Rethinking the Marketplace

First steps to the book chapter as part of the Eat, Cook, Grow book.
The Place of the Market
We live in a digital, networked society where immaterial transactions frame many aspects of our everyday life. But in an internet of things our products and artefacts still have material presence; they have to be somewhere, they need to be physically displaced to arrive somewhere else, they cannot be easily duplicated and they have a life-cycle. As we grow increasingly accustomed to digital things this has an impact on how we relate to and interact with material objects. A critical characteristic of all things that we consume is that they need to travel from the place they are produced to the place in which they will be consumed, sometimes with some form of preparation process occuring in between. So, in order to eat an apple there needs to be a tree, a person who picks the apple, someone or something that transports the apple to where it will be prepared and then to the person who will eat it. This process may cover a simple few metres or may involve thousands of miles and many weeks. Since western industrialisation this process of the exchange of goods has typically been one which requires a market. The market is the structure through which goods are transferred from the producer to the consumer and typically this process involved many actors. However it involves not just an exchange of ownership and money, but also physical movement from its source to its consumption. The critical feature of such developments is that it created a disassociation between consumer and producer, between farmer and the urbanite. In the vast majority of cases the person who buys their food at a supermarket will never have had any contact with the source of the food, and in most instances will not even be aware of the country in which they food was produced. The consumer accepts the benefits of cheap, accessible and available food in the context of their urban life, without having to be involved in energy demanding distribution processes and highly regulated mono-culture farming. The market removes these issues from their control and provides the easy and homogenised interface to their experience of food.

Flow, Interface and Response (an agenda for architecure)

Architecture as Interface and flow
Architecture should be about creating interfaces and flows between people (both individuals and communities), the environment (both in terms of ecology and also the existing built environment) and through technology (both as hybrid digital space and as tool ). This should be reflected in the outcome where the built project is not seen as an isolated material object, but a mapping of social flows and techno/ecological systems. Instead the architect needs to be able to work in a way that responds and interprets to the many needs, desires and also tensions in a participatory manner. The involvement of any architect in this process is also one that is not complete once the project is completed, but which sees any built project as part of a life-long cycle. Out of this a new responsiveness is needed which sees architecture not as simply as focused on the design of the built world, but as an approach to responding to how we interact, act and structure our experience of the spatial world.

Materialising Social Practices and Ecologies
Architecture is about designing spaces that can be inhabited and create opportunities for social encounter and that are responsive to the local and global environmental ecologies. Architectural design and research should be able to capture, analyse and interpret the often intangible and changeful qualities of social practices and environmental ecologies and materialise these in a design approach. This means responding to patterns of movement, social encounters and tensions, technology practices and environmental ecologies using applied methods from related disciplines such as sociology, geography and anthropology. Overall the design process should be a dialogue and translation of these issues into a coherent and not a dominant or imposed response.

Responding to Technologies, Mobilities and New Urbanisms
The multi-faceted changing nature of the urban space means we need to adopt new strategies for how we respond to these issues as architects. These include new mobilities which cause us to reflect on the static and dynamic in architectural space, and the context of globalisation for understanding how the concept of the city pervades all aspects of design. A further key focus is digital technology, which becomes invisibly embedded in everyday things, even more activities become mediated, and networks extend rather than replace architecture. The field of interaction design reflects not only how people deal with machine interfaces but also how people deal with each other in situations where interactivity has become ambient. It shifts previously utilitarian digital design concerns to a cultural level, adding notions of premise, appropriateness, and appreciation. This calls for new approaches to the concept of materiality in the context of architectural design and a reassessment of the notion of aesthetics.

