'en masse'

The elements of networked urbanism

Now that I’m in the final project stages, and frantically trying to piece things together but also extend the project a little more to address early questions, I’m taking the time to reflect on the insights so far. 

Adam Greenfield of Urbanscale has some very interesting points of insights into city space and the changeability and flux that the future hold, but how technology can play an important role. I’ve listened to one of his 2009 talks three times so far to extract as much from his thoughts as possible. The talk was divided roughly into:

1. From latent to explicit;
2. From browse to search;
3. From held to shared;
4. From expiring to persistent;
5. From deferred to real-time;
6. From passive to interactive;
7. From component to resource;
8. From constant to variable;
9. From wayfinding to wayshowing;
10. From object to service;
11. From vehicle to mobility;
12. From community to social network;
13. From ownership to use;
14. From consumer to constituent.

Focal point (Schelling point)

In game theory, a focal point (also called Schelling point) is a solution that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special or relevant to them. The concept was introduced by the Nobel Prize winning American economist Thomas Schelling in his book The Strategy of Conflict (1960).^[1] In this book (at p. 57), Schelling describes “focal point[s] for each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do.” This type of focal point later was named after Schelling.

Stream
— Sparks of followed users

Discover
— View sparks by proximity (need to figure out the control for that…)
— Explore sparks based on proximity in a map view. Gauge distance and popular locations in the city.
— Historical view for digging into past Sparks with granular control.

My Own (user profile)
— User information like name, number of posts, location
— Bookmarked/starred Sparks
— Location of user Sparks 

Settings 

Tutorial 20 September

— Live view and historical view
— How can historical Sparks be explored?
— Look for code templates (slideshow) for presenting the work, like Square
— Export from Flash to HTML5?
— Exhibition: Infographic poster explaining the app, flow etc.

Spark (singular idea) —> Smoke/Ember (popular idea) —> Fire (idea in action)