And we’re back in Helsinki again, after yet another extended roadtrip — this one to Wellington, New Zealand for the Webstock conference, with stops at Singapore (on the way down) and Hong Kong (coming back).

It was a genuinely necessary trip, on a lot of levels. For almost two solid weeks, we soaked up Southern Hemisphere summer, ate foods it’s all but impossible to get in Finland in any season, and basked in the extraordinary generosity of the event’s hosts and participants. We also found, once again, that we were able to ship Tokyo Blues orders from the road.

But the real revelation was the response to Systems/Layers, our “walkshop” on the experience of urban space in the era of networked informatics. The feedback we got was so positive that we’re determined to do it again both here in Helsinki, and later on in New York and anywhere else we can mount it; not coincidentally, it was also a rich source of ideas for future Do initiatives.

The method, to the degree there was one, was pretty simple, and drew heavily on a similarly-themed walkabout developed by Martin Brynskov for the NordiCHI conference in Lund a couple of years back. We basically walked around the Cuba Street district of Wellington for an hour and a half with eyes wide open, looking very carefully for all of the sites in the streetscape where information is being gathered up by a networked system, or drawn back off such a system and displayed or acted upon. (You can see Nigel Parker’s video of the walkshop here and check out participants’ visual responses here.)

Then we returned to a command post we’d previously set up and provided with a map of the area, to plot our findings and consider what we’d seen in the light of a couple of fundamental questions: who owns this data? How might one get access to it? What kind of interface might be involved? Whose interests does it tend to support, or undermine? To a person, the participants all said it had raised their consciousness regarding the present-day, real-world effects of networked informatics on urban life, and we learned more about the texture of Wellington than I’d have wagered it was possible to discover in 90 minutes. Superthanks to Tom Beard for helping to plan and run the event, and endless gratitude to Mike, Natasha, Keith, Ben, and everyone else who helps to make Webstock what it is: you’ve really got something special going on. (Xtra bonus shout-out to Dr. Anne Galloway and the Snapper guys.)

Our next challenge is going to be figuring out how to do this as a regular, repeatable event, and to produce documentation (perhaps along the lines of the wonderful things Candy and James are doing with Civic Center) that helps people further unpack the dense urban systems they live in, around and between. In the meantime, we’ve got a couple more weeks yet of winter to trudge through, so wish us luck. : . )

A real-estate agent’s map of Seoul. Jongno, January 2010.

The last seven weeks have seen us taking our fledging operation on the road. Between our last report to you on the 22nd December and mid-January, we found ourselves in Palm Beach, New York, London, Seoul and Tokyo: the price of having a far-flung family.

As you’d imagine, we spent a lot of that period in a jetlagged (but well-fed) daze, and as you also might expect, it’s been a little difficult to reintegrate fully into Helsinki life. We’ve been helped immeasurably in this effort by our dear friends Sasha and Petri — and suspect we would be by Bryan as well, if he were ever in town.

The pace of Tokyo Blues orders has slowed after its initial spike, but we’re actually happy in that this has allowed us to handle fulfillment from the road. We took a stack of books with us wherever we went and shipped them from wherever we happened to be as orders came in, which is a luxury/burden I can’t imagine too many other publishers experiencing. We don’t believe this led to any problems with delivery, but please let us know if for whatever reason your order hasn’t arrived.

Our trip to Tokyo was brief but instructive: the city’s homeless, having already been chased out of the subway tunnels at the end of the 1990s, are now being exiled from the public parks they colonized in the early part of last decade. One unexpected, minor, but very interesting consequence of this is that Tokyo Blues has acquired new value as historical documentation, as the conditions it depicts are no longer extant — at least not in the parts of Shinjuku and Shibuya we were able to reach.

The city’s parks, playgrounds and interstitial spaces have been swept clear of any sign of their former use, to the extent that I have a hard time imagining how anyone encountering them for the first time now will understand just how richly and cleverly they were inhabited. What we thought of as a more-or-less permanent feature of the cityscape turned out to be just the way things were done during a very particular interval in time. I feel very lucky to have something we can point to and say, this is the way it was.

Another nice piece of luck: after many years of poking around Seoul, obviously in the wrong places, we’ve finally touched base with something that feels to us like vibrant alternative culture. Nurri had read about a bookstore/imprint out of Itaewon called Post Poetics, and we dropped in to have a look. It turned out to be this amazing oasis of lowercase cultural production — somehow simultaneously spare/minimal but ad-hoc and funky — run by a lovely guy named Jowan; he, in turn, let us know about a sound-art opening at the brand new Space Hamilton around the corner, and that was also pretty great.

It was all a little uncanny for me personally, since this little nexus of activity lies just up the street from the place where a pleasure district (”Hooker Hill”) once huddled up against the gates of Yongsan, formerly the main US Army base on the peninsula. I spent a decent amount of time up in these alleys in the late ’90s, watching twenty-year-old Rangers kill their neurons by the millionfold with soju kettle (a concoction of 86-proof rice whiskey and Kool-Aid, served in two-liter soda bottles with the tops hacked off) before setting off to making fools of themselves by trying to bargain with the working girls.

