summ( )n

Capgemini finally shared a full version of its earlier announced report “Department of the Future“. The report is a result of the round table held by the company with the governmental officials (both local and national) who shared their ideas on how the government can improve its services. It is a
bit warning sign that there is still so few, if any, alternative voices/opinions in the report, which results in too a limited version of the possible futures.

MediaRuimte, Brussels’ art and new media think/do tanks, presents Artomaton, and exhibition featuring self-operating machines which “blends art with automation, and extends vocabularium of character, pen & paper to a variety of digital generative formats while rendering the beauty of the code beyond the canvas”. It may sound confusing, or inspiring, but in any case worth to explore. The image below is not of mine, I still have to try to get to MediaRuimte.

(C) Marius Watz, 2010

Atwerpen-based Middelheim Museum will host almost a month-long festival of ‘spatial imagination’, inviting architects, urban planners, artist and designers to reflect, rethink and try to re-design the living condition we all live in. Supported, among others, by the Cultural Center Luchtbal, the program includes workshops, various experiments in – and with – the city, installations and performances of a large group of Belgium and international teams.

I finally managed to compile a short video of the nice interactive installation by rAndom International, London-based team that creates what might be broadly defined as ‘digital art’: various installations that use modern technologies to create novel aesthetic experiences.

This particular work was presented at the Art Brussels fair in May 2010 (at the premises of the Galerie Volker Diehl from Berlin). Main idea is relatively simple, and therefore very powerful: imagine a flock, or an an ensemble of movable mirrors that ‘talk’ to each other, imitating our nonverbal conversational activities. These ‘conversations’, however, are immediately interrupted when someone enters into a ‘mirror space’, and the mirrors then start ‘looking’ at the intruder, and follow the person with their ‘gazes’, rotating their ‘heads’ toward a new potential ‘interlocutor’.

I observed quite a lot of pople observing walking these ‘conversations’, and a few of those who ventured to enter the space; I didn’t see anyone who would start talking to the mirrors. The whole scene strongly resembled the Alice’s conversations with the flowers in a magical garden. “We can talk – when there is anybody worth talking to.”

We went to Amsterdam today, not knowing that there is strike of garbage collectors there. Coincidentally, there was a public holiday one day before, so when we saw the piles of avfal, or garbage sacks everywhere, we first thought that it is simple leftover after the yesterday’s street parties. But the size of some piles was really huge (the one before us not even the largest we’ve seen):

When I write this, the strike is seemingly over, and I hope that the city is cleaner now. But it’s every time scary to realize how vulnerable the cities are, and how a relatively small disturbance can quickly derail an entire system off track. We need not sustainable developments, we need resilient ones.

Last Friday, May 7, I went to Brussels to participate in a symposium called Human Cities, on both researching and designing public spaces. The event, held in the Bozar art & media center, was at the same time an opening of the first festival with the same name, Human Cities: Celebrating Public Spaces. The festival is a large event, which will be hosted by the city for ten days, from May 6 till 16, and include multiple performances, urban installations, art exhibitions etc, etc.

The symposium gathered a very interesting crowd of practitioners – designers, social scientists, artists – who shared their ideas and projects related to ‘public spaces’. What is a public space today? Can any non-private space in the city de defined as ‘public’? Or it should have certain embedded characteristics to claim such a status? And who’s defining those?

Tim Fendley from London-based AIG, Applied Information Group, presented a new way-finding system they developed for London. This was based on a very careful analysis of the existing (messy) of city navigation, confusing millions of the guests and dwellers alike. The new system affords a more efficient and less stressful navigation through the city, and also takes into account different ‘modes’, or motivations people may have while moving across the city.

Bas Raijmakers, a founder of a recently opened research and design practices STBY, told about a very interesting project they’ve done in England. The goal was to find a ‘new future’ for the old abandoned industrial complex in East England, which is an interesting and noble goal itself etc. But what’s interesting is how they’ve approached it: I knew before that Bas & Co are very keen on video-ethnography, and always heavily ground their design on in-depth contextual research. But this time Bas also told about their people-involvement strategies, including involving people in co-designing and eventually co-creating possible futures, and and the range of interesting tools STBY uses for these purposes. We agreed to catch-up in the future to discuss possible collaboration.

There were many more interesting presentation, and I placed a large set of pictures I took to my set at Flickr (Human Cities Symposium, Brussels 2010); some of the presentations can be easily reconstructed from these images (such as the one by Miodrag Mitrasinovich, from Parsons School of Design.

The one I took less pictures of was a talk by Ezio Manzinin, from Milano Politecnico, who talked about – not even design, but rather social construction of public spaces, using creative communities (his hobby-horse for years) as a vehicle.

But I tool less pictures only because I made more videos – in fact, I recorded a larger chunk of his talk, and managed to place it to my Vimeo (except the last part, which is yet to be uploaded there).

The very first image is of the book published in conjunction with this symposium; it is in fact both a theoretical work, redefining the very concept of public spaces and the way they should be created (or rather co-created), and a very rich collection of the cases, various projects and initiatives related to public spaces, including the new tools and methods. A great addition to any library, and a delicious food for thought.