Crowd.
The last tirade appeared on The Atlantic. But some people discuss their claims, data and methods.
I take this excerpt from that second point of view:
“Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us.” He accepts the psychologists’ insight: “We are doing it to ourselves.” For a moment, at least, March appears to answer his article’s inflammatory question, “is Facebook making us lonely?” with a definitive no.
But instead Marche concludes by arguing that Facebook is in fact doing something far more harmful. “The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude.” Facebook, he claims, has produced a “new isolation,” one that demands constant attention to the Internet and precludes any genuine retreat from the world. Facebook, he charges, “denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.”
“There are still people who believe that design is just about making things, people and places pretty. In truth, design has spread like gas to almost all facets of human activity, from science and education to politics and policymaking. For a simple reason: one of design’s most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change.”
Paola Antonelli
| — | From “Design Takes Over” |
