I am at Day Two* of the Interactive City Summit in San Francisco, sitting right beside a fellow who also happens to be entering notes into the oh-so-familiar WordPress interface.
The day started with a talk by Matt Jones, that in his typical rapid-fire and intelligent way, bantered back and forth between focused questions and proposed examples as solutions. He spoke about “solidified socialisation” – the idea that our social relationships are being better articulated and firmed up through web 2.0 applications (I found myself nodding during this slide, since I know I’ve used these tools to reinforce a weak tie or capitalize on a chance meeting). Matt also spoke of “playing with reality” (using fantasy football as an example) and methods of tagging, recording, and sharing information in public which he cheekily referred to as “search and deploy” tactics.
Matt asked the simple question at one point – Toys or stories? We used our mobile phones to vote on which thing – toys or stories – we preferred to use/make/think about. It is an interesting binary to propose, especially when thinking about some of the examples of creativity in urban environments that are being showcased at ISEA this year.
One of the concepts from Matt’s talk that I found particularly “sticky” was the idea that we are creating (or should be creating?) a “Robot-readable planet”, meaning that instead of working hard to develop machine vision and have robots see the world they way we do, we can just make it easier for them to read our world. This led to the vivid and horrifying example of perhaps some of the bots that surround us and try to read us and our world becoming a bit of an Army of Microsoft Clippys.
One of the final examplese that Matt showed was a news story about a British village named Crackpot, where people drive off cliffs because they rely too heavily on their satellite navigation systems, and not on their eyes. This example in particular made me smile, since I have seen a similar phenomena with my own eyes. When I did the Geostash project in Toronto, where artists searched for caches of materials to create temporary public art, often the participants fixed on the GPS device and the number displayed, fiddling with the technology instead of trusting their eyes and doing a good look around when the numbers were close enough.
Next up, some reporting on the lunchtime brainstorms…
* – sadly, I missed Day One.