Sunday, February 21, 2010

COLLABORATIVE MAPPING

Reading the article by Julian Bleeker, 'A Design Approach for the Geospatial Web,' was exciting and stimulated my creative juices. What possibilities are there for collaborative mobile mapping?

What if everyone on Clemson Campus could "tag" locations easily on a mobile, collaborative mapping application that would upload them to a common, collaboratively-created map? For example:

The "I would love to see a sitting space [HERE]" map.

CLICK!

And the person has voted, and tagged a spot, including user info (to control for one person overtagging or "multiple voting" relative to others).

A map idea I had in while living in the Carrboro, NC area had to do with preserving sacred spaces in the city. If each person could "vote" on their favorite (single or multiple) "sacred spaces" in the city, would that not lead to an emergent collective awareness, as well as some possibly unique and yet highly citizen-appropriate directions for planning and preservation? I would have marked a certain rock formation in a certain stream in a certain part of a certain park in Carrboro. Someone else may have marked their favorite "sitting and contemplating" spot. The uses for that data could re-define how we see ourselves as a people and as a citizenry.

In the article, interestingly, is the inclusion of craigslist as a location-mapping application. It does not use GIS -- and yet is tagging locations and making connections with every new entry.

What other things did you think of when reading this article? How could GIS, non-GIS, mobile phones, handhelds, ISP addresses, iPhoto tags, blogs with location tags, an other technologies evolve into novel ways-of-seeing, understanding, and interacting in the future?

How could they enhance other projects you have considered or are engaged in?

Response to REDEFINING THE BASEMAP by Alison Sant

The gist of this article seems to be a call to reexamine the traditional, static, landmark-based mapping systems. "New mapping" technologies such as GPS and wireless reveal different patterns. Events, flows, routes, processes, and data based on statistical sums of multiple individual humans define the graphic patterns emerging from the locative-media-based mapping. The author cautions us to consider abandoning the traditional basemaps as well, with the view that some emergent pattern may therefore be more allowed to emerge.

I do think there is a lot of promise in locative technologies for mapping. Pulses and flows of life, for example between locations of day (work) time and evening (home) time for many individuals would reveal emergent patterns of home locations for various elements of the workforce. "Routes" prioritize chosen pathways of movement and may be more appropriate to examining the living processes within cities, while traditional "streets" prioritize official named landmarks but do not reveal use statistics or a myriad of other sociological data. Mapping events and processes, and the discovery of emergent patterns based on locative technological mapping, is a promising direction for understanding our lived spaces.

This is technologically-based, however. Without locative technologies, we would not be entertaining these novel emerging potentials. The technologies themselves, therefore, are foundational and pre-defining in much the same way that a "traditional static basemap" may be. Can we drop the "technology" and imagine mappable potentials beyond both locative technology and static physicalities? Conversational topics, perhaps -- admitedly based on the idea of "mapping" cellphone conversations? Aesthetic reactions throughout daily activity, multiplied by all of the people in a locale? Arousal? Interest? Cognative activity or level of awareness? Feelings of wellbeing? How would these be measured?

Additionally, the argument in favor of the traditional "basemap" is its representation of relatively static physicalities. In terms of orientation, that is an important factor. Will there likewise be more "static" processes -- ongoing events -- which emerge from locative mapping? "Most frequented locations", perhaps, by "the highest variety of people" -- would that be a shopping mall? A public park or downtown plaza? Certainly, these will also shift and change over time, but surely there will still be gradiations of permanence in process-mapping as well as mapping of physicalities. After all, the physical, the solid, the static are processes as well.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality.

Are films, "manufactured dreams"?

What relations can be drawn between dreaming and creativity?

Is their a connection between separating from reality and the process of design, in relation to the way this article defines film?

Hello again: CT-scan New Group

We have started a new semester. It has started fast and with a great interdisciplinary group of students:

Michael Whitmire, Planning Design and Built Environment

Kevin Wayne, Planning Design and Built Environment

Shirley Yu, Digital Production Arts

Jason Butz, Architecture and Art

Nick Barrett, Architecture

We will also be joined by another six students from the Universität Kassel led by Marc Kirschbaum in one week for a three week exchange.

Join us on the Urban CT-scan discussion that will continue this semester.