After the turn of the century, and especially since the return of Yongsan to Korean control, the neighborhood’s lost most of this character, becoming heavily Bangla and Pakistani (and gaining some incredible hole-in-the-wall places to eat in the bargain), but my own memories of Itaewon tend to feature landmarks like Polly’s Kettle House and the supercheesy Reggae Pub. Post Poetics isn’t entirely detached from this legacy — it is, reassuringly, one floor up from a tacky little sex shop — but I have to tell you that walking into a space hereabouts and seeing shelves lined with Apartamento and Kasino A4 and Butt still strikes me as nothing short of surreal. Here again, a study in changing urban dynamics. (Congratulations to Jowan on bringing something lovely into being, and our thanks for having pointed us at some other great stuff.)

The last thing we have to report to you for now is something that makes us really happy: Nurri’s won a 2010 Finnish Arts Council grant for work on an upcoming project, of which we’ll tell you more in days to come. For now, stay warm, keep in touch, and keep sending us those pictures of you with your books.

Slow week, snow week, holiday week. The only thing of substance we have to report to you is the appearance of a generous feature on Nurri’s Feeder series in Photo Raw magazine. The copy we got our hands on looks gorgeous, and so does the work: very gratifying. Pick up a copy if you’re able.

For now, here’s wishing the happiest of holidays to you all from Do HQ here in Helsinki: cozy, healthy, relaxed, and surrounded by those you love best. See you here next week for a year-end wrapup.

Another good solid week; orders continue to come in at a pleasing pace, and we continue to bring stacks of books down to the post office for shipment on a daily basis.

Three things have come up in all of this. The first is that we’re contemplating bumping up our shipping rates to Zone B (i.e. anywhere but Europe) by about a dollar, to reflect higher-than-expected costs. We’ll come to a decision on this in the next few days, and let you know as soon as we do.

The second thing is that we’re especially curious to hear how the first shipments of Tokyo Blues have fared in the mail – if we’re packing the books adequately to protect them on their journeys, how they look when you get them, and so on. We’d appreciate it if you’d let us know when you get your books, what kind of condition they’re arriving in, and how well the packing meets your expectations.

But the last is that shipping orders – which ought to be nothing but drudgery, given that it involves delightful tasks like printing labels, stuffing envelopes, and waiting on line at the post office – unexpectedly turns out to be one of the most rewarding things I can remember doing, and infinitely more gratifying than anything I’m doing at my day job. (Maybe that’s why they call it “fulfillment.”) Every time we walk out of the Posti with another batch of orders shipped, I feel the kind of solid-but-humble, and humble-but-solid, sense of accomplishment that’s all too rare in this life.

It’s a wonderful feeling, and especially welcome in what would otherwise be the lightless and depressive depths of a Helsinki December. I recommend doing whatever you have to do to put yourself in the same position, as soon as you possibly can. The economics of small endeavors like Do will always be brutal, but this is a life-changing sensation.

Adam is hoping to grab some time to dig further in sources for The City Is Here For You To Use, primarily oddball Frei Otto’s oddball Occupying and Connecting and material on favelas and slums. Nurri’s continuing her work at Refugee Hospitality Club Punavuori, conducting resident and stakeholder interviews and collecting information about how residents sense, understand and make use of Helsinki.

Finally finally, just a quick reminder that it’s holiday season, and while we’re doing our best to get orders out within 24 hours (and in many cases, on the same day they come in), you can expect the mail to be sluggish from now through the end of the year. The people at Posti advised us that orders going out this week will probably show up no earlier than the first week of January, no matter where they’re going to, and we’ve adjusted our expectations accordingly.

Launch week, and a flurry of activity:

- Very gratifyingly, Tokyo Blues was featured on Dwell, MetaFilter, Space and Culture, Boing Boing, Jean Snow and Warren Ellis’s sites, and in too many tweets to keep track of. (Our personal favorite has to be William Gibson’s.) There’s very little more rewarding than seeing how many of you get what we’re trying to do.

- As you can see from the above picture, we’ve been making daily fulfillment runs to the Posti. The first orders went out in last Wednesday’s mail, and while things are bound to be crazy this time of year, those of you who ordered Tokyo Blues might want to start keeping an eye on your mailboxes.

- If you’ve already got your hands on the book, send us your pictures and we’ll publish them here!

- Nurri’s continuing her research at a local reception center for refugees and asylum seekers, with an eye toward developing materials that explain the city and its new residents to one another. Adam took advantage of a trip to San Francisco to discuss requirements for our forthcoming Emergency Maps project with Stamen’s Tom Carden and Michal Migurski.

That’s about it for now, with thanks always for your support, your insightful comments, and (especially) your orders. More news next week.