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. : . )
