talkin' bout the street

This past Friday I had the pleasure of attending StreetTalk, a one-day workshop on urban-centered computing organized by Eric Paulos of Intel Research Berkeley. Though the basic premise is to find new and compelling ways of using digital technology to enhance/enrich/change urban life, a wide array of viewpoints were presented, including largely non-computational ones.

I stashed my notes in meta's bag at the end of the day, and have waited too long now to retrieve them, so I'm going to try to do this from memory for now... Here were some of the highlights.

• Dennis Crowley showed off his system dodgeball, which allows you to broadcast your location so your friends can find you. I've since signed up for the service, and it's interesting receiving location messages about your friends. As my friends seem to be using the system judiciously, no resulting awkward social situations have surfaced... yet.
• Cassidy Curtis spoke about his excellent graffiti archaelogy project. I spoke with him briefly at the end of the day, and got to learn more about his process of documenting various actual and potential graffiti sites as well as his encounters with graffiti artists and cultures.
• Jack Napier taught us how to improve the urban landscape through billboard liberation. Already an Adbusters fan, needless to say I was enthralled.
• Anne Galloway took the stage to dispel any digital utopianism left amongst attendees. While techno-utopianism is an undercurrent of much of the human-computer interaction field, the ubiquitous computing literature is particularly full of unexamined (and, imho, in many (most?) cases unwarranted) optimism. Hopefully Anne's polemic helped kill that good and dead for those in attendance, promoting a balanced, critical perspective.
• Paul Dourish speaks eloquently, insightfully, and quickly. His lesson (among others) - don't forget that cities are living things subject to continual interpretation and negotiation. Beware of succumbing to the temptations of positivist modeling in your urban computing endeavors.
• Peter Lunenfeld pointed us all towards the work of Jane Jacobs as a foundation for further urban-centered work. He argued that her work should be as pivotal to these endeavors as Christopher Alexander's work on design patterns has been to the software engineering community.

Afterwards we went to Rx Gallery in San Francisco to socialize. Some of us got more social than others.