Flashmobs, Foursquare and Facades

Vermessungs des Urbanen 3.0 organisatoren

Wie ist die Entwicklung hybrider Räume aus Sicht der Forschung, des Designs und der sozialen Kommunikation einzuordnen, und wie ist die Emergenz neuer Verhaltensmuster in diesen Räumen zu bewerten? Heute steht die physische Natur des städtischen Raums einer Dynamik der Informationsflüsse und neuer Mobilitäten gegenüber. Den Beitrag wird die Eigenschaften dieser Medial Raüme und der sozialen Verhaltensweisen verbunden mit der Verwendung Lokative Medien im städtischen öffentlichen Raum der Stadt mit folgenden Schwerpunkten untersuchen:

Flashmobs
Diese hochgradig choreographierten Performances im öffentlichen Raum zeigen, wie Medien und Technologie neue kollektive Verhaltensmuster ermöglichen. Wie kann der statische Charakter des gebauten Raums auf diese Formen der Mikro-Koordination sozialen Verhaltens reagieren?

Foursquare
Die Verwendung von foursquare.com dokumentiert einer neue Sozialität und Mobilität im städtischen Raum, in dem sich Menschen bewegen und anderen Menschen begegnen: auf Bahnhöfen, Flughäfen, in Cafes, Geschäften und Diskotheken. Lokative Medien ermöglichen neue Formen der Begegnung Fremder im im urbanen Raum. Wie können wir Räume für diese Art von Begegnungen gestalten?

Medien-Fassaden
In städtischen Transit-Räumen gibt es eine wachsende Zahl von Bildschirmen und teils interaktiven digitalen Interfaces, die auf die Anwesenheit von Personen oder auf Eingaben reagieren. Mirjam Struppek hebt in ihren Arbeit die zentrale Rolle der Urban Screens hervor und beginnt, Medien-Fassaden als kreatives Design-Problem in den Blick zu nehmen. Wie können wir im hybriden Raum eine Beziehung zwischen gebauten und medialen Räumen schaffen?

(EN)
It puzzles me that when I look and move around I experience very few obvious changes in the physical nature of urban space. maybe I expect too much. For sure I carry a device with me that augments the space, but the screen is still my interface, it doesn't spill out into the city. The city and the built space itself remains surprisingly neutral (dumb?). The physical world does not respond to my passing or presence. In fact when I try to really grasp how space has been changed it is in these three areas:

flash mobs. These highly choreographed performances in public space show how media and technology can inform new ways of behaving in public space that's moved way beyond rheingolds smartmobs. They come into being through a whole plethora of media platforms, twitter, facebook and sms and demonstrate a temporality that the physical space of the city cannot (will not?) respond to. It can only be a passive observer or stage. How can the static nature of out built environment and space start to respond to these forms of serendipity and micro-coordination of social behaviour? Can hybrid space start to perform, to come together and disperse when its use is over?

foursquare.
The use of foursquare.com represents a new practice of recognising and naming presence in space on technology’s terms. Take a look at foursquare listings at any place and you will find as diverse a set of descriptions for places as you could imagine. It documents the sociality and mobility of places we are present in, where people pass through and encounter others, in train stations, airports, sandwich bars, stores and nightclubs. These are places of shared encounters and experiences, not addresses or locations, and our presence in the physical environment is a presence in this hybrid space. So as locative media re-values the sociality of presence with strangers in urban public space, how can the spaces start to allow for these passing encounters? We simply need a few more places to be ‘slow’ and to stop (without having to pay for a coffee), where we can be present in both digital space and the physical space without causing disruption due to our civil inattention. Is it as simple as more benches, more meeting points? What are the implications of networked social interactions for the design of the built environment of cities, specifically public urban spaces?


facades.
The emerging prevalence of urban screens and media facades cause us to reinterpret both the presence and ‘located-ness’ of technology and in particular the moving images in public space as well as the corresponding effects on patterns of social presence and interaction. Whole façades are superimposed with images and sometimes projections or even screens. Do we need windows in public buildings. anymore? If not, how do we design for spaces that need not look out, but that offer other ways of both enclosing and making interfaces between one space and the next? Our colleague Mirjam Struppek’s work highlights the key issue of urban screens and starts to reclaim screens as a creative design problem. On a broader level, how do we connect our physical spaces with our digital spaces? How do we create a less disjointed hybridity, drawing together the physical requirements of the built space to connect outside and inside, and the media spaces which demand a different kind of accessibility; one which is only concerned with non-visual, unbroken links to the network?