Making sense of space

This collection of short expository, critical, and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social, and aesthetic impact of software. Computing and digital media are essential to the way we work and live, and much has been said about their influence. But the very material of software has often been left invisible. In Software Studies, computer scientists, artists, designers, cultural theorists, programmers, and others from a range of disciplines each take on a key topic in the understanding of software and the work that surrounds it. These include algorithms; logical structures; ways of thinking and doing that leak out of the domain of logic and into everyday life; the value and aesthetic judgments built into computing; programming's own subcultures; and the tightly formulated building blocks that work to make, name, multiply, control, and interweave reality.

The growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural theory that can understand the politics of pixels or the poetry of a loop and engage in the microanalysis of everyday digital objects. The contributors to Software Studies are both literate in computing (and involved in some way in the production of software) and active in making and theorizing culture. Software Studies offers not only studies of software but proposes an agenda for a discipline that sees software as an object of study from new perspectives.

Contributors:
Alison Adam, Wilfried Hou Je Bek, Morten Breinbjerg, Ted Byfield, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Geoff Cox, Florian Cramer, Cecile Crutzen, Marco Deseriis, Ron Eglash, Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Steve Goodman, Olga Goriunova, Graham Harwood, Friedrich Kittler, Erna Kotkamp, Joasia Krysa, Adrian Mackenzie, Lev Manovich, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Michael Murtaugh, Jussi Parikka, Søren Pold, Derek Robinson, Warren Sack, Grzesiek Sedek, Alexei Shulgin, Matti Tedre, Adrian Ward, Richard Wright, Simon Yuill.

Matthew Fuller (Ed) is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press, 2005) and Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software.

June 2008
7 x 9, 334 pp., 13 illus.
$35.00/£22.95 (CLOTH)

ISBN-10: 0-262-06274-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-06274-9

Published by MIT press Also available at Amazon

http://www.elec.uow.edu.au/issnip2008/cfp/EMSN2008_CFP.pdf

held in conjunction with the Fourth IEEE International Conference on
Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks, and Information Processing (ISSNIP
2008),

http://www.elec.uow.edu.au/issnip2008/

December 15-18, Sydney, Australia

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OVERVIEW

Environmental monitoring is a very important application area for sensor networks as it allows near real-time monitoring to be carried out at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Present day monitoring technologies do not provide such advantages. While a significant amount of research has been done on the theoretical aspects of sensor networks, literature on experiences with actual deployments of sensor networks for different types of environmental monitoring applications is highly limited. This symposium focuses on the use of sensor networking technologies for environmental monitoring. It provides an ideal platform to discuss various aspects of experiences with real-life sensor network deployments and also new and novel techniques designed specifically for gathering data in environmental monitoring applications.

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TOPICS OF INTEREST

We seek papers describing original, previously unpublished results. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Experiences with real-life deployments of sensor networks, e.g. environmental effects on reliable communication/data collection, etc.
• Experiences with power generation techniques, e.g. energy-scavenging.
• Hybrid architectures, e.g. integrating wired and wireless sensor networks.
• Distributed data management and visualization techniques for streaming sensor data.
• Real-life performance of in-network algorithms for reliable data acquisition, e.g. self-calibration, data aggregation, event detection, etc.
• Sensor-actor coordination, e.g. data muling.
• Commercial applications and market studies, e.g. precision agriculture, coral reefs, lakes, space, etc.

Why do I blog this? Of potential interest for next year...

Great video on NY times' Post-Materialist column showcasing "5,000 Years of Chairs in 5 Minutes"

A report from our Berlin correspondent on design and society.

The more you love design, the more you enjoy seeing things a bit worn, battered and imperfect. The greater your obsession with seating, for example, the more you’ll notice it — chairs out there in the world, a bit tattered and torn, weird one-offs, big green sofas shaped like mountain ranges, piano stools without pianos, junked stools salvaged from the trash and painted pink.

A very interesting project by Fabien Girardin from the Interactive Technologies Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona

Velib is a community bicycle rental service in Paris (similar to the Vélo'v service in Lyon and Bicing in Barcelona). The stations deployed in the city offer bikes people can use for their small and medium daily routes within the city.

[...] As follow-up to the work on Bicing in Barcelona, Mathieu Arnold granted us access to  the infrastructure status (i.e. number of available bikes for each station) over several weeks. The resulting animation shows the spatio-temporal state of the system and the mobility patterns of its users. One intention behind these visualisation is to explore how accumulated data can help people to grasp the availability and quality of the system over space and time (e.g. do not expect to encounter available bikes the different neighborhoods at certain hours). In addition we aim at revealing Paris, the life of its different neighborhoods, specific areas, their topologies and dynamics through its bike system.

Images from The animation of these spatio-temporal data that reveals the pulse of the Velib' system over a full day (February 10, 2008) based on the number of bikes available at each station. see full video

Why do I blog this?

I find Fabien's work fascination and very relevant to what has been on my head for some time now. It is a great example of making sense of space in action. It makes me think of Lynch's notion of "imageability". Also of Dan Hill's ideas on urban computing and services and Kazys Varnelis' recent article on "The invisible city" highlighting the increasing reliance on maps to understand our new reality and the opportunities for designers in developing this new language.

There is an increasing interest on environmental data streams and personal datasets. Lots of people are using twitter to share information from devices and environments. I'm not sure twitter is the ideal platform for this but it provides an easy to use API and posting interface. Interesting feeds include several telescopes a,b,c,d. Andy's House the IBM's research scientist that has connected his home security system to twitter broadcasting every activity in the place and Rob Faludi's Botanicalls project is and his Botanicalls twitter kit.

Can twitter be killer app for the internet of things? Apparently not but it hasn't failed to capture the imagination of many: TwitArcs, TweetWheel, Twitter Statistics, Twitter Spectrum, Twitter Topic Stream, Twitter Social Network Analysis

What makes twitter a good candidate for these applications? is it the easy to use posting interface? is it the simplicity of access? the community? Probably a combination of all those...

Last week we had the last instalment of the workshop series organised in collaboration between the Foresight team at Arup and Tinker.it. The workshop's theme was extended environments. We had presentations from Usman Haque and Chris Leung. They presented the work that each has done on Pachube and Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) respectively. Pachube is a service that enables people to tag and share real time environmental data from objects, devices and spaces around the world. It provides a series of interfaces to manipulate data using the EEML schema on a hosted service. There are libraries for Processing and Arduino making life a little easier for those who just want to get things done quickly and don't want to fiddle with databases and servers etc...

Pachube will become interesting the more people it gets to use it. If you are working with networked devices that are sharing data over the internet, chances are you are already familiar with the technologies necessary to accomplish this. Probably you even rather do it yourself using your language/platform of choice. However the attractive to both data providers and consumers is belonging to a large distributed community of artefacts and spaces that adds context to your data.

Duncan got a feed from Arup's BMS running pretty quickly.

This weekend we're running the second installment of the workshop series organised in collaboration between the Foresight team at Arup and Tinker.it . This weekend's subject was Wireless interactions. We've had great presentations by Ben Cerveny and Massimo Banzi.

I have posted the workshop materials I used to talk about the ZigBee side of things. Also this weekend I am making available the first public release of Bricks, after two years in the making. More on that soon.